Blog - Ben Guttmann

In defense of the boring, unsexy, and unpaid

After eight years, this week, my term ends on Queens Community Board 2. The community board isn’t the sexiest thing – it's full of long meetings, tedious bureaucracy, and dusty meeting rooms. But I wholeheartedly recommend you join your community board (or whatever other similar body might exist wherever you call home). It's the nutritious part of life.

April 5, 2023

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Social media, according to a classroom of undergrads

Snapchat is dead. Pinterest has lots of love. TikTok is confusing. These are some of the takeaways from one of my favorite discussions of the semester: my focus group. Here's what a room full of 20ish-year-old college students in New York City have to say about the state of our digital life.

March 22, 2023

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Mind the hype cycle

I’ve been finding myself making the same hand gesture on a lot of Zoom calls recently. I flick my finger up, wiggle it up and down, and trail off to the right in a straight line.I draw this oscillating line when I talk about AI. Or crypto. Or the “metaverse.” Or even Taylor Swift tickets. It’s the hype cycle.

March 15, 2023

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The psychology of color meanings and associations

Color's a tricky thing. You can ask two people can be looking at the same object, and depending on who they are (and more importantly, when they are), you can get two different answers. But while it can be a tough nut to crack, color can completely change the way your brand looks and feels.

March 6, 2023

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Be so good you can be bad

In physics, our understanding of the universe “breaks down” at extreme scales. The equations and models we learn in high school don’t hold up when we look at massive black holes and at the infinitely small quantum scale – the math has a pesky habit of going haywire. The same phenomenon happens when we look at how some people and organizations communicate.

March 1, 2023

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Don’t name things “my-“ or “your-“

Log on to your utility company’s website. What’s the section for your account called? Probably something like “My Account” “Your Account.” Ever since MySpace launched in 2003, this naming convention has sneakily stuck around in digital products. Twenty years later, it’s probably time for it to go.

February 23, 2023

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Samuel Morse and the power of thinking smaller

For most of human history, the speed limit on long-distance communication wasn’t a matter of 5G bandwidth or even how fast an operator could connect your phone call. It was how fast a horse could gallop. Samuel Morse changed that by thinking small.

February 9, 2023

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Do, delegate, decide, and delete using the "Eisenhower Matrix"

We’re never done. An infinite number of things are demanding our attention and efforts at any moment. So, how do we decide what to work on next? The answer lies in determining what's important, what's urgent – and what's neither.

February 1, 2023

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One Good Thing: Lunchclub

By this point, it’s pretty obvious that working from home certainly has its perks. But, there’s certainly a tradeoff in terms of our diminished surface area. That’s where we arrive at one of the most joyful apps I’ve discovered in the past few years: Lunchclub.

January 26, 2023

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The illusion of explanatory depth: we don’t know anything

How does your heart pump blood? How does a helicopter fly? How does a piano make music? All of these things are exceedingly normal. We aren’t frozen in shock and perplexed every time we flush a toilet or hear a piano player. We should know these things. We might even claim to have a grasp on them. But, when push comes to shove, we probably don’t know as much as we think we do.

January 18, 2023

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