Many people have long wondered why the Grateful Dead succeeded in creating a world of Deadheads. It turns out that’s because the people who allocated tickets understood familiar strangers. If you bought a ticket for a Grateful Dead show in Miami, they kept a record of who you were seated near. Then, if you bought a ticket for the Nashville show, th... See more

These other companies made shoes for a range of athletic activities, not just one sport. All the same, Weber’s resolve was strong. He was driven by a quote he wrote on his whiteboard on his first day as CEO of Brooks: “The secret to success is constancy of purpose”. This sentence stayed on the whiteboard for the length of his tenure, to remind him ... See more

In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by... See more

also think we need to learn to enjoy locality. Culture emerges from the connections between people, and I believe these are always strongest in person. Face-to-face cultural engagement is necessarily participatory, online cultural engagement rarely is. Nearly all of my most fulfilling and exciting experiences, those that have made me feel part of a

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Alongside technical tools, we need ways of defining and explaining social norms and expectations about contribution and value sharing. We need collective mechanisms for decision-making about shared assets, that make people feel heard while recognising the limitations, constraints and realities of their maintenance. We need people and organisations ... See more

For example, in one experiment, Stroud found that when comment sections on news sites replaced the “like” button with a “respect” button, users engaged with the content and each other in a less partisan way. In a few cases, the “respect” button led people to be more willing to click on comments expressing politics that differed from their own.

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

What was really powerful about Undivided is it made me recognize the ways in which the faith that a lot of the people brought to the work meant that grace manifested as their respect for the core dignity of people around them. This commitment to other people’s dignity was true regardless of what race or background others might have. And there was a... See more

social change always begins with people who have “both a critical eye and a hopeful heart.”