Archive for the ‘big ideas’ category
By the People, For the People
No Known Restrictions
Recently, I noticed — during a television commercial in which an S. C. Johnson representative was telling us that their products are both environmentally friendly and effective — that by consumer demand “green” in becoming essential for business. Not because laws were passed that mandated that S. C. Johnson make less harmful cleaning products, but because the […]
On Privilege
White privilege, as you may know,
is a sociological concept describing the advantages enjoyed by white persons beyond what is commonly experienced by the non-white people in those same social spaces (nation, community, workplace, etc.). It differs from racism or prejudice by the fact that a person benefiting from white privilege need not hold racist beliefs […]
Signal, Noise, and Lou Dobbs
Jarrod Trainque (flickr)
Signal to noise ratios are something most people are at least mildly familiar with. They’re the reason that you either turn off the radio or change the station as you drive out of the range of the station you were listening to.
But where radio on road trips is the obvious place to begin […]
Retroview: Happiness: A Guide
Matthieu Ricard’s Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill is probably the most important book in my life. No work has ever influenced so many aspects of my life or caused me to see the world so differently. Were there only one book that I could take with my to a desert island, […]
OPW: Finding Commonality Inside Iraq
Earlier this week I encountered a pretty interesting piece in the New York Review of Books. Entitled “As Iraqis See It,” the piece gives an inside look into the lives of Iraqis working for the McClatchy news organization, one of America’s biggest. McClatchy provides these reporters with a blog, called Inside Iraq, which is where […]
