GoodReads as my Social Networking Site of Choice for the New Year

The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century by Peter Levine


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There are surprisingly few examples of experiments that have been conducted along these lines. This book manages to cover most of them. Project affiliates submit the write-ups, and they are usually biased accordingly, with drastic variation in quality and depth. The projects are also quite dated, but the selection presented still provides a valuable understanding of the different models attempted in the past - on top of which modern communication technologies might be applied.

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My latest Craigslist scam: $400 - Not your usual co-op. (Kerrytown)

I'm a female grad student at U of M who turned thirty this year. Maybe you know what that's like?

Adorable infants, beautiful old houses, and sickeningly sweet newlyweds keep hijacking my friends' profile pics. Meanwhile, Facebook shows me in solitude at the end of a pier, reflecting on the setting sun, with nowhere to go but wet. Thing is, I'm generally happiest in water, where, presumably, the inhumane demands of constant marital admiration, incessant parenting responsibility, and unrelenting mortgage risks that plague the land can buoy into honest, polyamorous love, tribal child-rearing, and an imperfect, but better, cooperative ownership model. Lately though, splashing around with the crocodiles is just giving me a massive case of anxiety. I'm looking for other people to join me in taking the plunge, turning our backs on the Facebook-stream and exploring a sea of more sensical ways of doing life. After all, there's more to this world than cleaning house, making babies, and keeping track of a blood-spilling ring and the person who gave it to us. Specifically, I'd like to have time, energy, and support for creating and co-creating awesome things in my career, but opportunities to take off on long, solitary bicycle tours are not unimportant in my vision either.

So is this really an ad for shared housing? Yeah, in fact, it is. I've started a number of co-ops on Craigslist around the country. This is just a variation on that. The goal is to create a house - most likely a rental - of people interested in creating a family like this. The goal, in case you were concerned, is not to meet, fall in love, make babies, and buy a house by the start of the school year. It is unlikely that the initial household will resemble what I describe, but the point is to have a real space to house the vision, where outsiders can visit and consider it on a more flexible timeline. To that end, if you are reading this and it makes you think of someone who would be interested but who is not currently looking for housing, please forward this to them anyway. They, and anyone reading this who is interested in housing, should email me. We'll set up a virtual meeting space and have periodic F2F gatherings to discuss possibilities and self-organize into (potentially) compatible groups. Also, I should note, if you have no plans to stay in Ann Arbor, you're 100% welcome. Families can be global. Good models reproduce.

To begin the discussion, I'll briefly sketch out my vision...
* Polyamory, in the sense of loving freely. Love whomever you want, whenever you want, whysoever you want. Don't force love for any reason and don't fight love for any reason.
* Co-parenting, meaning sharing responsibility for kids without denying the strength of biological or other connections that emerge within groups; using a non-consensus model (i.e. not everyone has to create a child and not everyone has to act as a parent).
* Co-housing - think co-residing in a sex-positive (not sex-crazed!), (unrelated) extended family, where everyone is considered an individual who is both dependent on and responsible to everyone else. Think veggie garden too, because, I mean, the idea is to make sense.
* Co-creating, as in group genius. Work from home; work from across the world. Write contracts; write books. But mostly, write code. There are certainly lots of ways to utilize a close-knit group of brilliant minds to create, but right now, the revolution is in leveraging technology toward minefields of innovation. Be willing to contribute to that in whatever way fits you best.

He bound his soul to his music, and what a good soul it was

The comeback tour was scheduled for early July in London, with expectations of endazzlement beyond what the world has ever seen. But instead it came Thursday afternoon, in tight black pants and white socks moonwalking their way across impromptu vigils the world over.

My generation, and maybe yours too, was bombarded with Facebook posts, "MJ is dead, and so is a part of my childhood." "The soundtrack of a generation," the media calls it, and they're right. The white glove and the crotch grabbing made both MTV and our own garage band experiences the memorable joys that they were, feeding hungry little souls across the nation's suburbs with the energy and ingenuity every child needs to grow. So in the stunning hours after the King of Pop was pronounced dead, there was really nothing we could do but unite in celebration of the music and dances that had come of his talent, hard work, and relentless pursuit of innovation.

It was a party the likes of which the world will probably never see again. A global economy, doubled over in self-doubt and insecurities, stretched gloved hands to the sky and thrust belted hips to the future, focusing rampant neuroses, for a moment, on the realities of physics and the uniforms mankind can wear to bamboozle them. From one street corner to the next, shrieks of Michael Jackson's signature "Ow!" flushed away the pain and stress of an economy that seeks to but cannot yet appreciate the contributions most of us have to make.

It was in those hours and the days that followed, spent huddled around ancient technologies broadcasting Michael Jackson marathons, that the public, for the first time it seems, discovered the true contributions of the person behind the music. The soul Michael had worked so persistently to bind to his music, that had been branded and marketed so successfully bit by bit, finally took on a holistic shape that even most Americans were willing to welcome into their living rooms.

YouTube views of the world's best selling album skyrocketed, and so did views of a lesser known and almost unbearably sensitive 26 year old in the making of "We Are the World" and also of the reclusive and reviled Wacko Jacko in "Leave Me Alone." For those who have grown accustomed to being spoonfed their worldviews between ninety second commercial breaks, back-to-back tributes on all the major networks drew the conclusion: the super-star who had reconstructed himself so many times, through his music, his image, and through plastic surgery, was, in fact, one coherent loving, caring, and incredibly unique human being.

Only that he is no longer. Michael Jackson, the man, will never have the opportunity to show his children how he can defy gravity in a live performance. His brilliant ear and creative eye can no longer push without encumbrance at the boundaries of sound and video. And Michael, to the relief of his attorneys, can no longer share his bed and home with the young boys he so sweetly and philanthropically read stories to and tucked in at night.

But the soul we all heard in little Jackson's soaring voice - that love and spirit that never had a chance to play ball with the other kids, that was instead bottled up into perfect performances and fantasy lands and sent out to the world and its children, tragically, to be ridiculed into shopping and prescription drug addictions - that love and spirit has found a new home: in the hearts of a generation that can now, for the first time, understand what a truly good man the world has lost.

So while MJ's B-rated horror movie, along with the hundred million copies the soundtrack souled, will forever remain ingrained in the dance moves of the ten-year-olds each of us usually keeps tucked calmly away, we can now also appreciate a deeper contribution from the Man in the Mirror. Dead at 50, the Lost Boy, who had too much love and spirit to ever grow up, forces us to ask ourselves in what ways are we bottling up our own souls for export. Have we been working all these years, negotiating demands on our resources and reputation, in order to bind our souls to our work? And even if we have, is that enough? Can the people of the world really live in peace with each other if they can't figure out how to drink from the source?

In these past few days, we have drunk of Michael Jackson's sincerity. When the beating stopped, the world turned to a man who spent his life trying to win our love through his music, and we gave it to him because of who he was - an offering his upbringing probably never even let him think to wish for. Hidden to most of the world behind shimmering costumes and scary masks, his sincerity, and the discovery of our love for it, will forever remain an inspiration to those who have come together to mourn the pop icon in recent days. But it's now up to us to defy the personality-imploding laws of society in order to structure our surviving brilliance to shine outwardly into a bastion of appreciation.

Thank you, Michael, for daring to show us our own cruelty. May you now rest in peace, for you are a martyr to a global good in which your children, and mine, will someday thrive.