From time to time an adult is called to the hospital. You stand beside a friend or loved one's hospital bed, you do your best to put the beeping devices and tubes and hallway sounds aside and find the right things to say, the right spirit to say them in. The illness may be large or small, it may be threatening or painful, but in any case with the loss of health something deeply significant is being taken from the person in the bed there. Something substantial is at stake. Someone's suffering is real there. The quality of life now, perhaps ongoing, hangs in the balance.

But judging by the politics of health care, the thing you witness at the hospital is not very real. If it were real, politicians wouldn't play games with it, make points with it. If it were real to them, anyway. You have to conclude that the suffering of others, the real stakes of others, is not real enough to keep them from playing with the lives and hopes of those who happen to be sick.

We walked in a beautiful state park today, just for an hour. The trails were well-marked and well-maintained, the woods were pretty and peaceful, the people we saw out playing with their kids in the woods were having a sweet time. It was something that I hope the people of Indiana are proud of--not just the natural beauty but the fact that they set it aside and have cared for it and that they take pleasure in this thing they have made together not far from home. No need to drive for hundreds of miles when you have state parks of this quality. Now the fact that a shared pride is the last thing we seem to be able to manage in this state and in this country today--almost any common ground, really--is deeply troubling. The shared understanding of the things we own together--is that understanding all but lost? The evidence is still out there, Hoosiers, just down the road in places like the nearest state park.

Reading a bit of regional art history just now. The writer, a respected senior artist of the region, points out that a lot of art is created around here but that there is not a wide audience for that art. In general, people around here don't make viewing art part of their life, he says. A memory flashed into mind. I was on jury duty, I think, heading to the courthouse through the security screening. Picture me, the middle aging white guy. I had a book of poems with me, Breath by Philip Levine. There is an image of the cover on your screen now. I placed the book in the bin and passed it toward the x-ray machine. Picture the guard in a jacket with a badge, a woman, also middle-aging, who at first glance seemed to be African-American. She slowed down and took a substantial interest in the book. We talked for a moment. She didn't know Levine but the cover spoke to her, I guess. City life, a respectful portrait of an interesting young black man, poems. The feeling that people might read poems or look at art if it struck a little closer to home part of the time. The thought that folks are probably writing poems and maybe making art anyway, but the lines are down, no communication between their creations and the wider community. Isolation, indifference, social barriers. Opportunities for a larger neighbor-feeling, feeling of fellowship, lost.

My favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal takes place on Friday morning. Coffee started, thermostat turned back up after a night on low, the newspaper in from the sidewalk. Still some whipped cream, real or canned, ready to go. Open the paper, pour the coffee, slice some pumpkin pie and top it with some whipped cream on a small plate. Sit near the warm air vent, sip coffee, eat breakfast pie, maybe a small second slice of mocha pecan, and solve the Friday KenKen in the Times. House guests across the table reading the editorial page or the comics, teenage offspring sleeping in. Landscape tan out the front window, dog walkers wrapped up fairly tight for the weather, dogs just happy to be alive. Pie eaters too.

All the historical episodes we have studied this semester show that the voices of citizens come to matter if institutions and social groups are in place to hear and rebroadcast and amplify those voices, to affiliate with those citizens, to coordinate together. An elaborated social web, already in place or under construction, made up of allies with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that support speech, protest, social action over time. In the historical cases, when these things were in place, change happened, and when they were not, in the worst cases, isolated protestors were easily crushed.

Anyway, the social structures were the same in case after case. So all you need to know to judge the health of a democracy, or the hopes for one, is to see if these things are in place or people are going about the business of building them.

It that structural analysis is correct, then it seems pretty clear that our democracy is feeble right now. Walk up the somebody on the street corner, pay $25 for five minutes of time, explain what is needed--above--and ask if they have it. They'll very likely say no. Right?

