The new tweet from @MonsantoCo, the Monsanto corporate account, said:

• New post at Beyond the Rows (#Monsanto): A Trip through the Produce Aisle from the Eyes of a Nutrition Scientist

I thought: I'll click. I'm in need of better health and nutrition and maybe this article will be encouraging and enlightening and help me do a little better. So I did click. I found myself looking at a "blog post" with this headline and byline:

• A TRIP THROUGH THE PRODUCE AISLE FROM THE EYES OF A NUTRITION SCIENTIST By Jonathan Mein | Vegetables Division

Vegetables division? That's kind of interesting, I thought. I always think of Monsanto and the big row crops of the Midwest, corn, soybeans, and so forth. I looked at the first paragraph, which read:

• We all know that we should eat more fruits and vegetables, but not many people get to advance that cause as a career. As a Nutrition Scientist in our global vegetable division, I’m one of the lucky few.

Okay, I thought, maybe I'm going to get to learn about how better plant varieties are produced, in general, but more specifically, how we can be tempted to eat a better diet as a result. I'll read on. Paragraph two:

• The reality is that most of us don’t eat as much fruit and vegetables as we should. That is where the cool part of my job begins. I get to think about and address the challenges we face in providing consumers with safe, nutritious and, most importantly, delicious vegetables.

Okay, that was not a good sign. It essentially repeated the first paragraph: we should eat better and I work on that. My hopes for the article are slipping. Paragraph three:

• Most people don’t even realize that Monsanto has a vegetable business, let alone cares about taste, flavor, convenience, and nutrition. But in fact, we care a lot. I was in a colleague’s office the other day and made the comment that if people only knew how much time and effort goes into understanding how a tomato tastes, they would never believe it. That is true for a lot of the work we do in vegetables.

Not a good sign. Yet another paragraph that says this is a cool job and we are trying to make food better. Repeating generalities like that won't get me back to the corporate website, I promise you. If it weren't a short article with the end in sight, I would have probably stopped reading here. Fourth paragraph:

• BellaFina mini bell peppers are a perfect example of the work that we do in vegetables to provide taste, nutrition, and convenience to consumers. Not only do they taste great, but their size makes them a great vegetable option for children. As a new dad, I can appreciate making vegetables fun for everybody. Any time we can make consuming vegetables tastier, more compelling or more convenient, I feel we have done our jobs.

Okay, for the first time I start to learn something new: they actually try to breed food plants that are more interesting for kids. I had not imagined such a thing, and I'd be pleased to learn more about that. But look hard at the paragraph: except for that fact, it just repeats things that are becoming obvious by now if they weren't already. There is about one sentence of new content in this paragraph. That won't do. I want information. I'm serious here: Information advertises; advertising annoys. Luckily, the end is in near:

• I probably have spent more time thinking about broccoli nutrition over the past week than most people will over a lifetime. With almost 12 years of conventional breeding efforts behind it, our Beneforté broccoli has resulted in a variety that tastes like broccoli but with enhanced levels of the phytonutrient glucoraphanin. We’ve taken the science behind the antioxidant benefits of glucoraphanin and combined them with our expertise in conventional breeding to produce a broccoli with truly added benefits. We all know broccoli is good for you, but we’ve managed to make it even better.

Another paragraph with one sentence of new information: it's been possible to increase a particular antioxidant without losing the taste of the food. Anything interesting happen during the twelve years of breeding? Who knows, because we aren't going to hear about it. Tally so far: about two sentences of information and the rest is cheerful advertising. And finally:

• The research, thought, and passion that goes into filling your local produce aisle is a behind-the-scenes journey that starts with our people. As I walk through the produce aisle at my local grocery store, I don’t just see the bright colors, smell the sweet scents and sample the great tastes. I see the hard work that goes into that experience, and I am proud to say that I am a part of that hard work. Every time I see a tasty tomato, broccoli stalk or other vegetable go into a shopper’s cart, I can enjoy a bit of satisfaction in a job well-done.

