Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
I got to see Hitchens debate former J-School dean Orville Schell during the height of the Iraq war, and found him a puzzle, as one often does when you agree with exactly half of what someone really smart is saying.
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Christopher Hitchens Is Dead at 62 — Obituary
Mr. Hitchens wrote in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell and trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa.
Came across what I thought was an interesting piece in the New York Times, Americans: Undecided About God?, about the rising percentage of Americans who declare their religious/spiritual affiliation as “None” but who still feel a personal need for the connectedness that organized religion brings. In it, the author (Eric Weiner) made the perhaps too-flip remark:
“We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone who can invent not a new religion but a new way of being religious.”
The article was about a lot of stuff, and the Steve Jobs reference was just an aside, an analogy. But that’s the bit I quoted in a Tweet …
not because I necessarily agreed or disagreed, but because I thought it was an intriguing thought. Nothing more, nothing less. What happened next was an interesting lesson in just how little attention people pay, and how ready people are to unload half-cocked thoughts, work from assumptions, and to have loud opinions without bothering to actually, you know, read. Because a few minutes later, Tim O’Reilly retweeted the quote to his 1.5 million followers, and the switchboard lit up.
I’ve stitched together a bunch of screenshots to show what the stream looked like, which is quite amazing (see below).
Continue reading “1.5 Million Twitter Users on “A Steve Jobs of Religion””
Stopped to watch a bearded guy playing a fantastic acoustic cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallejuah” (via Jeff Buckley). Really getting swept up in it, when a Muslim dude came by, realized it was prayer time, got down on his knees and started praying to the East, praising Allah. Thing was, he was just a few feet in front of a BART ticket machine, so it kind of looked like he was praying to a mechano. All very surreal and beautiful.
Very well done: The Story of Broke – on how politics run the economy, and vice versa. About how we have more money than we think we do. About our shared priorities. Â Worth watching.
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In November of 2001, after working for several years as a freelance technology writer, I took a job as webmaster at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I was led to a humble wooden desk in a converted boiler room, half-underground. Light poured in from a door open on to nearby Soul Road, and the sound of students yammering about engineering problems over cell phones filled the air. Â Had no idea at the time that I’d be sitting at that desk for the next ten years, or that it was about to become one of the richest, most interesting periods of my life.
After a decade in that position, I’m about to move on, with extremely mixed feelings, and will be taking a job as web developer with campus’ central Educational Technology Services (ETS) department later this week. Before I go, wanted to spend a few words digesting my years at the J-School and Knight Digital Media Center.
Over the past week, Miles and I have spent our evenings sketching out and making our own chess set, using Crayola’s borderline surreal synthetic clay-like substance Model Magic (we bought it in bulk at a craft supply store). It’s really weird stuff – feels light, almost like foam or fluffernutter. It stiffens up after a few days, but never gets completely hard. Easy to work with, super clean.
We decided to each design and create our own side of the chess board, but helped each other with some bits. Miles is a brilliant chess player at age 9, and it takes some serious concentration to not be beaten by him – he seems to see every possibility, every opening. Either that or I’m oblivious. Finally had our first real game with our new set last night and he kicked my butt!
Fun project.
New at Stuck Between Stations, "Touch the Sound" – Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie teaches us how to hear with our whole bodies, not just our ears.
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Touch the Sound | Stuck Between Stations
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The goals of the #ows movement have been well-communicated by now, and continued encampments are starting to do more harm than good in the public perception. It's time for an effective political movement to grow from this soil, and seeds for the real politics of #ows may lie in Lawrence Lessig's new book,
Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It
which apparently gets both parts right – what corruption is, AND what to do about it. Lessig's book could become the "manual" for the future of #ows. Sounds like a great read.
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Has a Harvard Professor Mapped Out the Next Step for Occupy Wall Street?
His call for state-based activism on behalf of a constitutional convention could provide the movement with a political focus
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"El Caminito del Rey (English: The King's little pathway) is a walkway, now fallen into disrepair, pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Ãlora in the province of Málaga, Spain. The name is often shortened to Camino del Rey (English: King's pathway)."
Reshared post from +Kevin Bourrillion
An old favorite. You haven't
liveddied a thousand gruesome deaths inside your mind until you've seen this video.
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Added to my Bucketlist! (check the amazing videos there).
Wonderful day hiking backwoods Pioneer, CA with Dad, where we discovered an old abandoned cabin in the woods. Appeared to have been built in the 1920s and last occupied in the 1960s. Haunting, sad, beautiful, and scattered through with interesting junk. A poster showing all the presidents shows that JFK was still in power when someone last lived there. Outdoor shower powered by old riveted boilers, an unopened box of Kleenex from the 1950s, spiderwebs coming out of the taps, a dead bat in the sink… the place was visually amazing.
