You’ll never guess what Jerry Brown said when he visited my apartment back in the day.

In this week’s edition of my podcast, Public Life Today, I interview Kettering Review editor and George Mason professor Noelle McAfee. I am proud to count Noelle as a friend. I recently noticed a piece in her blog, Gone Public, in which she lays out some directions she suggests we need to go in order…

In this week’s edition of my podcast, Public Life Today, I talk about a simple test public leaders might use when faced with the need to act when emotions are high. It’s the “Long View Test.” It’s simple: Think about how you want to look back on this moment. How would you like to remember…

In this week’s edition of my podcast, Public Life Today, I talk about the balance that needs to be struck between freedom and responsibility. For people who run online communities this can be especially troubling, as the relative anonymity of the online world makes it easy to go too far and say things that infringe…

In this week’s edition of my podcast, Public Life Today, I talk about my friend who’s a civil engineer. The other day, he happily observed to me that none of his bridges had ever fallen down. It caused me to rethink a few things about my own work. What if I approached my work with…

Stanford professor James Fishkin is a luminary in the civic engagement field. He is the developer and chief proponent of something called “deliberative polling” and he heads Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy. He recently posted and article to his blog at the San Francisco Examiner in which he complains that our “political system is struggling…