That's a summary style of conclusion, and so it just repeats the highlights of the story. It's not the only kind of conclusion, and it's not the most interesting kind, since it just repeats, but so it goes. Nothing new in the paragraph. I bet you a dime, though, that if you actually walked through a produce aisle with this scientist you would learn far, far more than this article offers. It's just a glossy advertisement that pretended it was going to be an informative article. I learned my lesson, which is that the Monsanto Twitter account offers advertising, not useful information, and I won't click on the links it provides again any time soon. Too bad: it didn't have to be that way. That's not real blogging either--just because a company calls something a blog doesn't mean they have found the spirit of blogging. They could, though. They'd have to rethink public relations to do it. And understand that real blog posts have links.

PS. Sorry, Jonathan. I bet your boss said to write it that way.

PPS. My comment, asking for more informative postings, is still awaiting moderation a few days later at the Monsanto "blog" site. It reads:

• I thought this was going to be a more informative article. It is more advertising than information that I can use. I would visit a corporate website much more often if the mix leaned more heavily toward useful information.

• PPPS. The Monsanto posted my critical comment, just above, along with a small number of others on Monday, November 4.

Writer Edward Abbey had an insight years ago about the automobile congestion on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Passengers in those days would tumble out of cars at each scenic overlook, creating crowds and traffic jams in a park tens of thousands of acres in size.By prohibiting car traffic, he said, the public space would instantly be enlarged many fold, as walkers and bikers traverse not just those few parking areas but all the beautiful spaces in between.

Biking and walking make the most beautiful parts of a city more spacious, with more places to engage and enjoy. Instead of passing by a neighborhood in a moment, a biker or walker can come to know and care about the fine grain of the place, the solitude, the views, the shops, the people. Sealed in our cars, just as we are often sealed in our private lives, we miss a chance to engage. This has been our loss for some time now in many American neighborhoods, the poshest of which have often been created without sidewalks, discouraging even a casual walk after dinner.

Happily, South Bend, Indiana, where I live, has been adding miles of bike lanes and paths each year, and in spring a big public biking festival is among the most popular events of the year.

[Written in response to an article about biking in Portland by Elly Blue at the Guardian.]

Some highlights from the talk given on our campus this evening in South Bend by Lee H. Hamilton, who served in the House of Representatives for a district in southern Indiana for 34 years, was co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, and who now heads the Center on Congress at Indiana University in Bloomington:

• Congress is now deeply unpopular and flagrantly unproductive. Very few Congresses in history can match the present Congress in futility.

• This Congress can't pass anything. It can't repeal anything.

• Most of the committees of the Congress have collapsed.

• Omnibus bill? No, it's an abomination. No accountability, no transparency, put together in the dark of night, voted on in the morning.

• NSA is the most dramatic expansion of government power in my lifetime. The amazing passivity and timidity of Congress...the arrogance...Congress didn't see the NSA as a subject for public debate.

• Democracy is not a result. Democracy is a process.

• You couldn't get a single sentence in the US Constitution without compromise. Not one single sentence.

Mr. Hamilton also advised that the best way for citizens to influence a US representative is to gather a group of four or five well-prepared folks together, make an appointment for the next time the representative is back in the home district, buy her a cup of coffee and talk face to face.

He was proud of the deliberative traditions and the history of the Congress and gave the impression that it has abandoned most of its best features.

"How are you doing?"

"We're okay. Too busy to be really happy, too stupid to do anything about it, but otherwise, pretty good."

• Or: Too busy to be happy, too stupid to change.

English teachers are overjoyed to see close reading and interpretation [of baseball's obstruction rule] being practiced everywhere today. It's a vital and beautiful set of skills.

"Making knowledge public does not a knowledgeable public make," writes Jay Rosen in "The Limits of Investigative Journalism," a very useful essay that considers why good reporting sometimes sinks in and other times fails to matter much. He contrasts "Top Secret America," a major 2010 Washington Post series, almost two years in the making, with "the Snowden effect," the "direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden's [2013] leaks of classified information about the surveillance state in the US." He notes four elements that helped to boost the Snowden results: an interesting person to pin the story on (Snowden himself), a lively narrative arc (will he escape?), the sharp spark of secrets revealed, and the vivid evidence of government lying.

I've been thinking of this sort of collection of elements as an "elaborated web" that must to some degree be aligned already to receive and focus and amplify the right kind of event. When that web isn't in place, the words of a great prophet would fall to the stones stillborn. The early adopters can help create an elaborated web, but the stories I've looked at so far suggest that much of it already needs to be in place for a story or a protest to take off.

