It's nice to see that the Center for Civic Literacy at our cousin campus in Indy, the alarmingly named Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis or IUPUI, has a blog underway on civic literacy, a topic they phrase as a worthy question in an early posting: What exactly do American citizens need to know in order to be effective citizens? Another good entry talks about the difference between raising up young people who take satisfaction in volunteering for community service and those who have the skills and motivation to contribute as active citizens in the political process. [My own memory of school is that the first was addressed and the second for the most part was not.] It's good to see faculty and staff at a public university raising these questions as part of their work.

A small sign of public-spiritedness: it was difficult to get a sense of what was happening in the final episode of Breaking Bad in real time by following the #BreakingBad hashtag on Twitter. Most people were showing great restraint here in the eastern time zone, knowing how many fans were waiting patiently west of here. Well done. I had to read the episode account on Wikipedia to discover what went down.

South Bend has a sculpture called "The Keepers of the Fire" mounted on a platform in the river. It was created by Mark di Suvero in 1980, and he has since placed orange steel sculptures in cities all across North America. This one has sections that move in the wind, and a mirrored surface that I never took much notice of until recently, when a student mentioned that it sometimes reflected the light of the spillway of the low-water dam. She made it sound rather magical, the light playing in the arc of mirror there. I have made a couple of trips to see if I could be there at the right time, in the right light conditions, to see the reflections come alive in the mirror. Twice today I stopped by--it's just a few minutes from our house--once in bright light and once when the sculpture was in shadow. Both times it was turned away from the spillway, so the mirror was reflecting the calmer waters above the dam. The first time I could see very pale reflections working across the mirror, almost invisible, like the palest edges of a natural gas flame, almost completely without color. The second time the water was dark and mostly still, and the mirror was largely dark as a result, but one edge sparkled between dark and light very steadily. It wasn't like a flame so much as a mirror, though--the bright light was much more magical than the shade, even though the shade was easier to see. Tomorrow, I hope to have another chance or two in bright light, maybe even facing the spillway if the wind is right. I am persuaded now that there is more to see. The orange structural steel, beams and curves, parts turning slowly, and the arc of mirror catching the light of the moment and holding it there--I like the sculpture more and more.

[The Flickr image excerpt by Andrea Wiggins. In this image the mirror, the only part that is not orange, faces away from the photographer.]

You hold the treasures of princes now, earth,

now that princes' hands hold nothing.

They took those prizes first from you,

before the anguish of battle gripped them.

Death took everyone who knew

the joys of our people's great hall.

They've all left this life.

No one carries the sword now,

no one polishes the feasting cup.

They've all gone off somewhere.

Now the stout helmet of finely-hammered gold

falls to you, the polishers who

should shine the war mask sleep.

The mail coat that endured battle

among the breaking of shields

and the bite of swords

rusts on a corpse.

Its chains won't ring out

while a war-prince rides

with heroes beside him.

There'll be no joy from the harp,

no hand touching the sweet strings,

no hawk flying from beam to beam

across the people's great hall,

no swift mare stamping

on the courtyard stones.

Death has pointed

many peoples on their way.

Translated from Old English by K.S.

The article said "mediate" and maybe that's okay, but I'm looking for more ordinary words to make it clear to myself. The "it" here is literacy. Literacy, small, is the ability to decode the words and send out your own messages and be understood. Literacy, big, is the ability to think it through, not just the message but the context, the implications, the stakes for you and others, the way it does or does not line up with what you know of the world, and the ability to speak back, to push back if need be, to use words to be a player in the world, not just a listener and a reader. The article said literacy, big, was the ability to mediate between yourself and the big world around you. So "mediate" is okay but it has no urgency, no presence, as a word. It holds a good idea at arm's length when we really need to look it in the eye. But that's the way specialists tend to talk--in jargon, to their colleagues--when if their field is worth a damn there are people who wish that they would speak with them.

There is a surprising opening move in an old article by Kenneth Burke where he criticized the book reviews people were writing about a new English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. No, the reviewers weren't praising the book, they were slamming it, Burke said. But it was how they were doing it that was the problem. They were dropping a few true but easy criticisms and leaving readers no smarter at the end than they were at the start. He called this vandalism--essentially high-class graffiti--and said that it "[contributes] more to our gratification than to our enlightenment."

