Brad Rourke’s Blog
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Judged By Mischaracterized Intentions
One of the greatest pathologies of public life today is its pervasive gang mentality. We are constantly labeled by others — and at the same time do that very same labeling. By our actions, we divide ourselves up into tribes, Us and Them. It’s our hatred of Them that continually leaves us far, far short of…
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The New Anti-Panopticon
My friend Lars Hasselblad Torres (who may have the coolest name I know) pointed out a really fascinating project. It’s “The Intellectuals Circle” — a circular bench designed to encourage “a clear form of verbal communication without visual cues or theatrics between participants.” As it has been a long time since I’ve been a to…
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Using New, Widely Available Tools At The White House
The White House is experimenting with using a freely-available, “crowd-sourced” tool as part of the backend to the “electronic town hall” it announced earlier this week. You can go here to see it in action. The Town Hall is set for this morning. Here’s the White House blog post about it. The system is using…
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White House Meeting On Transparency
As some of my readers know, I am a peripheral part of the NCDD network. That’s the National Coaltion for Dialogue and Deliberation, a network run by Sandy Heierbacher. Sandy is one of the most impressive civic entrepreneurs I know, having bootstrapped NCDD into the pre-eminent collection of people doing work in this “field.” Sandy…
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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…
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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…
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What Will We Say About Now?
My friend Peter Levine, in an article that examines ways to look at the question of “whether President Obama is trying to do too much too fast,” mentions an analogy Bill Galston makes to Jimmy Carter’s early days in office. In Peter’s view, those days are not at all comparable to where we are now.…
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Agents, Come Out Of The Shadows
Seth Godin wrote recently about the plight of agents. Literary agents, travel agents, stock brokers, real estate agents — all either extinct or becoming so. Why? Anonymity: The problem with being a helpful, efficient but largely anonymous middleman is pretty obvious. Someone can come along who is cheaper, faster and more efficient. And that someone…