Jay Rosen's examples hint at how this sort of elaborated web of elements already in place must work. He speaks of the "reportorial scraps gathering mold in journalists' notebooks [that] gain new relevance" once a story has momentum. He describes the swarming instinct of major papers--always at least a remote threat--once a big enough carcass has been spotted to distract them for a time from celebrity gossip and political racehorse chatter. Ideas too need to be in place--see this brief Storify account of how one generation of activists prepares the idea matrix for the next generation, for example. Organizations--unions, community groups, religious groups, healthy institutions like the courts and the schools--have to be in place too, even though few people would see the alignment until something provokes it into revealing itself.

And why does a story not take off? There must be many reasons beyond the general principle that it did not align with an elaborated web of people, groups, ideas, institutions already prepared to respond. Washington is for many of us an alien place. Reporters and politicos can get themselves worked up over something that never catches on across the country. See, for example, Joan Didion's account of the Clinton impeachment years, when insiders whipped themselves up to a frenzy over Clinton's personal excesses but failed to make the country care. Because that passage of history was essentially an insider's game, it never played beyond Washington. The ground had not been prepared beyond the Beltway.

"Knowledge made public does not a public make," Jay Rosen's second formulation of his striking opener, may be just a little more to the point. Individuals become citizens not mainly by right but more by their ability to choose and act. The kinds of choices and actions we associate with the internet include: speaking, publishing, affiliating, collaborating, aggregating (some overlap there). These actions change a person from a private person to a citizen; they align a citizen with others and with groups and institutions; they allow a person to act as part of the elaborated web that moves a society forward; they allow a person to respond to news and to help shape the society's response to news. These internet-age skills change the masses or the general public into a particular public alive in a particular episode of history. Knowledge alone, as Jay Rosen says, doesn't transform people into citizens; we become citizens when we see ourselves participating in the elaborated web of our time. Knowledge only helps us get there.

Knowledge, then, doesn't land on our doorstep in the morning and change us. The real front page of journalism is now in the elaborated web of social media, as Tim Dunlop's well-named new book, The New Front Page, asserts. The action is there; the forces affiliate and align there and the new event animates them all, or the new event helps them align a little better in preparation for the next event, the next protest, the next leak. Jay Rosen's inquiry is very important, as we need to know how to increase the chances that good journalism and all other institutions will matter in the progress of our society.

Two other examples I have looked at: 1.) In World War II Elise and Otto Hampel could no longer live in Berlin under Hitler without protesting, and their postcard protests in some ways predicted the character of Twitter. But because they could tap into no elaborated web for communicating and affiliating, they were doomed. Brave as they were, astonishingly so, there was no structure in place to give them any chance--according to my line of theory, at least. Brief audio of their story here. 2.) In 2009 a single tweet from Alan Rusbridger, not very different than a single postcard from Otto Hampel, did operate in an elaborated web of international journalists, lawyers, activists, bloggers, and others, all in possession of research and communication skills, all able to affiliate and collaborate in a case of toxic waste dumping by a multinational corporation. Brief audio of that episode here. As a result, that single tweet lead to the overturning of a Supreme Court ruling in Britain protecting that company in a matter of a few days. The elaborated web operated as promised by the theory. These two stories helped me start to try to understand the thing I've been calling an elaborated web. And they align usefully with the project Jay Rosen has underway in his recent essay.

PS. And when everybody is writing in a corporate silo instead of on the open internet, the chance for an event or a protest to land in this kind of elaborated web and build it out further must be reduced.

A letter to the editor here in South Bend painted a vivid picture of a troubled part of town. Where once there had been tidy, prosperous blocks of houses and shops, now whole buildings were missing or had fallen into disrepair, and a new indignity, ugly, sometimes frightening graffiti, was blooming on garage walls and street signs and overpasses. I could feel the powerlessness in that long-time resident’s voice. Things were out of control. Something had plainly broken in our community.

I remember visiting New York in the worst of its graffiti days, when nearly every surface of a subway car, inside and out, would be covered with scrawled names and illegible slogans and, it’s true, occasional masterpieces of imaginative and even beautiful art. But the overall effect was, for me, anyway, to feel pressed down by a stranger’s angry and troubled imagination. On the subway we rode along inside someone’s nightmare, inside someone’s scream.