In a recent interview my area's member of the US House of Representatives heard three clearly-stated questions in a row on the subject of anti-discrimination protections for the workplace. The reporter set aside four or five minutes of radio for the interview, and he asked his questions repeatedly (and politely) when they were dodged, so listeners readily could judge for themselves that the representative was not willing to speak about the issue. Later, the audio was posted online so others could link to it and share and replay it.

The representative's replies--they were not answers--relied on stock phrases always at hand when she is not willing to honestly expose her position. As Andy Fitzgerald says, this repetition of stock phrases is propaganda, without a doubt, but the well-trained journalist structured his report in such a way that the dodge or deception was clear to us. Properly structured journalism explicitly undermines propaganda, even simple examples like this one. Careless journalism, weakly structured, without enough space or time, without follow-up, without integrity or courage, is a gift to this sort of politician. As I listened to the broadcast, I was proud of the standards set by one area journalist at WSBT and angry and ashamed of our Indiana 2nd district member of Congress.

[Posted as a comment on the Andy Fitzgerald article at the Guardian.]

The regional public affairs TV show, WNIT Politically Speaking, uses Facebook to ask for viewer questions they can use on the show. I suggested this question for the four elected officials who will be interviewed this week:

• In states such as Indiana or our neighbor, Illinois, by law one party or the other dominates the drawing of voting districts, which creates substantial opportunities for gerrymandering. And as we know, gerrymandered districts are intentionally drawn by those in power to reduce the influence of some people's votes and strengthen the influence of others. In recent memory, both parties in Indiana have found this temptation too sweet to resist. In some states, however, voting districts are drawn by a non-partisan commission. Do any of today's panelists wish to defend Indiana's seemingly corrupt partisan practice? Or instead would they work for the necessary changes to Indiana law to put it behind us?

I saw a presentation the other day about a newish Indiana University program for archiving online content of lasting interest and I thought about a number of bloggers I've been reading over the years and wonder if these writers have taken any steps. It was not immediately clear if this IU program would work for field-leaders who are long-time bloggers or not, but I'm going to ask around. Are bloggers like that taking steps to protect their good work?

Our regional NPR affiliate, WVPE, brought the live taping of this week's episode of Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me! to an overflow crowd in Elkhart, Indiana's beautiful Lerner Theater. If you enjoy the show, I'm sure you would enjoy seeing a live taping in Chicago or on one of their frequent road trips. It moves fast, responds nimbly to current events, to the locale where the taping is taking place, and to the unpredictable turn of conversation moment-by-moment in the performance. How much is scripted? It's hard to say, surely a fair amount, but it moves too quickly to feel like a full script exists. Dunno.

A couple of colleagues who are among the leading investigators into string theory were giving a talk at the same time back at IU South Bend, for a general audience, on the nature of black holes. And in another university building simultaneously, a poetry reading, part of a continuing literary series hosted by the creative writers in the English department. How good is the series? Well, for example, Mary Szybist was a recent reader in the series, but this week she won the National Book Award for poetry. Who knows, maybe something interesting was happening at that other university in town, too.

The point? There are too many cool things going on in the wider South Bend area for people to take advantage of. The area still struggles, and the reputation is not always stellar, but if you look in the right places you see a dynamic region (admittedly, with work still to be done). The story needs to be told--more loudly, more proudly, more often.

And the people for whom the area's economy does not provide opportunities, their voices, those stories, too.

First I asked a student to circumnavigate the building by walking at a natural pace. It took a little over three minutes. Then I set up a team of "semaphore" relays (students) at the corners of the building and at our classroom door. I arranged to send the "one if by land, two if by sea" signal with my raised arms, and we had a student with a stopwatch on her phone timing it. Another student paced off the building so we knew the approximate distance. Let the experiment begin.

First trial. I raised one arm, and the student at the door instantly raised one arm. Out of sight, a second student relayed the signal to a third, then it passed to a fourth and fifth, and then a spotter at our classroom window saw the fifth student raise one arm. The moment he raised his arm, everyone in the room yelled out, "One!" to bring the trial to an end. We tried three times, sending either "One" or "Two" through the system, and out best time was about five seconds.