For Burke, it's lazy just to tag even this vile book with a few critical slogans and move on. Sure, the book is racist, for example, but spraying that word in large letters across the front of it doesn't help us figure out how that racism worked so thoroughly as to lead to millions of deaths. There is a mechanism, a vile philosophy, a set of practical political tools, a psychological foundation of human desires and weaknesses all at work here, a body of slogans and imagery, etc., and the accurate word racism does not illuminate this complexity. The writer pats himself on the back; the ready applauds; but the brain shuts down.

The chance for understanding requires specificity. When we read a blog post or an editorial or a tweet, the phrases may turn essentially to graffiti--simple phrases repeated in frustration or outrage or self-assurance rather than the specificity of the subject starting to unfold. It's a question we should be in the habit of asking ourselves: when so-and-so announcer or columnist or blogger gets on a soapbox about this or that topic, are we smarter at the end or have we mainly been tagged with graffiti?

And here is the Burke paragraph.

Maybe this is a follow-up from yesterday, the true story of the street preachers and the street theater protestors yelling at each other in Berkeley in 1974.

There is a cousin to metaphor and simile, a type of figurative language called synecdoche. It's a fast way of indicating something big by mentioning only a part of the thing. When it's done well, the reader gets the big picture from the little piece.

"The hand that signed the paper felled the city." Well, of course it didn't really. The tyrant signed the order, the army he had assembled over the years carried out the order, but in context the sweeping power of the tyrant leaps out of the synecdoche. The part brings to mind the whole.

It has seemed to me that synecdoche is the key to empathy and ethics. At some point in life a person realizes, "I don't really know what the other person has suffered. Try as I might, I can't really walk a mile in another person's shoes." Once you know that you only partially understand what another person has gone through, you can practice empathy and try to imagine the unseen part. From the part you can look for the whole. A person begins to see it as an ethical obligation to try.

But it's really good to add the insight that synecdoche may imply: you only have partial knowledge. It says to me: I should be modest in my claims about the suffering of others because I only see the part, not the whole. My knowledge is not going to get larger than that. I should speak moderately when it has become clear to me that my knowledge is incomplete. And to the degree that knowledge of my fellow humans always resembles synecdoche, it is always incomplete.

And "And yet" will surely follow. A discussion of times one must speak boldly....

Visiting Berkeley, in 1974, one spring afternoon as the crowds passed up and down Sproul Plaza, I stopped to watch the confrontation between a couple of street preachers and two or three guys who had brought along a large papier-mâché cow nearly as tall as they were. On one side the preachers with Bibles in their hands were threatening damnation and calling people to the Lord, and beside them the young men were inviting people to kneel and pray to their cow. They drove the preachers crazy, all the more so when they said that the cow had been made from pages of Bibles torn from the hands of street preachers. Their sacrilege was deeply intentional and the preachers were outraged. The crowd was fascinated by the conflict, but nobody stopped to attend to either of their calls--nobody stepped up to be saved and nobody knelt down to pray, street-theater-style, to the cow. Off in the distance I could hear a hot dog vendor, one of those people who worked the job so long that he developed a song-like patter, calling out to the crowd. People were lining up for his wares. I remember thinking: His calling out is musical, and sells.

Some kinds of writing are stamped with a badge of authority--the king wrote it, say, or the head of the research lab confirmed it, or the writer's last book won the Pulitzer. Other kinds of writing operate in a space that has been cleared of competing voices, so pieces seem to have authority because of the silence around them. But some kinds of writing come with a little card that says, "This is my best understanding, right now, at the moment." No external claim of authority, but rather: "Take it or leave it, reader, here is what I have for you today. I'm thinking on my feet. I hope it's good, sure, but it's yours for the using now."

A different dynamic forms in writing without claims of authority, both at the writer's desk and in a reading and writing community. In 2005, Jay Rosen described the results for both writer and community, I believe, when solo and shared inquiry trump claims of authority:

• Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out, re-building it around new stuff. Come to some conclusions? Put them in your weblog, man, but just remember: it doesn't want to conclude.

