Z-Files

Metaphors associating white with goodness (“as pure as the driven snow”) and black with sadness or evil (“the dark side”) are prevalent in the English language (and probably in other…

Metaphors are everywhere.  As the author of The Immortal Game: A History of Chess states, “So much about the experience of living is intangible, we need choice comparisons and symbols…

Hi, This is a book I finished a couple of months ago that deals with the psychology of driving.   It’s a truly fascinating work that explains why we do the…

 Hello, Here is an article that deals with a powerful but sometimes overlooked emotion – disgust. The topic is how people’s threshold for disgust can influence their sense of right and wrong…

I recently finished a pithy little book called Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.    There are lots of little ZMET-related nuggets in here.  Among them: --How discounting the price…

  This Wall Street Journal article by renowned management guru Philip Kotler and two colleagues discusses the conflict that often exists in organizations between R&D and marketing. Among the authors' remedies is…

  A California company called Namelab (which creates names for products and companies) has an informative blog called LabNotes in which they discuss news associated with linguistics and branding. A…

I recently stumbled upon an article in one of those in-flight magazines about a company called College Hunks Hauling Junk which has become a highly successful and profitable business. The…

I am reading a book called “One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture.”  It’s a fascinating book for a lot of reasons but one is that the author…

When I first saw this Gatorade spot that is linked below I thought, “Man, that’s an excellent ad!  There’s a brand trying to reach out to people who are struggling…

This article comes from a recent New York Times Magazine.  It is a long article, but a good one.   The article is about ZipCar, the car-sharing service that is becoming increasingly…

    This from The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux: Often we are asked whether ZMET work with so-called unemotional participants.  There is no such thing as a fully-functioning person…