I [Bruce Kodish] haven’t had much time to blog. Since last Thursday I’ve been at Read House, the home of the Institute of General Semantics in Fort Worth, Texas. Read House is located in the Fairmount Historical District of town, full of historic resid…

For a variety of reasons—some religious, some social, some economic, some interpersonal, and perhaps some based on an analysis of costs and benefits—people feel that relationships should last and that it’s bad when they end. And so you often resp…

Click On Picture AboveA cartoon by Maru from the fan art page of Ryan North’s charming Dinosaur Comics

Here’s an interesting article from yesterday’s New York Times. It should provide a neat bridge between the public speaking course and the election rhetoric. It also contains some interesting observations from communication profs Kathleen Hall Jamieson …

I happened to start reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan one night while flipping channels (yes, I confess to sometimes watching television while reading), and saw that the 1998 American remake of Godzilla was on. I watched the movie whi…

From the notebooks of Robert P. Pula:” General-semantics [he liked to write it with a hyphen to emphasize its use as a unitary term for the system that Korzybski formulated] offers a way for people to size things up, including themselves, in a way more…

From the notebooks of Robert P. Pula:”General-semantics is a method for challenging yourself. How do you know what you ‘know’? Do you have the guts to self-challenge? What effect will this have in how you come across in the laboratory, in the office, i…

Korzybski’s famous ‘aphorism’—”A map is not the territory” has become ubiquitous in some parts of the culture.The analogy seems so compelling and has become such a common part of people’s ‘mental furniture’, that many people like Nassim Nicholas Tale…

I was going to say “obsession” but if it qualifies as an ‘obsession’ I consider my interest in Korzybski and his work a healthy one, at least it has seemed mainly so to me. I read a lot as a teenager. Sometime in the mid-sixties, looking for new things…