Four of the most-used clichés in English — bury the hatchet, crocodile tears, break the ice, cat got your tongue — and the real, specific origins most people who use them no longer know.
On June 2, 2011, the USDA replaced the Food Pyramid with MyPlate. Michelle Obama's Let's Move anchored the launch. Fifteen years later, MyPlate has survived three administrations as one of the cleanest examples of long-cycle public-health communications — and the GLP-1 era is forcing the next revision.
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded January 28, 1986. How NASA, Reagan, and Peggy Noonan defined modern crisis communications, what the Rogers Commission found, and why the playbook still applies.
Walmart announced today a five-year plan to reformulate packaged foods — lower in sodium, sugar, and trans fats — and to cut prices on fruits and vegetables. The announcement was made jointly with First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative. The largest single corporate commitment to nutritional reformulation in U.S. retail history.
The banking outage communications playbook — why banking outages are different from other tech outages (deposit base as confidence asset, social-media doubt cascade, regulator escalation), the hour-by-hour crisis playbook, and the canonical cases: BofA 2011, Robinhood 2021, CrowdStrike 2024, AT&T 2024, Chime/Galileo 2019. Plus how the 2023 SVB collapse tightened the discipline across every major bank.
Where startup founders announce a new business. Five venues that actually reach the audience — the entrepreneurs, investors, and web developers most likely to notice.
The November 2010 Carnival Splendor engine room fire became the canonical modern cruise crisis case — Spam memes, T-shirts, Daily Show coverage, and the response template every cruise operator now studies. The full case study.
AngelGate, Theranos, Uber, WeWork, FTX, the OpenAI board, Silicon Valley Bank — the seven biggest startup PR crises in Silicon Valley history, what failed in each, and the permanent record the AI engines now retrieve.
The British monarchy is the most durable communications operation in modern history. 957 years from William the Conqueror to King Charles III, running the same five principles. The definitive reference on the royal family as a PR operation — Victoria, the 1936 abdication, Diana, Operation London Bridge, Andrew, Harry and Meghan, Kate 2024, the tabloid wars, The Crown.
Archival EPR post from June 2010 covering FIFA's communications operation during the South Africa World Cup, under Sepp Blatter's presidency, and the Nike "Write the Future" ambush campaign.
