Community

That is to say, our social groups, tools, situations, and, more broadly, environment have always served as a cognitive extension, networking our individual minds, allowing them to spill into each other and share processing tasks as a group. It’s as though our brains are aware of their own biohardware limitations. They naturally seek to form rings... See more

Don’t work in community. Seriously. I never meant to become a community manager. Most of us didn’t. We fell into it sideways, like walking through the wrong door at a party and suddenly finding ourselves responsible for babysitting someone’s forgotten & drunk cousin.The job is a messy tapestry of contradictions. You'll build fences designed to be... See more

There are many sources of inspiration. New anthropological and archaeological research in books like The Dawn of Everything shows that the history of our species is full of diverse political and social structures and that humans 10,000 years ago were likely more engaged in the politics that ruled their lives compared to today’s average person. They... See more

There’s one other thing related to the questions of civic life and democracy that we have been talking about. If democracy is this challenge of people coming together to figure out the kind of shared lives they want to forge, then the behaviors that they use to negotiate difference are going to flow from the commitments they have to each other. So... See more

The size of the effect is astounding. Cross-class friendships are a better predictor of upward mobility than school quality, job availability, community cohesion or family structure. If these results are true, then we have largely ignored a powerful way to help people realise the American dream.