Here's the very rough math: In about five seconds the visual sign was relayed about 500 feet, or about 100 feet per second. With five or six relays each taking a portion of a second to raise their arms after seeing the signal, of course most of the five seconds was used by human reaction time. Obviously, the signals themselves travelled at the speed of light, much faster than 100 fps.

Why bother with this wacky experiment in a college class? Because I wanted everyone to have a concrete experience in which they saw how profoundly a new technology can change a system of communication. At work, if you could save your boss 2% of waste in production or speed up production 5%, you'd deserve a nice raise. We cut the travel time from walking, over three minutes, to semaphore, about five seconds. We cut about 96% of the communication time out of the system with semaphore. And at the end, our voices branched out the way social media does, in effect not just speeding but amplifying.

But the lesson is not just speed of communication. Semaphore only works if the network is in place. On the Internet, that means not just the Internet but some structure of affiliated people and groups already in place, a subset of the Internet, attending to signals from each other because they care about something in common. The speed of communication is utterly transformed, in such cases, just as it was in our class today: tweets came from Tahrir Square, for example, to the far side of a 25,000 mile circumference globe, in moments, to those who were already connected and had the skills and cared about the Arab Spring. The elaborated web has to be in place already. (Not just the Internet, which is the carrier but not the actual affiliation. The Internet is the potential for affiliation; acts of affiliation make the potential real.)

And once the message hit the elaborated network already in place, if the ends of the fibers have traits like social media, then branching takes place. The message is compounded or amplified. If the network has social media traits, then the elaborated web not only speeds the messages along but also amplifies them.

If within the Internet we have already created an elaborated web of people who care about what we care about. If we have built up our skills. If we maintain the links. If we keep somebody from shutting the system down in a crunch. If we understand the work needed to turn the potential of the Internet into an actual elaborated network that can then speed and amplify. If, if, if.

But it works. The concepts are clear.

Just as yesterday I mused a little about stone cairns as a form of communication, today I want to take a few notes about another oddity, semaphore. I'm thinking of the idea that a chain of people can be ready to pass a message along at great speed, perhaps from hilltop to hilltop announcing an enemy has landed on the country's distant shore, or perhaps from computer to computer. The tools are simple enough, the skills might be learned quickly, but by the time the boats are being pulled into the dry sand all the elements had better be in place. If now you want to assemble the team to pass the emergency message, it is too late. The system must be prepared ahead; the teams must be ready; the skills and tools must be on hand. The lesson of semaphore is that simple forms of communication can serve us very well if an elaborated web of people and structures are in place. The message of the beach-watcher is sped along, perhaps even compounded or amplified, by the elaborated web, but without the web the voice has no force. One of the basic civic skills for local groups must be to create that web and to link it to the webs that others create. Otherwise we face our challenges muted, cut off from allies, subject to being ignored or bumped aside one by one. [Image: RSS spelled in semaphore.]

Cairns are a kind of public-spirited communication using stones instead of words. Up in the mountains, beyond the tree line, the soil thins out and you may find yourself walking across bare fields where the trail is in danger of being lost. Hikers have long preserved a record of a trail by stacking stones to serve as a marker. Sometimes these towers are beautiful or extravagant, but always they are meant to help a stranger who follows later. You gain nothing for yourself by building or rebuilding a cairn except the knowledge that you are part of civil society where one person pitches in on behalf of others. In that sense cairns are an emblem of the shared responsibility of citizenship. Young people who grow up not knowing about cairns, or at least about the principle behind them, enter adulthood ignorant of one of the central workings of civil society. Walking miles from the nearest town, you see a cairn and know that you are still wrapped in the care of others, including people you will never meet, people who you can never pay or repay. It is not a money economy, but it is essential to life as we know it. If all the cairns have fallen, if we forget to maintain them, then soon we are on our own in a wilderness without hope of an ally, whether we are speaking metaphorically or literally, either one. [Image by Tinelott Wittermans]