This won't stop someone from replying with something dumb or hurtful, but it leaves the door open for conversation. It's hopeful and realistic about the ways insights build and accumulate when conditions are right. Dogma, by comparison, is pleased with itself and considers its thinking work to be done. [That's one style of talk radio, for example.]

• The image above spells out "blog" in semaphore.

The Guardian gives away a nice Jack Wolfskin backpack each week for the best contribution to the reader-generated GuardianWitness Been There travel site. For example, the recent call for 100-word entries on this outdoor walking theme:

• The UK’s countryside is beautiful for a walk or hike any time of the year, but in autumn, with its dazzling colours and delicate sharpness in the air, there are some trails that really prevail. Where’s your favourite hike to embrace the changing seasons?

The principle could hardly be any simpler: Guardian readers know their countryside and can create useful content. All a paper has to do is encourage readers to share in the writing and make those new writers look good with proper design, photography, and editing (as needed). Here is a tempting reader contribution to an earlier call for posts on microbreweries:

• Beerwolf Books, Falmouth, Cornwall

• Approaching Beerwolf feels like you've stumbled on a secret: it's up an easy-to-miss alleyway between chain stores, in a beautiful 18th-century building on Bells Court. Through the door, there's a staircase and a view of shelves of books. So it is a bookshop. Then there's the smell of beer and the sound of chatter. So it is a pub. There are several cask ales and an interesting range of bottled beer, not only from Cornish breweries. beerwolfbooks.com

I'd stop by that establishment, and I'd keep reading a local paper that got readers involved that way.

The campus has a new newsletter, two pages, attractive design, nicely written, with an informative selection of news and views, and even a Twitter #hashtag for stirring up conversation about the contents. It comes as a two-page pdf file via the campus bulletin board, a format that is probably fine for a sizable audience. But no web links, nothing you can click on, even the little articles that you know stand in for a bigger article on the university site. For example, a Nobel laureate is giving a talk in a couple of weeks. Now that's worth a link, but there are no links, and as far as I can tell the pdf's content does not live elsewhere in a more web-smart format, like a blog. I would link to it but there is nothing to link to. I would click links to read more but there's no links to click. I would occasionally throw a few readers over to the newsletter on Twitter, Facebook, and the blog, but no can do. So, there you go. Wanna go hear the Nobel laureate talk? Go find the web page--it's out there somewhere.

We owe a great debt to experts. They got us to the moon before our enemies; they saved my father's life in the ICU years ago; they made this truly beautiful machine I am typing on right now; they cured the common cold. [Well, not that last one.] Our debt to experts is profound.

By contrast, bloggers cast a ridiculous figure in a society shaped so cunningly by experts. Who are these typists with their stray thoughts and their hopeless, rambling plans? Their informal little essays almost instantly forgotten, their links rotting and, soon enough, cobwebs decorating their servers. Who do these bloggers think they are fooling?

But expertise can rob us of a little of ourselves:

• When we use only the lens provided by a profession, there are some things about our fellow human beings we will never know.

• When we are guided only by expertly-framed policy, we will from time to time stomp on the souls of other people.

• When we speak only in the words of expertise, some people will believe that we are also quietly saying, "Be quiet and listen. An expert is speaking. It's time for you to shut up."

At least there are certain mistakes that bloggers don't often make:

• They usually don't pull rank. They usually don't insist that a problem can be solved only by a certain kind of expert or talked about only in one kind of language.

• They tend to think that people's experience has something to offer. They assume that tradition or dogma should be challenged by people reflecting on their experiences.

• They get riled up, but down deep they like to hear more voices, not fewer. They want their turn to speak, not the only turn. They get really impatient, but down deep they want democracy.

So: we bloggers aren't entirely serious. That is our weakness and our strength. We aren't systematic. That helps free us from the ethical failings of expertise. We have no authority and we can't make people listen. That means that the people who turn our way are free people, making their own choices. Those are very cool people to have as friends. No money changes hands, just ideas and experiences. Nobody pulls rank. And on a good day, interesting things get said and sometimes they ripple out into the world. In an expert society, bloggers give me hope.

• [This post was sparked by Dave Winer's idea that blogging resembles the fast-painting practice of fresco. The three men walking image is a representation of "RSS" in semaphore.]

