I host the Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good podcast, and have written and reported for National Public Radio, CBC Radio, Business Insider, HuffPost, Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Toronto Star, O’Reilly Digital Media, and other outlets. Here are some of those pieces, a mix of new and old:
Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI): “Blinded by the Enlightenment”
Toronto Star: “No Matter the Result, Democrats Have Failed — Again — and They Need to Learn Why”
HuffPost: Will you just “wait and see?”
Have you ever wondered whether you would speak up if democracy came under attack, as it did in Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s? That question is being answered now.
HuffPost: America Is A Creed, Not a Tribe — And Too Few Americans Know Why That Matters
You’re not an American because of your blood, or the soil on which you were born, or the religion you practice. You’re an American because you believe in the American creed. That’s the essential miracle of this country.
HuffPost: It Isn’t Just Trump: The Roots Of Democracy’s Crisis Are Many And Deep
For a panel discussion on the crisis of democracy, I started a list of answers to the question, “How did we get here?” I was amazed at how fast that list grew.
HuffPost: A Prison Of Lies: How Misinformation Became A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry And Broke Democracy
In America in recent decades, an industry of information counterfeiters has sprung up, and it’s making a few, unprincipled people very rich, at the expense of everyone else. And at the expense of democracy.
Business Insider: How Democrats Lost Their Base — And How They Can Get It Back
Alas, Democrat, the problem is not with “these people.” The problem is that you no longer understand a big chunk of what should be your political base. How could that happen? It’s a question of Ideas, Interests and Identity.
Stanford Social Innovation Review: Does Your Backbone Organization Have Backbone?
Any enterprise needs an executive branch—people who are accountable and who can make the necessary decisions to deliver results. But the prospect of an executive backbone is scary for many nonprofits, not because they don’t want to make progress, but because of a big, structural problem with nonprofit collaboration: a systemically driven misalignment of interests.
O’Reilly Radar: Beyond AI: artificial compassion
When we talk about artificial intelligence, we often make an unexamined assumption: that intelligence, understood as rational thought, is the same thing as mind. We use metaphors like “the brain’s operating system” or “thinking machines,” without always noticing their implicit bias. But if what we are trying to build is artificial minds, we need only look at a map of the brain to see that in the domain we’re tackling, intelligence might be the smaller, easier part. Maybe that’s why we started with it.
From the Archives
O’Reilly Digital Media, 2007: The eSession Experience: Online recording for All. A look inside the music recording process with world-class musicians collaborating over the internet. This online article, with audio examples, takes you step by step through the recording of a song from demo to master.
Associated Press, Nov. 13, 1993: Pete Wilson on Immigrants and the California Budget. I attended what I thought would be a routine speech by then-Governor Pete Wilson of California, and was struck by the emphasis he gave to an asserted connection between immigration and the state budget gap, so I wrote a longer story than I’d planned to and submitted it to the AP. The speech turned out to foreshadow a theme that would end up costing Wilson and the California Republican Party dearly. But it would be adopted enthusiastically by other GOP leaders, notably Donald Trump.
NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Dec 2, 1992 The Farhat Family and Human Rights Abuses in Kuwait After the Gulf War. “In the early hours of the morning, on March 2 [1991], a man entered the home of a Lebanese father, his 20-year-old son and his 32-year-old daughter in Kuwait City. The man killed both the father and the son. The daughter, after being raped and shot in the head, survived to tell the story to another brother living in the United States. She says the intruder claimed to be an officer in the Kuwaiti army and that he had orders to kill the family for collaborating with the Iraqis during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. The family told him he was wrong, that they had actually helped fight the Iraqis. From member station KUSP in Santa Cruz, Spencer Critchley reports…”
NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Aug 12, 1992: California Paying Its Bills With IOUs. “For 42 days now, California has been without a budget. The state is nearly $11 million in the hole and without a budget, the state continues to spend at last year’s levels. It is the worst budget crisis in California since the Great Depression and the state is covering many of its bills by printing IOUs. This crisis has actually created an investor’s opportunity for those willing to take the risk from member station KUSP in Santa Cruz, Spencer Critchley reports…”
CBC Radio: I’ve collected some episodes and pieces from the 80s and early 90s here. In the 80s I started contributing to CBC Radio by writing and producing music for some of their shows, and then became a freelance writer-broadcaster and host, which I did through the early 90s, overlapping with a move to California.