"Something more than comment threads and share buttons," wrote Jay Rosen. For a news website to move to a new level of engagement, its structure must allow the most active users to do more than comment, share, and post the occasional suggestion for an article. Comment is free at the Guardian does all of that very well, and readers who write comments end up with a rudimentary sort of blog as a result. But it's not really a blog. The reader-turned-writer can't initiate anything there at the "blog," nor can other readers use the "blog" as a site for conversation--all the conversation takes place in the comment stream of the article that sparked the first comment. The reader-turned-writer remains a different sort of citizen than the staff or freelance folks who appear on the main page. My hunch is that the next level of engagement must break down that wall of difference and risk more equality.

Jay Rosen suggested the need for a new website structure, maybe also a workflow structure as well. Here is a great opportunity and challenge: how to invite participation, maintain quality, and take advantage of those benefits that participation can bring. I recall an old idea of mine, which was for a paper to invite the authors of the best couple of letters each week to have a column once a month for three months. Good writers, already proven, invited on board every week.... There must be some digital equivalents that we can look forward to seeing the Omidyar group test in the months ahead. Best wishes...

An email arrived from a friend, a former longtime resident of this town. I knew she had become "uninsurable"--unable to have proper health insurance and, therefore, proper health care in the United States, her homeland. I had asked her to explain why she had to leave the country, and she wrote this:

• I am one of the floundering millions. Uninsurable because of prior conditions, I left the country when my COBRA insurance ran out. There’s little worse than ex-patriating due to circumstances beyond your control, far away from family and friends, with no assurance of return. My husband and I moved to Costa Rica for seven months where healthcare is good and nationalized while riding out The Affordable Care Act’s waiting period to apply for its initial high-risk plan. We only hoped I would be accepted and our tenure abroad would be limited. I was, and we came home. Millions of uninsured Americans can’t afford the time or money to leave the country for healthcare, suffering ill health and loss of income or life savings as a result. Medical bankruptcy has become a household term.

The stakes are clear for the writer and for untold numbers of others. Meanwhile the area's representative to Congress writes most every day on social media about her efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, with never a single word about the real needs it meets and never a single word about even a scrap of a plan to use instead. How can her words be taken seriously?

If propaganda includes the endless repetition of stock phrases meant to overwhelm dissenting voices, then what can we call the representative's words but propaganda?

Two episodes this week make a handy comparison:

• 1. Alan Rusbridger (@ARusbridger) of the Guardian answered useful questions for over an hour online, and only one question was deleted after failing to meet the community standards for the site.
• 1. JP Morgan Chase cancelled a promised Q & A session with its vice chairman, Jimmy Lee, after huge numbers of people used the event's hashtag, #AskJPM, to register all manner of protest and satire: "Tomorrow's Q&A is cancelled. Bad Idea. Back to the drawing board."

Why the difference? Not so hard to explain. For one thing, the Guardian has spent several years building a relationship with a live audience, sharing opportunities for conversation and debate, establishing standards for writing on their site, and aiming as much as possible for transparency and partnership. In fact, Rusbridger's major public addresses over the last several years track the paper's efforts to understand how those values can work for a newspaper, to innovate accordingly, and to commit to them.

But the venting that JP Morgan Chase experienced was quite different. I thought when I first saw it that it was a reminder that corporate power on that level typically depends much more on the silence of the general public rather than engaging them in conversation. There is a sense of entitlement and a dose of oblivion there too, a taking for granted that corporate ways are seen the way the corporation wants them to be seen. And @squirrelinNH described it as "more an outpouring of rage in the one media channel not owned and operated by, and kowtowing to the banks." [Updated.]

So, two corporate leaders seeking to talk with a public audience on social media, with profoundly different results that give clues about the deep appeal of real democratic exchange, the privilege that some are accustomed to, and the media-supported silence that hides simmering issues. Not hinted at in these exchanges: how to strengthen those voices that came bursting out via the #AskJPM hashtag so that they come to matter in the country's decision-making. Draw out those voices, help them affiliate, find or make structures that amplify their speech...

