MELISSA MARASCO

A reflection for Mother's Day and Father's Day — and every ordinary day in between There's a question I've been sitting with lately, one that hits differently when you're both someone's child and someone else's parent: What did the work your parents did teach you about the world before you ever understood it was a lesson? Not the explicit lectures. Not the "here's what I want you to learn from this" moments. I mean the quieter curriculum — the worldview baked into their insti

It's graduation season. Which means two things are happening simultaneously: a fresh wave of communications graduates is walking across a stage wondering if they chose the right field, and a generation of mid-to-senior professionals is quietly asking themselves a version of the same question. I see you both. And I want to be direct with you. The instinct to chase the tools is the wrong instinct. Every new grad I talk to right now wants to know which AI platforms to master. Ev

There's a concept in psychology called the illusory truth effect — the phenomenon where repeated exposure to a statement makes it feel true, regardless of its accuracy. Advertisers have exploited it for decades. Now, without meaning to, so have large language models. Here's what every modern communicator needs to understand: AI doesn't just find information about you or your brand. It synthesizes it. And synthesis is where reputation lives or dies. The Search Paradigm Has

Have you ever scrolled past a product with perfect 5-star reviews and kept looking until you found the 4.3-star option with 2,000+ reviews? Your brain just did something fascinating: it rejected perfection as fake and sought authenticity through imperfection. Your instinct was right. The 4.2-4.5 Star Sweet Spot Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center partnered with PowerReviews to analyze millions of product purchases. The findings contradict everything traditional