We get graffiti in our neighborhood, too, mainly down at the railroad bridge. One of the neighbors paints over any new tags as soon as he sees them, so they don’t last long. I’m grateful for his efforts to keep those troubling voices at bay. When we first moved in, nobody looked after the bridge, and for several years a simple line drawing of a hanging and a brutal slogan expressing nostalgia for the lost days of lynching stayed in plain view by the sidewalk where the young people passed each day on their way to high school.

Nowadays, on the news, when I see protestors at some political event holding up angry, inarticulate signs, or when I catch a few minutes of the badgering and venting style of talk radio favored by some of our fellow citizens, I think to myself: that right there is graffiti. Those ugly words on the protest signs, those bitter phrases of ridicule flowing from the famous radio hosts—those are graffiti on the airwaves. Something much larger than a neighborhood or a part of town is broken. In a time of growing national frustration, we are becoming a graffiti society.

I started thinking about that problem during the last local election, that time of the civic season when, in theory, we all get to speak up. Sometimes voting doesn’t feel like a very clear or powerful kind of speech, though, and yard signs send pretty generic messages, too. The most common ways that citizens participate in democracy can seem downright feeble. Certain graffiti writers, oddly enough, manage to construct stronger, or at least louder, voices than the average citizen does. And that’s not a good sign, is it?

My interest in graffiti was stirred by a striking portrait of a blue-faced man stenciled last year on a downtown wall. The mouth was x-ed out, and underneath was printed this question: “Where is your voice?” It struck me that the writer had a point. So I went looking for clues to what the most interesting of these writers are up to. To my surprise, I discovered that some of them would probably agree with the recent letter to the editor. They too think something in our society is broken, and they want a place to speak. The British graffiti artist Bansky, for example, said that “The city shouldn’t just be a one-way conversation.”

The newest graffiti down at our nearby bridge was among the few beautiful ones I’ve seen there. Against the gray wall, bold white letters stood more than a yard tall. Vividly outlined in red, they spelled out the word “Heist.” This was provocative. Was it a threat to come back and break into a house or two? Or maybe the writer believed that something vital has been stolen from him or from all of us? It felt, somehow, vaguely, very meaningful. But that strong, uncertain word has been painted over now, and of course the writer vanished. We can’t ask him, we can’t talk it over, so we’ll never know.

In "How to Write about Africa," Binyavanga Wainaina* lists dozens of stereotypes that let outsiders seem to know what they are talking about when they write about that large, diverse continent. You can feel the simmering of anger underneath the crazy list, the feeling of having to endure outsiders who think they know when all they are doing is rehearsing myths or patting themselves on their backs for one superiority or another, or enjoying the emotion of pity, or otherwise fantasizing about some exotic other place and other people. It's a reminder that society offers us a huge, pre-packaged set of attitudes and "understandings" of many a topic that are well in place but may have little validity and may actually be destructive. For educators and citizens, the problem is posed: how to resist the lazy, canned understandings that threaten our contact with reality daily.

Even following a couple of dozen people from different parts of the continent on Twitter, reading some of the links they provide, etc., can make a huge difference. As we should expect, the specificity of their words and experiences explodes the common myths time after time.

*See also: "How Not to Write about Africa in 2012: A Beginner's Guide"

A friend told this story recently:

• I went for a walk with my camera yesterday. Didn't get any good pictures, but a man I met gave me a nice quote. "I see you again, I’m going to smash your f*** camera. This ain’t no scenic area. This is the ghetto. Don’t you come here taking no picture of my house."

The way I read the story is this: there are a good number of Americans who know that their views, their stories, are either ignored are written up by somebody else, not by them. And among them this fellow was tired of it and angry, and he didn't want to be anybody's "quaint picture of poverty" either. That's part of what I think he was saying. [My friend said he wasn't photographing the buy's house, which is cool.]

If you visit here from time to time you see that one of the things I'm interested in is who gets to speak and who is silent in our society, and why, and what people can do about it. This guys knows something about the country that many people don't know--wouldn't you agree?

