For their 2017 album, Everything Now, Arcade Fire created an extensive faux-promotional campaign. I’m writing about the album and its promotional campaign in my book project, Sway: How Promotion Has Shaped American Music. One of the features of the campaign was the creation of a fictional, evil corporation that plugged AF’s release with all the vigor and crassness of a profit-mongering company.

The ploy led to a number of funny and caustic creations from the band, one of which was their music video for “Creature Comfort.” Here’s how it went down:

It is important to understand the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. These terms refer to how many layers of scholarly interpretation and analysis have been applied to the source material before you are interacting with it. To get a sense of how this works, consider a research project on Duke Ellington’s compositions in the 1940s.

Here is a step-by-step process to find relevant sources for your research project quickly and efficiently.

If you take the time to do things right, it will seem like you are moving slowly at first, but you will save time later, at the finish line, when it counts most. Learn how this philosophy applies to your research process.

As a university student, you are asked to do research, but why? It turns out that we use our research skills constantly, every day, to make decisions. In this video I imagine what it would be like in a world where research didn't exist.

As I have been watching courses on Masterclass, I have been paying attention to patterns of thought or approach that several top performers share. What are the similarities of top performers in very different disciplines? I am keeping a running list of these concepts in order to study them more deeply. One of the first ones to surface for me was in how top performers respond to and utilize critical feedback.

It can be difficult to know how to convert your live lecture courses to an online video course. In this video I share my approach to dividing lectures into short, manageable chunks for students. Then I show you exactly how I sequence these short videos into a "playlist" in the course website.

What if you could quickly find the most respected sources and reference information on your topic, organized in a way that would save you time in the outlining, drafting, and proofing stages. And what if you could do that all within the first two hours of research?

Picture in your mind the Mona Lisa. Now take a step back and observe yourself picturing the Mona Lisa. Consider what you are seeing. If you are like most people, you can call up in your mind a general image of the painting by Leonardo da Vinci called the Mona Lisa. We can call this image your "mental representation" of the Mona Lisa.

In this video, I explain three levels of video editing that university professors should understand: basic, intermediate, and advanced. I explain each level, what skills you will need, and which level you should use in in your classes.

Things worth doing take sacrifice. One reminder of the principle of sacrifice comes from The Mandalorian, a television series in the Star Wars universe. As the story begins, it follows a mysterious, helmeted character called "Mando." At first Mando seems like a ruthless, lone warrior,

If you’re a university student, or a university professor like me, you’ve probably been making a lot more teaching videos these days. In this video, I share my approach to making simple edits to my video lessons in a software program called Panopto.

Imagine a world without research. What would that world look like?

You would have no ability to seek out answers or information about a decision. You would have only your experience to draw upon. There would be no Google. No YouTube "how to" videos that could teach you how to draw, how to cut your own hair, solve a Rubix cube, or the perfect way to shovel snow in your driveway.

Now imagine, in this world, a scenario in which you are hungry and you are standing in front of a bush that has berries….

In a brand new academic article published by Musical Quarterly, I tell the story of how P. T. Barnum used strategies of branding to create the most successful music tour of the 19th century. The singer he brought to America was Jenny Lind. Lind was already a star in Europe, but was relatively unknown in America before signing a contract with Barnum.

Barnum did something unprecedented:

There are few resources in your career more valuable than a trusted mentor. In this post I will share with you: 

• What is a mentor, who needs one, and why?
• Two short quizzes (one question each) that will give you my personalized recommendations for where to look for your next potential mentor, based on your career stage and situation.

What should you do when you actually get through to a potential mentor, and get advice? How can you turn one-time advice into long-term mentorship?

In this short video (about 3 min.), I talk about the two big mistakes people make when they get advice from a potential mentor, and what to do instead.