I noticed the generosity of the digital age even in my earliest days reading email lists, when I had a phone modem in our cinder block apartment on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, New Jersey. The modem's speed was 200 words per month or something similar, but still there were people in my field all across North America trading ideas every day. It was a bookish, trivia-loving crowd, admittedly, and I signed off one list in despair after most of the crew spent several days remembering every pop song that used spelling in its title or lyrics: "Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E became final today...." D-O-Z-E-N-S of these songs came to the minds of the assembly that week.

But on my main list there were these elders in the field who would show up day after day and share resources and answer questions and point people in the direction of previous studies or mention who someone should email or call to collaborate on a project. The generosity was mild-mannered, anything but pushy, and somewhere between tireless and infinite on the stamina scale. Younger folks would be working on a problem in the field, and this handful of elders would just simply help out. Every day.

When I started blogging, in 2003, I quickly ran into communities of bloggers who had the same ethic. Librarian-bloggers, for sure, and educators interested in making the web work for the good of students, for example. And occasionally I'd see the same thing in the land of various pastimes and hobbies, such as chess.

And the bedrock generosity of some folks online continues today. I ran across the YouTube chess feed of Mato Jelic, a teacher who has given the world over 800 short videos celebrating and unpacking the brilliance of the games of great masters. He shows the board, the moves of a particular game, and some alternate variations, all the while talking casually about chess tactics. Even with my over-the-hill chess brain I can feel neurons being nudged into fresh alignments when I watch one of Mato's videos. And you have not trouble spotting his love for the game.

People talk more about spam and the cruelty of the web, but this other strand is also everywhere, in abundance, and has been for years.

People come up to me in parking lots and compliment our bumper sticker. I have to agree with them. I'm grateful to the friend who created the design and had a big pile of them printed. The bumper sticker says:

"I Wish Adequate Mental Health Care Was as Easy to Get as a Gun."

The videos are out, a little rough around the edges but you can get the idea. Men from the community writing stories that they might otherwise never tell, submitting them anonymously to the reader's theater group, where they are shaped into an evening's performance. This was the first year but it will become a tradition here, as it follows on a longtime women's Michiana Monologues series with the same structure. The results, in both cases, are funny, thought-provoking, moving, and, in spite of how deep a person's woes can sometimes be, affirming. Things about men's lives right here, right now, get said that otherwise would simmer on for who knows how many years in silence. Proceeds from both the men's and women's shows go to local anti-violence and family justice centers--just beautiful.

Here is an example from the Manologues show, at 9:05 of the first video. Later in life a man recalls how as a child he could see his father struggling and eventually being swept under by his demons, while he as a boy felt keenly both powerful love and powerlessness.

So: Part 1 and Part 2 of the 2013 performance. Their website, where they tell the production's full story and where writers can submit work later in the year for the 2014 production.

But don't miss the joyful finale!

News that gets out stays out? I thought the title of my last post was clever, but since I hit "Publish" I have wondered if it is only partially true. I think, for example, of the urge to speak indicated by graffiti in any American city. In South Bend a huge gallery of art underneath one of the river bridges was painted over a couple of years ago, and as far as I can tell no record remains online. I was fond of one image particularly, a huge ant peeking over a wall almost exactly as the playfully drawn Kilroy did in World War II-era "Kilroy was here" graffiti.

My favorite South Bend street image probably lasted only a few days. It was a blue man with his mouth sealed by an X of tape above the slogan, "Where is your voice?" It looked like it was a stencil and spray paint job and it was centered on a really prime section of wall on the downtown river walk, almost exactly as a painting would be hung in the galleries immediately across the river in the South Bend Museum of Art. If it was a stencil job, then maybe it will appear again someday, who knows. The city painted over it very neatly--they don't always bother to make a reclaimed wall look good, by the way.

Here and on Twitter I'm very interested in voices that are heard or silenced, news that gets out, or not. Images that are seen or obscured. The structures of society that influence who is heard, and the impact of these inequalities on our democracy and our quality of life.

The Chinese national arts censors asked film director Jia Zhangke to make surprisingly few changes to his new film, "A Touch of Sin," even though it tells embarrassing stories about contemporary China. Why? According to reporter Edward Wong's NY Times article, the answer involves social media's ability to make events part of the public record.