Over on Twitter Ravi Mohan describes computer programming classes in India where students memorize syntax and write out code by hand in notebooks instead of actually creating tools on computers. At first glance that sounds stunningly backwards, but in reading the pithy ebook Why School? by Will Richardson (@WillRich45), I pause for a second thought. The tools that are available to our young people at home and on their phones are dazzling, but our schools ignore or even forbid students from using some of the most powerful of them. Sure, everybody uses an online library catalog or Google, a word processor, maybe a graphing tool or something else to display data in striking ways. But the digital age is not primarily about quick, cool ways to grab and present data. At its best, it is about the most profound changes to literacy, to inquiry, to problem-solving, and to active citizenship. Using computers only to make pretty presentations in the United States in 2013 is not much better than writing computer code on sheets of notebook paper. Schools that stop there are hopelessly out of touch with the actual power of the technology. They might as well provide all their students with a sleek, massive, correcting IBM Selectric.

Judging by the personal stories told by Christine Ristaino, silence extends our suffering and speech helps us start to heal:

• We all have a story to tell, and if it involves pain, we need to tell that story. Each time we tell it, the event loses power and we gain strength – the strength to go on, the strength to be ourselves.

And we all have a role to play, too, when important personal stories are told, says Ristaino:

• The next time you talk with somebody who has a story to tell – about violence, oppression, tragedy, illness, death or pain – listen to her as though listening was the only thing in the world you had to do that day. Look into that person's eyes and make her feel her story is worth telling. Tell her she is brave and that you care about her.

Ristaino's essay is one of the fruits of the Op-Ed Project, which seeks to get a wider range of voices into our media--especially but not only women's voices.

FB of course doesn't care. It's the sad deal we have struck there--gather with friends and acquaintances, give away all of our data, be advertised to any way they please, change the format endlessly, override our recently chosen preferences after a few days, and so forth.

I met a very positive pair of people recently, spending just a few minutes with them, and I walked away refreshed. They have interesting careers that they've shaped around things they care about, they take chances and work very hard to try for the life they have imagined for themselves, and they have habits of engaging with others that feel open and interested. Sure, they need to be that way operating a shop, but they've still distilled a purer sort of positive spirit than most people I know. Why not, I found myself saying as I walked away. Why not?

I revised the October 6th public presentation to work in the radio slot for today's broadcast on WVPE. [audio]

A lot of folks were gathering on the IU South Bend campus to celebrate the memory of two remarkable people, Eileen Bender and Harvey Bender. They were longtime area residents, university professors, major figures in their fields, and community leaders. To deepen the celebration, a distinguished guest, a Nobel laureate, would give a public lecture. Outside on the plush lawn, a large awning was set out, rows of chairs and a podium for a brief ceremony. A big new tree had been planted in memory of Harvey and Eileen. But there was just one problem. All the nearby trees were not even changing color yet, but every leaf on the new tree had curled into a crispy brown. This new tree gave a strong impression that it was dead.

Planting a tree in autumn takes me back to Westover Greenhouses, where I worked when I was in college. Our customers knew that there were a few choice weeks in the fall, just right for planting trees, but you could see real doubt on their faces when they looked at some of our twiggy, leafless specimens. Laborers like me didn’t need to know very much biology to earn a paycheck at Westover, but we all knew how to check an autumn tree. Out there near the end of the smallest branches, we would use a thumbnail to scrape away just a little bark. And what we would show a customer under the bark was the bright current of green cells in the cambium layer that is the fiber of life in a tree. So I walked over to that new ceremonial tree and took hold of a small branch and scraped back a tiny curl of bark. It was beautiful to see the undercurrent of green, not just because that’s what you want to see but also because I was really feeling the lively undercurrent that still flows through many of us from the lives of our two departed friends.

I used to see Harvey pick up Eileen at the end of a long day of work. In later years her vision was poor, and she looked small and even frail as she walked very slowly down the corridor beside him. He was tall and distinguished, and ordinarily he had a long stride, but not now. Yet I never saw a speck of impatience there. It was as if Harvey had distilled in his heart a blend of love and service that meant that walking the speed Eileen walked was the perfect speed to walk through life if he got to walk next to Eileen. For me, the example of his decency is evergreen.

Eileen kept her hair in a tidy flop of blonde bangs. She wore big elliptical gold hoop earrings that you never saw anywhere else, and her eyes and smile were keen above the point of her chin. She worked hard and kept long hours, but her office door was always open to students who wanted to talk about literature. Eileen had a playful understanding of human nature. She told me once, “You know so-and-so is a good leader. He gets other people to do his work for him.” I think what she meant was that if you respect people and invite them to join you in a project that makes our lives better, people will do a lot of work when they feel that respect and believe in the shared mission. As the co-founder of a statewide teaching group called FACET, Eileen got dozens and dozens of good teachers to aspire to be even better teachers and to work together playfully, for years, to strengthen teaching at Indiana University. Eileen, wherever you are, I’m on to you—you wanted IU to be a better place and you figured out how to get the rest of us to carry on the work even after you were gone.