Reading Havel again, wondering how a person living inside the Soviet sphere in the 1970s, say, can locate a lot of confidence in human possibility. Yet it's there in "The Power of the Powerless," the essay, and in the fine documentary by the same name, moment by moment, when people keep finding a way to say "this is the right thing for us and so we'll do it" even when they will be slapped down for saying or doing, either one.

A small example: in the documentary's extra scenes, one of the young participants in the "velvet revolution" remembers an old woman pushing a wheelbarrow into town during the height of the protests. In the barrow, a wooden cask of brandy. "My husband buried it in the garden when the communists came," she said, "and we vowed to dig it up when they were driven out. He didn't live long enough to see the day, but now I have dug it out and I bring it here. Have a drink, today is the day we waited for." [Paraphrase.]

Enduring hope, generosity, human spirit secreted away if necessary to preserve it for another day. Clues that there are things to believe in if we keep our eyes open. Not empty, stupid hope, but particular kinds of possibility, in solo creativity and teamwork and affiliation that amplifies our voices and our strengths.

You hear that publishers can no longer afford the rigorous editing that used to be common, and perhaps that's true. Here is a sentence from a new Simon & Schuster book, big name publisher, written by Doris Kearns Goodwin, big name writer whose manuscript would ordinarily be treated to a serious edit before being sent out into the world:

• It is my greatest hope that the story that follows will guide readers through their own process of discovery toward a better understanding of what it takes to summon the public to demand the action necessary to bringing our country closer to its ancient ideals. (45 words)

I'll try a new version here--acknowledging that many versions and several good versions are easily within reach:

• It is my greatest I sincerely hope that the this story that follows will guide help readers see how to persuade through their own process of discovery toward a better understanding of what it takes to summon the public to demand that the action necessary to bringing our country move closer to its ancient ideals. (26 words)

Almost half the words have been cut in this version, but I'm not sure any important nuance has suffered--you can judge that for yourself. The method comes from Revising Prose by Richard Lanham and Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams, primarily. The heart of revising weak academic prose is cutting through the wordiness and high formality to see the actions and actors, then focusing on them in the revision. If you do, words almost always fall away:

• I hope the story ... will help readers see ... how to persuade the public ... to demand that the country ... move closer to its ancient ideals.

Something like that--to my eye those seem like the actions that the author really wants us to understand, and the rest can be saved for another day. Or better, pitched. And usually the writer sounds smarter and the reader likes the writer more because of the clarity. Just saying.

PS. The New Yorker quoted the Goodwin sentence in full in the new issue, in an article by Nicholas Lehmann. Wouldn't a well-edited magazine find a way to paraphrase or quote just the best part, rather than bring a section of a big article to rest on a badly written, poorly edited sentence? (11/18/13 issue, page 78. Book title: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)

PPS. Ancient?

Just off the phone with my father, who recalled another soldier in his Army unit in the 1950s who had a run of bad treatment there and vowed to get himself out of his term of service early. The man read all the policy manuals, discovered what the Army would count as mental illness, how it would act step by step toward treating, then discharging him from service, and, most important, where he himself had to draw the line in his performance so that he would be released rather than committed to an endless term in a distant mental asylum. This fellow's performance of mental illness involved riding an invisible motorcycle everywhere he went. Another soldier with similar ambitions used an invisible tape measure to take the dimensions for imaginary window drapes everywhere he went. According to my father, the motorcyclist explained the plan to him in advance and succeeded. It pays to do your research, I guess.

There is a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which King Arthur manhandles a mud-splattered, mouthy peasant named Dennis. First Arthur tells how he became king – the Lady of the Lake, decked out in splendor, raised a shining sword from the water to call him to the throne. But Dennis is having none of it. “Farcical aquatic ceremonies,” he says, “are no basis for a system of government.” When Arthur explodes and pushes him around, Dennis calls out, “Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!”