In spite of state oversight, Jia's new film tell stories of individuals grappling with troubling political, economic, and social conditions:

• “In these few years, because of the speed of China’s transformation, I have become very interested in history,” Mr. Jia said. “And I have also become interested in China’s societal problems, its economic problems, its political problems. So I feel now with ‘A Touch of Sin,’ it’s not just an issue of individual emotions, but it is also an expression of the state of the entire nation.... Reform has brought about many problems.... Prominent among these are the problem of social inequality and problems such as distribution of income.”

Now Jia is telling the stories of individuals lashing out violently against the conditions of their lives, which could easily have tempted the state censors to react more firmly than they did, in the interests of good national publicity. Jia has become just the kind of artist a country touchy about the control of image and information would censor. But social media was already playing a public role.

Thanks to "the world of Twitter-like microblogs, which many Chinese have been reading in recent years to get the unvarnished daily news and opinions that are all but absent from the state-run news media," the four interwoven stories in this movie, and other stories like them, were already part of the public record. This fact, the director suggests, protected his film from strong censorship. The kind of stories he was telling had already broken out:

• The news articles on which the film was based had already made the rounds on microblogs. The narratives had entered the public consciousness in a way that might never have happened 10 or even five years ago, before the Internet became such a social force in China.

But even though the news was out, Jia points out that these violent episodes are not well understood there "because society has never had a widespread discussion of the problem." Here a distinction is made between the attention that is drawn and paid via social media and the kinds of discussions that form a national consensus and then shape policy. As an artist, he heard the evidence and witness of the microblogs and Internet news feeds, but still saw the nation in a state of emergency requiring a response: “Certain things need to be said, and need to be said directly, clearly, to as large, and as activated, a Chinese audience as possible.” Because social media attuned people to the crisis, but could not resolve the crisis, it was a necessary but not sufficient tool for Chinese society facing its problems. Other arts and other institutions need to be healthy and active in order to work the issues further.

Edward Wong's article helps us understand more exactly the nature of social media--not a replacement for other forms of media and other institutions but a necessary widening of a society's toolkit. A way of preparing the ground for more focused national conversations and a way of keeping the pressure on. The chatter on a Twitter or Weibo can swell into political awareness but the working out of a national consensus about action probably cannot be completed there. Great social decisions are not, so far, anyway, made on Twitter.

It might be interesting to think more, too, about why Jia told these stories in a familiar martial arts genre--perhaps audiences can empathize and understand challenging material more readily through the lens of a familiar kind of story? I don't know.

["Filmmaker Giving Voice to Acts of Rage in Today’s China," NY Times, 9/14/13]

So there I was, betraying my principles, contradicting my religion . . . well, maybe just disobeying my doctor’s orders, walking into a fast food restaurant. I’d been running errands, and I needed a quick lunch. I thought maybe a fish sandwich and some fries would go down easy. I tossed my dietary scruples aside and walked up to the counter, where a pleasant, clean-cut young man in a tan shirt offered to take my order. I mentioned the fish sandwich and the fries, and I thought maybe they could throw in a medium cola and a cheeseburger, just to round things out. The total did some major damage to a $10 bill.

I saw my sandwiches make their way up the cooking line. A woman in a blue shirt walked over to the bin where sandwiches awaited their fate. As she did, she raised her right arm, tilted her head down, and quickly and quietly coughed, just once, into her hand. Now I was really interested. I watched her read my order from the big screen, then grab both my sandwiches from the bin and slide them into a brightly-colored paper bag. She dropped in the order of fries, folded the bag closed, and turned and handed my fresh, tasty lunch to the young man at the register. Now I faced a dilemma. Should I make a bit of a scene? I reached back for a combination of good manners and self-assertiveness, and I said to him,

“Just before she filled my bag there, she coughed into her hand. So I was thinking maybe we should do this whole thing over.” He turned to his co-worker and said, “The customer said you coughed into your hand and he’d like a fresh order of food.”

She blandly asserted her innocence, then told the cook to remake the order. The young man put the first bag of food under the counter, and everyone waited. I watched with renewed interest as a lovely new fish sandwich, hidden from germy danger in its box, made its way slowly toward the woman in blue. I caught the eye of the young man and started rubbing my hands together in the air – the universal sign for handwashing. “Maybe it’s time for her to go wash up,” I said. The poor guy turned to his co-worker and, using all the politeness his mother had taught him, said, “The customer thinks you should go wash your hands.”

