Embracing my Digital Youth

When I was a kid, someone told me that the best way to see if spaghetti was cooked was to throw it at the wall and see if it sticks.  I was reminded of this today while attending a media and technology conference .  So many middle-aged, middle-management nonprofit professionals throwing all kinds of “new media” tools [...]

The Good

Some time ago my friend in the publishing biz referred me to the magazine Good.  I usually judge things like this from the quality of its free schwag, and I still have have two tokens from its premier issue hung up in my office- a 3 in x 3 in card that’s titled “personal manifesto” ( [...]

The Accidental Pun

Yesterday, I was in a meeting for work.  We were debriefing recent trainings that we’ve done, and my coworker (who was calling in via phone) started telling us about his training with the National Association of Letter Carriers, you know, the people who deliver your mail.
So my coworker said, “blah blah blah so yeah it [...]

The Harvest

Well, it’s sukkot, as well as fall generally here in the midwestern lands, and i’ve had a lot of reason lately to think about local foods. The change of seasons always makes me inexplicably nostalgic - the smells of fall give me all these sense memories of childhood. As usual most of my [...]

The World as You Can Make It

I am obsessed with mapping.  Mostly this is a work-related obsession, because as I work to keep track of our impact on the world and the “ripple effect” of the work that we do, I have visions of visual representations of progressives and their good deeds spread out across the country like so many amber [...]

The Tax Dollar at Work

I’m nothing if not a sucker for politically manipulative online tools.  This one came across my inbox this morning, from the National Priorities Project.
Their cost of war counter doesn’t just showcase the arbitrary, difficult-to-contextualize total number of tax dollars being spent in the war in Iraq, in real time.  It also allows you to see [...]

The Awkward Turtle

To start this off I can think of nothing better than to share with you the latest craze in hand signals going around our office. Like many phenomena it’s not clear how it started or where it came from, but a google search tells me that it’s been making the rounds with the socially-deficient campus [...]