Of course being bullied by King Arthur is nothing compared to some of the film’s other scenes. The medieval sword-play is slashingly brutal, although the movie presents it as satire. For that matter, much of the violence we see in films is comical or cartoonish. Other movie violence looks serious but we don’t take it seriously as we sit on our couches with our fingers in the popcorn. Only in our entertainments do most of us wish to see violence, inherent in the system or otherwise. Unless we live in the grimmest part of a city or drive a squad car or work in an emergency room or serve in combat, we North Americans may go our whole lives without taking a good close look at the violence that runs through human life.

In this age of the volunteer military, fewer American families know what it means to serve in the armed forces, much less what it means to go into combat. But it’s the knowledge of violence that separates those who have and have not been to war.

Veterans are famously reserved about what they’ve witnessed and what they’ve done. Many go years without speaking of it, and some, deep in old age, carry their burdens away with them silently forever.

Their reluctance makes sense. Idle party chat about war is an indignity, a betrayal, a failure to do justice to the most serious things. The rest of us won’t really get it, so veterans button their lips. It must be hard for someone who knows violence to listen to the misconceptions and enthusiasms of the naïve. “You were in the war! Wow, what was that like?”

I think of the few veterans who have decided to tell me about war. Typically, their stories are of certain times and places, particular moments, really, very sharp and particular sins and outrages and suffering. They earned the right to tell, or not, by having lived it.

At work I found myself heading toward the elevator with a colleague who had been in Vietnam. “Hey, it’s Veterans Day,” I said, but for a second I didn’t know what to say next. So I kept it to a simple “Thank you.” By the time he spoke, we were in the elevator. “You’re welcome,” he said. “Really?” I asked, and then he looked away. Behind the good manners, behind the reticence, I caught a hint of the weight of things witnessed but not told. The violence inherent in the system, no longer a joke, no longer funny, was now a ghostly presence in the little chamber. But then the elevator rose toward our floor and the conversation turned to other things.

Due to things like the casual paternalism of a good number of our elected officials, I'm persuaded that publishing needs to be added to the base curriculum of all American public schools and universities. My view:

• Publishing is one of the essential personal skills, like balancing a bank statement or passing a driver's test. Publishing should be on the list of state standards for public high schools; it should be in the general education requirements for American universities. Democracy requires it, and technology now makes it possible. If you can save a Word file as a pdf and load it onto the website of one of the on-demand printers, you can publish a book that preserves the stories of your community or asks the questions your activist group is trying to keep up in public view. If you can sent an email you can publish a blog that tracks the words and actions of an elected official or an email newsletter that lets people know what's happening in your neighborhood. Publishing is about as easy as writing a letter to the editor used to be, and it is more important.

After publishing is well in place, next comes organizing.

Today, thanks to Elizabeth Bennion at Politically Speaking, WNIT's public affairs programming, my question (word for word) reached our Indiana senator Joe Donnelly. I asked:

• Senator, could you give a one-minute seminar on ways that individual citizens and local groups can make their voices actually matter in American politics today? (video--34:56 to 36:37)

His reply was about the excellent service his Washington staff provided individual constituents who had personal questions about social security checks or veterans benefits or military service medals when they contacted his office by telephone. ("Just call our office," he began. My students laughed when they heard him begin that way.) In other words, he missed the point about successful activism that I hoped was clear in my question, or he didn't want to answer it that way. I was disappointed.

I was disappointed not to hear a Washington insider give some clues about what actually works, but beyond that I was displeased by the paternalistic nature of his reply: "Don't you worry, we can get your question answered, just give us a ring." That was the general concept, not a quotation, and I thought it was lightly laced with a tone. A tone I didn't like, a tone of Washington satisfied with itself on one level even when it knows it is plainly broken on many another level.

PS. I told the story a little differently here. In class we talked about the difference between a responsive, paternal elected official who can solve a person's problem with the bureaucracy and the chance to be heard and perhaps help improve some policy touching perhaps millions of people.