She disappeared into the back of the kitchen for a minute or two, and soon the young man handed me a fresh bag of food. A few days later, in a friendly way, I told the story to one of the managers. She coughed into her hand, I said. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked, cheerfully. No, I said, she assembled my bag of food. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked, hopefully. No, I said. I requested a new bag of food. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked, faltering just a little. No, I said. Everyone waited for new food to be cooked, and I suggested that she go wash her hands. So then she went to wash her hands, the manager asked one last time, always looking for the good in people. Yes, I said, then she went to wash her hands.

You’d think I would have savored my lunch that day – those sandwiches so freshly prepared, my little victory over bad manners so fresh in mind, myself so thoroughly in the right that nobody could say a word against me. But no. For who cannot identify with that employee? Who has not taken a shortcut or skipped a procedure or overlooked a little personal failure? It could as easily have been me sliding sandwiches into the bag with my germy hands. For as my mother tried to teach me long ago, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. [Source]

The regional public radio station gives me four minutes of air time every seven weeks to talk about quality of life here in the area. A few years ago I wrote about Indiana's Do Not Call law, which for a time was among the strictest in the country. The law made for a huge reduction in the number of unsolicited sales phone calls most of us received at our homes.

But now the calls are coming back--more often, and more companies, though some of them may be the same companies using the same methods in difference industries. Credit cards and home security systems have been most common.

I managed once, a few years ago, to record one of the calls in which the person I was speaking to said that it was not against the law to call because he was representing the federal government. It was a gutsy, I-don't-give-a-damn performance on his part. I wrote the Indiana attorney general's office to let them know that I had this recording, but got no answer.

So I told the whole story on the public radio, and I sent that along to the attorney general, and now that they saw I was actually reaching a wide audience they answered me. So it goes.

Now there is a different attorney general and I've written to ask for an update on the issue. I told them I might be getting some coverage in the media up front this time, so we'll see if they reply. I'll report back later. Until then, would you like a free home security system? Cause I know a company that will be in your area later this week installing these fine systems for people just like you.

Want to read more? Here's the first of my radio pieces, in which all my elected officials in Washington blew me off until they knew I had access to public radio. And here, in the second of the radio pieces, at 3:30 in the audio, the lying son of a gun credit card salesman tells me over the phone that he works for the federal government. And the office of the attorney general is too busy to reply to my query until they hear that I have media access.

Poets like rhyme not just because it's part of their tradition or because it makes their poems easy to remember or because it helps give a musical effect to the lines or because it links the meaning of two words or because it can be witty. All true, but there is this other thing. Rhyme is an aid to invention. The poet says, essentially, I am going to force myself to think about possible words for the next line that I would probably have never considered. For the sake of rhyme, I am going to try out language in this draft that I would never have bothered with. And sometimes, as a result something fresh and surprising happens.

And that means that, for poets, rhyme is an aid to invention. As a starting blogger, back in 2003, I used pMachine software, which included a calendar in the sidebar highlighting each day of the month whether there was a posting. The blue highlights were clickable links and the purpose was to draw readers further into the site, but I loved to see the weeks fill up, without, if possible, missing any days. The challenge of daily writing all by itself was an aid to invention. The discipline of at least trying, of looking around for topics, of reading other writers and seeing if there was something I could contribute to their conversation. The image of the calendar as a reminder of my aspiration to write daily. The truth that along with the weak entries daily writing captured good things that would otherwise never have been written at all, possibly never even been thought about. So the calendar visible on the page, the habit and aspiration of daily writing, the not-so-intimidating format of a blog post, the appeal of having a real audience--all these things help make blogging itself, and a good blogging tool, into aids to invention. Bravo.

In helping to tease the Johns Hopkins faculty censorship story into public view, longtime academic blogger Jay Rosen beautifully, at lightning speed, and just in passing, sketches what should be a seamless bond between traditional faculty duties and blogging:

• In commenting critically on a subject he is expert in, and taking an independent stance that asks hard questions and puts the responsibility where it belongs, Matthew Green is doing exactly what a university faculty member is supposed to be doing. By putting his thoughts in a blog post that anyone can read and link to, he is contributing to a vital public debate, which is exactly what universities need to be doing more often.

