THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM: Or, How Americans Are Learning to Have More Interesting Conversations A Talk at the Literary Society of Youngstown November 14, 2008   Last week, America lost one of its most popular and controversial authors — Michael Crichton. He was best known for his suspenseful technological thrillers, like “The Andromeda Strain” and [...]

When Richard Rodriguez entered first grade at Sacred Heart School in Sacramento, California, his English vocabulary consisted of barely fifty words. All his classmates were white. He kept quiet, listening to the sounds of middle-class American speech, and feeling alone. After school he would return home to the pleasing, soothing sounds of his family’s Spanish. [...]

As hippie-mystic John Perry Barlow has pointed out, the Internet has a lot in common with the 19th century American West. It’s vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, hard to navigate, and up for grabs. Large institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to [...]

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has spent the better part of forty years studying the phenomenology of happiness. What makes life genuinely satisfying, he says, is the experience of “flow” — that state of optimal awareness in which our concentration is intently focused and we’re fully absorbed in what we’re doing.  During flow experiences, our body, mind, and consciousness [...]

It’s a sad fact that while most of us spend a sizeable part of our lives communicating with others — in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, in committee meetings, via e-mail and social networks — we seem more separate and disconnected than ever. Genuine understanding seems to be the exception rather than the norm in everyday communication. We [...]

I believe the single most important step we can take toward leading happier and more fulfilling lives is to develop a spiritual practice. By that I mean some regular activity or set of rituals that quiet the mind and bring us into harmony with ourselves. Spiritual practices take many forms, from meditation and prayer to [...]

Gandhi famously said that “you must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Few people embody that idea as well as Jerome Threlkeld, a young activist and community leader from Flint, Michigan. In a city reeling from the collapse of the American auto industry, Jerome is a champion of hope and possibility. [...]

Today it’s widely recognized that we use only a fraction of our human capacities even though we carry within us an almost unlimited power to learn, develop, expand and evolve. Michael Murphy has devoted the better part of five decades charting our human potentialities. He co-founded the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in the [...]

The German philosopher Hegel gave us what is still perhaps the most compelling model of how societies change and evolve. His theory of dialectical progression suggested that cultures evolve in much the same way as ideas or outlooks do. The prevailing concept — or thesis as he called it — over time gives rise to its opposite, its [...]

The history of science shows that breakthrough lies not in discovering new facts so much as discovering new ways of thinking about and making sense of them. More: Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is still the best work on the subject Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers is another favorite because of its forceful argument [...]

What motivates people to work on behalf of the common good? In a study I’m leading for the Harwood Institute, I’ve been exploring this question with community leaders from across the country — civic entrepreneurs working to reduce homelessness, address poverty, work with inmates, clean up the environment, and generally strengthen our communities. A word that comes [...]

A Harris poll found that a full 90 percent of Americans would change their lives dramatically if they could. The survey showed that most people don’t like the way they live now, but they simply don’t know how to change. The statistic goes a long way toward explaining why advertising has become so heavily dominated [...]