Linguistics folk call it "other-initiated repair" but what they mean is that a listener lets a speaker know that something needs to be clarified. An example: "Huh?" This little noise invites a speaker to say it all again differently and better. If the speaker honors the request, we can dignify the event with the term dialogue. Otherwise, it's just speaker and passive listener, speaker monopolizing the time of a really-should-be-silent one. [Some people prefer to live in a dialogue-free zone. If you know you already hold the full and final truth because that's just how smart you are, then you don't need dialogue.]

Bullies and propaganda merchants aren't interested in dialogue, even when they pretend otherwise. Real dialogue has clear traits. It is "grounded in social interaction," so some work is involved. It is a process of "confirming and checking [and] managing common understanding." The rules must allow for "other-initiated repair"--for one person to press another to respond to something in particular initiated by the listener. The speaker has to allow her language to change part of the time. She has to be open. She has to see the virtue of creating, protecting, and enlarging the common ground.

See for example the typical form letter you get back from your representative in Congress. You ask a particular question and the staffer sends a form letter proudly reciting a few facts and promising that work is underway. Your question is not answered. Your writing, your public speech, has no effect on the reply. There is no repair that you can initiate. Maybe a lobbyist can, but you can't. It looks a little like a dialogue has taken place but it has not. There was no "other-initiated repair," no openness. At moments like that it's tempting to redefine citizen as a really-should-be-silent one.

("The Syllable Everyone Recognizes," Jennifer Schuessler, NY Times, 11/9/13)

I'm interested in how people's voices can come to matter in our society. I ran across an article called "The People’s Lobby: A Model for Online Activist Deliberation" written by Jeffrey C. Swift and published in the Journal of Public Deliberation. Great, let's take a look. At the top there's an abstract, a stocky paragraph of summary. I'll dive in there and get a glimpse of the heart of the piece:

• This article presents a model for a “People’s Lobby,” a digital process of deliberation and activism that allows citizens to have their voices heard on important political issues. The model described in this proposal attempts to achieve deliberation for its own sake, but also for the sake of an activist intervention geared toward immediate response—a process commonly called lobbying. In other words, this is a model that combines the fairness and inclusivity of deliberation with the prodding tension of organized activist lobbying. The People’s Lobby might not completely counteract the effects of more conventional corporate lobbying and other mass-organizational pressures, but if it increases the impact of citizens’ reflective and deliberative voices even marginally, it will be well worth the effort.

Okay, I respect Mr. Swift's professional obligation to speak as one academic to another, rather than to an educated general audience--been there, done and still doing that myself when I have to. But let's see if we can grab the essence of the abstract--I'll try a translation here:

• To help citizens to reflect and deliberate on public issues, to work successfully as activists, and to counter the too-powerful voices of corporate and other lobbyists, I propose an online technique that I call a people's lobby.

I think that's what the summary promises, but happily his blog gets more specific. If the blog didn't exist, I'd be kind of grumpy yet again about the way we academics train ourselves to keep readers and the world at arm's length with our writing style. Hurray for academics who get down to not just their own but also the people's business, who insist on writing for a smart general audience a good part of the time, as @swiftj does.

The endless old problem: When we discuss policy or politics, do we argue in order to win the day or to seek the truth? Thomas Friedman and Patricia Cohen explored the allure of both approaches.

What is academic writing? What is it good for? What are its strengths and weaknesses? The Writing Program at University of Chicago takes a wild run at the general topic by offering a spoofy academic sentence generator, which creates jargon-laden monsters at the click of a button. Samples:

• The politics of print culture carries with it the logic of civil society.

• The logic of print culture carries with it the politics of civil society.

• The politics of civil society carries with it the logic of print culture.

The site is kind enough to provide scholarly reviews on demand, too:

• Your crucial redefinition of the politics of print culture is a triumph of scholarship and critical acumen.

• Your desultory treatment of the politics of print culture deserves the obscurity into which it has fallen.