See you sometime next year. Yeah, I'm checking out -- not because of the approaching holidays or accrued vacation days or seasonal affective disorder. What it is, see, is the boxed set of "The Wire" lent to me this weekend by some dear friends/enablers. Somehow I've managed to avoid this moment for 11 years, but now I have all five seasons in one easy-to-grip package. If "The Wall Street Journal" has it right, binge viewing has now been demonstrated to be the natural order of things.

In the social-media age, nobody -- not e-tailers, not governments, not Vaticans -- can suppress speech without backlash exponentially more damaging than the offending speech itself. In the long run, this will be the ruination of the regimes ruling North Korea, Iran and China. In the short run, it will be the ruination of KlearGear.

Whoever is considering bidding on Forbes, which announced Friday that it is up for sale, must first address two questions: Is revenue growth based on its aggressive branded-content and unpaid-blogger strategies sustainable? If the answer the first question is "yes," why would the owners sell? Hint: If the answer to question #1 is "no," never mind question #2. So where does Forbes get off seeking a sum that would represent a mere $130 million haircut over its 2006 valuation?

Not for no reason, corporate managers are terrified of social media. Dear God, what if someone out there says something false and damaging to the company? Worse yet, what if someone out there says something true and damaging to the company? And worst of all, what if someone inside says something damaging to the company?

Joe, are you not aware that Time Inc.'s legacy, and till now Pearlstine's, has been to maintain an impervious firewall separating business and editorial so as not to corrupt the latter with the former? Well, of course you are -- or you would have seen no need to rationalize this obvious cultural and ethical retreat by alluding to the existential crisis that afflicts you and the rest of journalism:

News Item: Iranian hardliners, including the Tasnim News Agency, sponsor a contest to freshen and re-energize the "Death to America" slogan. Cash prizes will be awarded for the best song, poster, video, photo and caricature.

I find it demoralizing that the likes of Huffington Post and BuzzFeed -- and pretty much everybody else -- generate traffic with silly lists, pix of kittens, boobs, celebrities and other populist attractants. Versus news and information of substance. What enrages me is when ostensibly reputable publishers use such links, disguised as editorial content, in "Around the Web" sections leading readers into ad pitches.

Like most everybody, I remember where I was when I heard Kennedy was shot, when I saw the second plane hit the towers and when I realized Best Buy was doomed. This was in an optical store in 2010, when before pulling the trigger on a pair of Ray-Bans that make me look exactly like a SMERSH agent, I pulled out my phone to compare prices online.

What if the received wisdom about how to produce and sell all things to all people was based on an incomplete understanding of what people want and need? What if a vast blind spot to the dimension of intuition, feminine energy and the collective subjective has yielded the wrong picture of how we all function, what we all desire and what we all need? What if?

Went to Advertising Week in New York, with all its pomp and self-importance, but it was all so odd. Madison Avenue, did you not notice the panel subjects? Mobile, Big Data, so-called "native" advertising, "brand stories" -- 200 of them, all premised on momentous change. And yet, at least among the agency folks I was hanging with, there was the prevailing sense that this was all no biggie. Sure, some disruption at the margins -- but all in all, business as usual.