So it’s true, we all lose wonderful friends like Harvey and Eileen Bender, but on reflection we still have the undercurrent of their lives as green and present as the hidden bright cambium of an autumn tree.

The lovely friends, and friends the friends of friends,

pursuing insights to their journeys’ ends

subtle & steadfast:

the wind blows hard from our past into our future

and we are that wind, except that the wind’s nature

was not to last.

A Chinese micro-blogger could hardly have picked a more high-profile place to recite the virtues of free speech in spite of government suppression than the op-ed page of today's NY Times. The dynamics of blogging described by Murong Xuecun sound pretty familiar by now: the public space opened up by the internet even in a closed-down society, the leadership of the daring early writers, the society's hunger for knowledge and speech, the affiliation of growing others, the government reprisals. Good things may come of this in time, but in these early days the micro-bloggers still expect to be arrested:

• My friends and I channel our lingering anxiety into jokes about being on a government hit list. But of course this is a serious matter — and really all we can do is prepare for the inevitable.... As we contemplate the government’s next target, I keep my fear in check. I understand that for China to change, some people will have to pay a price.

How much do the small clues tell us about the health of the democracy? Maybe not so much, but here are my recent clues. I asked a specific question of our IN-2nd Congressional district representative, Jackie Walorski (@RepWalorski), in hopes of seeing where she got an unlikely seeming piece of data. I got a form letter back with no hint of an answer to my question. I asked a local journalist if he thought he'd get an answer, and within an hour the journalist had an answer and passed it on via Twitter. So we know how to get a call returned in Washington, eh? But the answer was a link to a "think tank" piece, so it was in itself a political document, not a source you could trust uncritically, and I was back to square one. Was the IN-2 representative's "fact" any good? I still didn't know. Was the journalist able to help--well, not really, since the information needed to be evaluated further. Here's the position of the citizen, on his or her own, ignored when it is convenient in Washington, aided but perhaps feebly at times by the press, and stuck with "facts" that need to be inspected further. Not all that healthy, I'd say.

Our Indiana US-2nd Congressional district representative is Jackie Walorski (@RepWalorski). For days she and her team offered tweets blaming the Senate for the current Washington crisis, even though she was one of the people who signed the August letter urging House leadership to try this kind of thing. Now for three or four days her various social media channels have gone dark--nothing except a single tweet yesterday celebrating the US Navy's 238th birthday. I don't agree with her actions on this issue--that's one thing. But stand up and admit to your actions--don't hide behind repeated, unpersuasive slogans like that. (Surely even her allies notice that the House Republicans have provoked the current crisis. Surely.) So don't pretend. Too many of the voters are paying attention to get away with that in the long run. [I hope!]

Katherine Viner (@KathViner) spoke about the state of journalism in Melbourne recently. Her talk serves as an update to the thinking inside one of the world's most interesting and daring newspaper companies today, the Guardian, as they continue to innovate. Viner herself heads Guardian Australia, a newish online publication that is in some ways a pure test case of the innovations and insights Guardian folks have accumulated over the last few years. A few highlights from the talk:

• The idea that the press's role as "truth-teller, sense-maker, explainer" is unchanged even though in our digital age the tools, methods, and partnerships involved are radically transformed. The idea that knowledge has been become much more "living, evolving, limitless, relentless." The idea that readers are smart and experienced and want to be involved and if they can't be involved they will move on. The idea that people want to be respected enough to be offered transparency, to see how a paper or a politician works. The idea that the web creates opportunities not just for readers but for newspapers that can attract informants and collaborators. The idea that the form of a publication can now be adapted inventively to the needs of an audience and the nature of the story being told, rather than always appearing in columns on paper. The idea that there is no excuse now for having a crowd of middle-aged white men speaking at a passive audience. The idea that through experimentation and paying attention to readers the web teaches the press how it is working today. The idea that paywalls defeat the openness that is currently teaching journalism the way ahead. The idea that linking out makes a site far more valuable. [well-established by now] The idea that light moderation can help protect vulnerable citizens but leave enough openness for public exchange to improve all of our views. The idea that journalism is a set of actions, not a job title, and that many can participate in journalism without having a press pass, and that we are all enriched by new varieties of voices. The idea that there are real skills that journalists bring that we really need for a healthy society. The idea that some around us are still more interested in having journalism serve the powerful but that speaking truth to power will always be its real role. The idea that the internet is vulnerable to commercial and political interests and might be taken from us. And more.