The reward system for most faculty ignores or devalues this public role. This institutional structure famously tempts faculty to turn inward toward a small and narrow audience made up of only disciplinary peers. As a result, they (we) serve our communities less well and in time come to deserve the ivory tower stereotypes that are applied to us.

Of course there is more. Writing for a wide, thoughtful, general audience involves academics in a more layered exchange of ideas and information than we would otherwise see. We academics get smarter when we listen to more people. This is one of the normal experiences of web publishing that most academics never bump into.

A later stage in the Hopkins story here.

It's true, I'm a slow learner. I want to read what my old friends, neighbors, and colleagues post on social media, and I set the Sort button on Facebook to "Most Recent" and not to "Top Stories"--which I don't know the meaning of, anyway. Then I seem to get the most recent posts from friends and neighbors and colleagues. Seem to. Then a few days pass and I notice that FB has changed the setting over to "Top Stories" without asking. I change it back. A few days pass, FB changes it back again. Sometimes I complain but there's nobody to complain to, nobody at FB who would ever read the posting. And tonight, FB changed the setting back a second time in a single day. I'm a slow learner but I'm starting to get the picture:

• There's nobody to complain to. They don't care and they don't listen. It's their playground and they make all the rules and we don't get to know what the rules are anyway. Thanks, Facebook.

The Corner Office interview in the NY Times almost always has good advice for young people in the final question or two. Today Adam Bryant asks Daniel Lubetzky what he would tell graduating seniors, but the answer, I think, should reach younger college students, too. He recommends turning off the gadgets and making time for introspection, for thinking about your values and evaluating your efforts:

• The most important is to make sure that you talk to yourself, that you think hard about what’s important to you and gives you meaning. When I was 19 and walking between classes, I didn’t have a phone, so my brain would take me in different directions. And it’s so healthy and important to be thinking, “Oh, I could have done that better.” Or, “What about this idea?” But nowadays, we’re on our iPhones all the time, and you don’t have time to talk with yourself, to analyze.

I imagine that most college students don't have anyone sharing this kind of good advice, but Adam Bryant gives it away for free a couple of times a week in his interviews. I often start by reading the final few questions.

Here is one good reading of what's at stake in our passive, consumer society today, by Kurt Spellmeyer:

• If culture is where we live, so to speak, if it gives form to our values and extends them into the future, then the promise of democracy remains unrealized so long as most of us are uninvolved in the making of culture itself. (Arts of Living 7)

My quick read, maybe unfair, maybe too gloomy, is that the average university course focuses on replicating expertise within the limits of a single discipline, not on tools for creativity or collaboration, and usually not on interdisciplinary tools either. My quick read is that the university does not entirely support consumer culture but it does not really take it on either, not in its teaching methods. A course reading or lecture might offer an intellectual critique of consumer culture, but the medium by which this message is communicated is still a problem.

• Passivity? You're soaking in it! [Just ask Madge.]

On March 5, 1946, someone, presumably Frank McCluer, the president of Westminster College, introduced President Harry Truman, who then quickly introduced former prime minister Winston Churchill, who went on to give the "Sinews of Peace" speech famous for the phrase "iron curtain" that sharply defined the conflict between Soviet-dominated countries and western European countries after World War II. It was a big day in Missouri higher education and in world political thought. But not remembered: McCluer's brief introduction (audio: 2:03-2:37) described a long history in which:

• ...freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.

McCluer's phrase helps me think about how democracy works. It is true that elections steer the great, heavy, slow-turning ship of state a little bit, one way or another, and some elections are decisive. But those precedents are another matter. They often come at the end of long periods of activism and debate, and they define one political concept or another newly or more decisively, and their definitions endure. They guide us for years ahead, and if McCluer was correct, they are the markers of freedom's progress over the centuries.

The role of citizens in an election: at the least, it is to vote. The role of a citizen in setting a new precedent that redefines and broadens freedom: activism. The difference is huge, isn't it? [More ideas from that introduction about the role of higher education in bringing decisive ideas to the wider community.]