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Ann Handley

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Image of a red Christmas ornament shaped like a virus, with 2020 stenciled in the center

20 Ridiculously Useful Holiday Gifts for 2020

A version of this story appeared in Total Annarchy, my fortnightly newsletter that helps you be a better writer, storyteller, marketer. Get it in your inbox; you’ll love it. * * * It’s easy to nod along to the narrative that 2020 is a raging dumpster fire, the worst year ever—what with the pandemic and the […]
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MarketingProfs in Santa Barbara: Show Notes, ‘Ann-otated’

00:00:01 My daughter Caroline. “I like the weather” (paraphrased) is kid-code for “Check it! I love being out of school!!” 00:00:18 Real drama unfolds as Sharon H. reveals that her work-BFF is actually… well… it’s not me. And it’s not Val, either, even though they live together. (Val: You might want to sleep with one […]
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The Shadow Knows: Watching Superbad with My Son

When I was a kid, in the 70s, I used to swipe my older brother’s Mad magazines. A lot of the humor was over my head, but that only added to the allure: This was a peep show into an unknown world, and I was lusting to grow up. One Mad feature I did get, […]
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New Media as Community Theater—All the World’s a Stage

I am a total sucker for community theater, especially musical theater. What I love isn’t so much the corny show tunes or the predictable story lines, but the players’ infectious energy for taking risks. I was reminded of this a few weekends ago when I went to see a local production of Godspell. Because I […]
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Competitive Parenting As Child’s Play

If April is the cruelest month, March has to be the strangest. At least, this March: What a strange few weeks it’s been. Silda Spitzer stands by Eliot; Gilligan’s Mary Ann is a stoner. Then, last night, as I was watching my daughter thumb through a new catalog from a local toy store, I noticed […]
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What Is a Friend?

My friend and colleague Shelley and I are taking our two girls to a company “junket” we’ll both be attending next month in southern California. (We’re calling the two of them the MarketingProfs “Web 3.0” team.) The girls are 9 and 11 and live, respectively, in Texas and Massachusetts. Kinsey (the 9-year-old) and Caroline (age […]
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Love Ann

Me and TomTom—True Love Always

Around Christmas, I met TomTom. We’ve been inseparable ever since. TomTom, if you don’t know, is a portable GPS navigation system. It mounts on the car dashboard, and its voice commands guide you to your destination. For someone like me—I get lost finding my way back to the table after a visit to the restaurant […]
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Is 18 the New 8?

In her book released last fall, Deceptively Delicious, Jessica Seinfeld slips chickpeas into her chocolate chip cookies and purees butternut squash into her mac and cheese. The general premise is that kid food is fried and white. But if you can slip in something on the sly—say, cauliflower into mashed potatoes, or sweet potato into […]
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‘Hey, Pretty Lady!’

A few weeks ago, I had some time to kill at Boston’s Logan Airport before a flight to Denver, and eventually to Santa Barbara. I’ve taken the same, lonely trip a dozen times or so, and it’s always a tiring day that reminds me again how profoundly disappointed I am that the seven-league boots I […]
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fine writing pen

How I Invented Blogging

When I was a kid growing up, and my parents’ friends would ask me the inevitable question, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I would look them square in the eye and say definitively, “I want to be a blogger.” Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go through a […]
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In-Your-Facebook

I got an email from my friend Sharon this morning. She had recently signed up for a Facebook account and had just been “friended” by someone she didn’t know very well. Actually, she didn’t know him at all. She asked something like, “So who is he? Is he a creep? What does he want?” Then, […]
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4 x 4 Secrets About Me, And Why I’m Uncomfortable Talking About Myself

Over the weekend, my friends Peter Kim and BL Ochman independently tagged me “It” in two blog games (called memes). The object of each is for the tagged writer to reveal personal bits about themselves that you wouldn’t know otherwise, and then to tag other blog authors to similarly spill their guts. BL (who had […]
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Alpha Females

Two or three years ago, I found myself on a list of people who take turns cooking in a soup kitchen. And so, every few months, I do. I can’t say I particularly look forward to it. But to beg off the list at this point would require a phone call to the organizer. I […]
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