Sam Liebeskind

I was surrounded by peace nerds talking about inclusion and plurality, but I have to confess, sometimes the event didn’t feel very inclusive or plural. Speakers often talked with the unstated assumption that left-ish politics are obviously correct. At times I felt the uncomfortable dissonance of being around a group of people explicitly talking... See more

Over the last 50 years, people have shifted away from meeting and volunteering regularly in associations and informal gatherings such as support groups and Bible study groups, choosing instead to engage through “checkbook participation,” where we outsource and pay local and national organizations who hire professional staff to do the good works and... 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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If a single status game becomes dominant, it breeds violence. Social fragmentation is a release valve.

Journalists tend to think of themselves as individual talents; driven by their own intrepid instincts, they find and uncover the stories of others. Instead, we should think of our work as one element within an interconnected ecosystem of social services.