I am on the Board of Directors for the Open Forum Foundation in Washington D.C.

I am on the Advisory Board for investigative journalism startup WarIsBusiness.com

Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society's decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality. Armstrong describes it as a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit, "always...seeking to know more and to extend...areas of competence and control of the environment," to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.

Now, take a look at at recent data from the Congressional Conversation Index (CCI), which tracks the top inbound issue categories in communications from American citizens (letters, emails, faxes, etc) to their elected representatives in Congress. 

I am pleased to announce that I have accepted an appointment as a Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College. 

Back in November, I was catching up on some highlight presentations at TED2009 when I remembered a bunch of buzz on Twitter about a talk by Bennington College president Liz Coleman on reinventing liberal arts education. I was gobsmacked. Really, it was one of the most inspiring talks I'd ever seen on TED, and struck me on many levels. I'd since watched it several times, especially when I'd get a little down in the dumps in my own work trying to think of new ways to harness technology innovations to promote better and healthier democratic deliberation models in this country (nevermind the fact that the political climate in America can be downright toxic). But along with a pile of other talks, articles, essays I come across daily, shelved it into my permanently overflowing reference file labelled, "Do It Like This, Cupcake..."

You can probably imagine my utter shock and amazement when I received an email from Elizabeth Coleman in March requesting a meeting. She had seen my talk at Cusp'09, and wanted to explore the possibility of me becoming involved with Bennington's ambitious new CAPA Program. She flew to Santa Fe days later, and I had the privilege of having the most thrilling twelve hour marathon conversation (yes, 12 hours straight, no interruptions) with one of the most incredible minds and spirits I'd ever encountered. My head spun for days.

Long story short, after several visits to Bennington to see their amazing campus setting, the impressive under-construction CAPA building designed by the briliant Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, meeting with the incredible minds of the faculty and students, getting over the fact that I haven't been in a serious academic setting in over two decades, I concluded that this was going to be the beginning of a pretty incredible journey for me, for my intellectual and creative life. 

I begin a four-week residency and will be teaching a CAPA module this coming fall semester. I'll be teaching something about the politics and economics of American Democracy, something about the society that dwells within simultaneous overlapping, and at times contradictory, systems, something about the complex interplay of rich, and oftentimes competing, personal and tribal narratives that comprise what we call our political lives, something about how to visualize one's self in this n-dimensional cluster-eff of American politics and what one's possible trajectories through it might be; all of which, of course, with a few unorthodox methodological twists that perhaps only a career designer and design-thinker can bring to a creatively and intellectually rigorous academy like Bennington College (can you say, "Walls of Post-It-Notes"?..). I'll be figuring out the details in earnest this summer. Sweating it out, to be precise...

Thank you, Liz and Bennington, for rolling the dice on a wildcard like me, for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime. Looking forward to this fall. Absolutely thrilled.

"Our primary electoral act, voting, is rather like using a public toilet: we wait in line with a crowd in order to close ourselves up in a small compartment where we can relieve ourselves in solitude and in privacy or our burden, pull a lever, and then, yielding to the next in line, go silently home."

-Benjamin Barber

Let's say the universe exists within an infinite space. How far to the edge in any direction is it from the earth? The answer would be infinity. Since the distance to the edge of infinite space is infinity in all directions, the earth is the center of the universe. Of course, more precisely, so are you.

Some people create. Some people make beautiful things. Some people inspire. Some people educate. Some people help. Some people dream, some people love, and some people are loved.

Other people pick cancer, and even cancer must sometimes wonder why it didn't choose to become medicine instead.

That's right. Two kinds of people in this world, in this glass-half-empty/half-full country of ours: The cancer or the cure. Which are you?

(And Caleb's bizarre apology...) 

-Commenter RichardC on this

Confucius