Brad Rourke

Category: culture

  • Brickfair, An Example of Cognitive Surplus

    Over the weekend, I accompanied my son to Brickfair 2010 at the Dulles Expo Center. Brickfair is a completely fan-driven annual conference. People come together to share their love of Legos, to show of scenes and models they have built, and to swap bricks. Daniel and his friend Jeremy had created a rock concert model,…

  • Cool Optical Illusions

    I was doing some house cleaning in my “Brad Personal” folder and ran across these cool optical illusions. No doubt you’ve seen some of them before, but I like them collected in one place:

  • 20 Jobs Of The Future

    Here are twenty jobs we may be doing in the future, according to a new report. “Body-part maker,” anyone?

  • Performatives In Social Media

    Ever since I discovered them, I’ve been fascinated by something called “performatives” in speech. These are statements that inherently change the state of affairs. The classic one is “naming,” as in “your name is. . . .” Before the statement, I did not have a name (or it was different).  After that statement, I did. It…

  • So Dreadfull A Judgment

    Last weekend my band, The West End, played a show and in the midst of it I had just the best feeling. I looked out at the audience and saw that everyone was paying attention, listening to the music. They weren’t distracted by the ball game behind the bar, weren’t playing Liar’s Poker, weren’t embroiled…

  • People Care About What Touches Them

    Yesterday Michael Jackson was buried. I have a terrible confession to make: the hoopla around dead celebrities has always left me cold. Perhaps it is my cranky and contrarian nature, I don’t know. But I find myself muttering inwardly, “What did he ever do, really?” Even the great icons – I’ve always thought that, when…

  • How To Promote Your Art In Today's World: Trent Reznor Of Nine Inch Nails Gets It

    Here is a great example of what Andrea Jarrell calls asking better questions. Kevin Rose (Digg founder) had set up an interview with Trent Reznor, founder and frontman of Nine Inch Nails. Like the White House’s electronic town hall,the questions are raised and voted on ahead of time by the Digg community. You could see…

  • Our Nation's Uncomfortable History With Race

    As many of my readers know, I write “issue guides” — discussions of difficult public issues designed to elicit small group dialogue. In my work on such guides, sometimes I develop fragments that are useful but just don’t fit into the ultimate publication. I came across an old passage I wrote that outlines our nation’s…

  • Study: Religions Losing Ground

    An important new survey on Americans’ religious behaviors and attitudes was released this morning. The American Religious Identification Survey was first fielded in 1990 and was updated in 2001 and now in 2008. The survey shows that just about across the board, Americans are less religious today than they were two decades ago. From USA Today:…