News & Updates
The Mayor of East Portlandia
Jefferson Smith is one of two candidates who made it through Portland’s open mayoral primary. Who’s Jefferson Smith? Read this.
The GarageBand of Organizing
For your consideration, a look with The Atlantic’s Molly Ball at NationBuilder, "The Community Organizing Geeks Who Could Revolutionize Campaign Tech."
And while I’m at it, I realize now that I never mentioned on the ol’ blog this piece on the Obama campaign’s technique of using its digital and tech staffers as fundraising hooks. Consider that box now checked.
“Knife Fight,” Reviewed
Here’s the one where I play Tribeca Film Festival-going movie critic for The Atlantic. I’m a sucker for things where political staffers are in the spotlight, but Knife Fight, starring Rob Lowe as political consultant Paul Turner and co-written by long-time Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, lets the aides get away with making the easiest of decisions. It seems like the moment’s right for a really sexy film about, say, the impact of political money on governing. It would have been a thrill to see Lowe chew his way through a script like that. But instead, we watch while otherwise perfect politicians get caught with their pants down. That’s some amount of fun, but at this point, we’ve been there and done that.
Might I recommend instead my newest guilty pleasure? ABC’s Scandal. There, the operatives and fixers navigate a political system where it isn’t always clear what’s what. And the sex is never just about sex.
“Exposing” ALEC
Belatedly, here’s a pointer to a recent piece for The Atlantic on the anatomy of the long online and offline organizing campaign to draw support away from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative legislative network better known as ALEC. Hint: it didn’t start with Trayvon Martin.
The NYU Expansion End Game
On the local reporting front, newish from me and the folks at Capital: an interview with Alicia Hurley, the university’s point person on its proposed expansion, in which she argues that some people on and around its Village campus simply aren’t willing to wrap their minds around the details of the plan.
A Domain of Our Own: Tussling Over “.nyc”
"Mark Twain famously advised ‘Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.’ Well now we can make more New York addresses—just on the internet!"
– New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
After years and years of discussion, New York City is on the cusp of applying for its very own top-level domain, the aptly-named ".nyc." There are geopolitical implications: the creation of these generic TLDs, as they’re called, has put focus on the role that ICANN, a California-based non-profit, plays in the governance of the Internet. And there’s something very New York City specific to it all, too, in that in our fair city we have a place where the cachet of our identity, a vibrant and growing tech culture, and an interest in urban planning create the opportunity to figure out how you pull off a ‘digital city’ in a way that other cities and places might emulate. For the good folks at Capital, I detailed the debate over just how .nyc will work, and I hope that you might give it a read.
“Our Social-Media Amnesia”
The gist of my recent piece for Reuters:
We’re tweeting more than 340 million times a day, conducting a robust public conversation on Twitter. Yet, even on Twitter’s sixth birthday today, we still can’t track it, can’t search it, can’t access our archives. There is no public record. Is that really so much to ask?
Hope you might give it a read.
Inside the Mustached-American Movement
I kept seeing references in the news to “The American Mustache Institute” and couldn’t figure out if it was a real thing. So I interviewed its founder, St. Louis’s Aaron Perlut, for The Atlantic. I’m not all that much clearer on what’s what.
The Latino Vote
New stuff: a Q&A with Voto Latino’s Maria Teresa Kumar, wherein, as part of The Atlantic politics channel’s “The Interview” series, we discuss online experimentation’s lessons for converting trending topics into action, how President Obama made this election personal, and what it will take to convince Democrats and Republicans to pay attention to Latinos after Election Day.
“Copyright Fight Hits the Lab”
There’s a debate taking place in the science world that’s both fascinating and important in sort of a historic way, and it has to do with using digital technologies to change the way that science publishing works. It has been much the same for the last 300-plus years, so you can imagine that there are some strong opinions involved. For The American Prospect, I cover one corner of that debate: federal policies that require that government-funded researchers make their works available to the public, online and at no cost. Hope you might give it a read.
After the piece ran, a friend drew my attention to Mendeley, a piece of software that makes it easier for researchers to organize their papers and link them together in useful ways. Seems a fruitful field for innovation on the software. If you know of others, please do let me know.