We were nearby today and wondered whether it was possible to walk near the Obama's Chicago residence. The answer is no, you can't walk down their block. A large, dark car drove up to meet us, and Secret Service agent in a heavy vest stepped out and sent us away. He was kind enough to tell us where the best view was around the corner, though. When we got there, a tour bus had pulled over and fifteen or twenty tourists from the continent of Asia were snapping pictures. Tourist, street, mature trees, big brick house through the gap in the trees--this was the picture you could take there. All the blinds were pulled down on the house. It was a beautiful neighborhood.

It's remarkable to compare the endings of two powerful American autobiographies published 100 years apart, in 1845 and 1945. Both contain accounts of great struggles by the authors to be able to read--Frederick Douglass first needing great presence of mind, strategy, trickery, and secrecy as a young enslaved person to essentially teach himself to read without letting anyone around him see what he was doing, and Richard Wright employing similar skills to gain access to a public library's collection and advance his own education. Both young men had a profound hunger for knowledge of the world that could make a different in the progress of their own lives in a deeply racist country.

The sections in which Douglass tricks neighborhood boys to show him letter combinations and Wright tricks a librarian into giving him books that, he says, are going to be read by a white man, not by Wright himself are well worth a close reading. But there at the end of each book, as both young men have escaped their dismal lives in the South, they both choose to conclude by talking about literacy, widely understood. It is as if they both saw their own progress in life as a literacy narrative, as a story about how a life unfolds as a person's literacy skills unfold. As if the two cannot truly be disentangled, and as if a democracy only makes sense if the strands remain interwoven.

Literacy, narrowly defined as the ability to read and write, won't explain it. But broadly understood: skills of reading, writing, and public speaking; the ability to know the world more fully as a result; the ability to engage others more fully as a result; the personal hopes that can be nurtured thereby; the wider social hopes that have a chance to be spoken and written slowly into existence thereby. Things like that. For neither Douglass or Wright is literacy the simple ability to read and write. Just as democracy is hobbled when we think of it as little more than elections, literacy is hobbled by a narrow definition or a narrow understanding. These familiar things, literacy, democracy, are deeper than we commonly remember.

There in the final pages of Tweets from Tahrir one of the participants in the 2011 Egyptian revolution catalogs all the skills he's picked up over a couple of weeks of active nonviolent protest, things like how to catch and throw back a gas canister. On a nearby page, another writer notes that they have gotten rid of a dictator but something more difficult remains to be done: establishing a healthy democracy, with functioning civic institutions such as courts, free press, legislature, police, schools. Entirely different skill set. That's an important insight for fans of social media--protest, saying no, affiliating in public places, these kinds of things may come more quickly to social media users than the work of creating institutions and traditions that hold up for awhile.

With two contrasting video performances of the first thirty lines of King Lear anyone can quickly come to know that Shakespeare lives in performance. Does Edmund the schemer stand a few feet off listening, slyly gathering court gossip for his upcoming power move, or is he right there in the conversation being shamed yet another time by his thoughtless father and not surprisingly simmering in anger that will soon be revealed? The director and actors choose, but Shakespeare sets up opportunities like that endlessly. The life is in the character that actors create out of the opportunities laced by the writer into the lines.

PS. If you see a film or live performance and any of the actors don't seem to have noticed these opportunities, they don't understand how Shakespeare works. But we do.

The role of images in blogging--the pleasure for the reader, the attractiveness, the way images help focus a piece...all these things have become clearer to me using the Fargo templates. A couple of blog posts with one or two images, filling most of an iPad screen, can be very attractive. I like a little narrower text column than some do, more in keeping with the ideas about text blocks that come from book production, where the number of letters in a column isn't arbitrary but when done right seems suited to the workings of the scanning human eye.

Just wondering. Over a few months I've grown so used to writing in an outliner, this outliner, Fargo, and publishing to the web from here, and the server has been struggling.