This perspective has long influenced my thinking, and it comes to mind again in the context of the longstanding rivalry between the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

I was always uncomfortable with people valorizing Jobs, because the track record seemed clear: he treated people very badly. Meanwhile, Bill Gates has done objective good with his wealth since. And yes, rehabilitating a reputation by investing in meaningful global health projects… that is a good.

But, though we don’t know the final word on the Epstein files, Gates’s relationship there does not look good, especially in light of a noncommittal interview done by his ex-wife Melinda.

This is the trap: we always want great men, great leaders. No matter your politics or your stance, no matter your hobbies, we’re always looking for one. They make compelling stories, and we live in stories. Honestly, sometimes those stories might even do more good than harm.

But we can’t lose sight of the broader idea, that research backs up: power is a moral solvent. It doesn’t just reveal who someone is — it can change who someone becomes.

That theme was canonized in a letter by Lord Acton 150 years ago — the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” letter. But just after that, he writes the line people forget: “Great men are almost always bad men.”

The question isn’t “Who’s our great leader?” It’s: What systems do we have so we don’t need one?

There’s another Chris Wink. He’s the founder of Blue Man Group, the eclectic artistic troupe that got its start in New York and maintains a longstanding residency in Las Vegas.

That Chris Wink (Blue Man Group founder and artist) is 25 years older than the Chris Wink (journalist) who is writing this. Once a friend pointed out that name appeared in this heinous file and document release, I wanted to ensure somewhere on the internet this clarification was made: there are (at least) two very different Chris Winks. When I was getting my journalism started in 2008, I first learned of the name competition.

Newly released documents show that that Chris Wink corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein back in 2018, apparently trying — first that September through intermediaries — to set up a meeting. This came from an art project he was doing on “the clitoris.”

That alone doesn’t mean anything. Being mentioned or emailing doesn’t equal wrongdoing. As an established artist in New York, it’s certainly plausible he sought the financier’s patronage. It’s also not clear they actually met since, yes, November 2018 was when the Miami Herald published their biggest dissection of Epstein’s abuses — though dates were discussed.

But still — it’s wild to see your own name in documents like that. Especially when the November 2018 email that finally connected artist-Chris Wink with Epstein introduced the Blue Man Group founder as being “big into sexuality.” What does it mean? I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is this might be the best argument yet for why I’ve always gone by Christopher Wink in my journalism career.

No trivial matter, this form of communication is a likely driver of the very development of language so that humans could better coordinate.

So argues Steven Pinker, the public intellectual and Harvard cognitive psychologist, in his new book “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.”

Though no specific accusations appear to be public, the timing proved awkward. He’s one of several prominent intellectuals named in a tranche of new correspondence with notorious financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. One of Pinker’s prominent book endorsements is Bill Gates, who is even more exposed.

I read the book before fully understanding this, and it’s not clear what it all means now. Though no great revelation, the book gathers perspective on a widely familiar concept.

Below my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• Private knowledge versus common knowledge (reciprocal knowledge when I know you know but don’t know if you know that I know)
• Mutual knowledge may be better term as common knowledge has a slightly more technical use (as in this book) than in wider use but the author uses common knowledge
• Communication and coordination
• Altruistic (monkeys picking bugs off another’s back) and mutualistic (bird eating bugs off zebra’s back)
• Conventions allow us to coordinate
• Gil Disendruck and Lori Marisol: three year olds that learn a new word assume an adult will know it, but they don’t assume that for new facts
• Michael Chwe’s 2001 book Rational Ritual: social goods are advertised on the Super Bowl (technology consumer products) more than private goods (batteries, breakfast cereal)
• Author cites Erica Chenoweth’s nonviolent stats (challenged by Andreas Malm): 51% vs 25% of nonviolent v violent movements worked, though she acknowledges “the dictators learning curve” – thwarting common knowledge of coordination
• 2013 Justine Sacco tweet: early in RT function nd the idea of virality losing context (irony not understood online) introduced cancel culture
• Truly viral messages feel like common knowledge
• Jillian Jordan et al: social media enforcer of community collective norms (in lieu of courts or even town square floggings) vain in group esteem
• Online “Everyone is both watcher and watched”
• Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban: moral condemnation not only signals virtue but also aligns with a dominant faction.
• Some of the norm setting is just to give a focal point to create an identity and community
• Blaming people for outcomes they never intended is a difference between archaic and modern justice
• Darkness at Noon; The Crucible; 1984; The Lottery all showed ritualistic group outing of others to reinforce social standing of others
• Metaphors We Live By book from 1980: idioms help convey common knowledge
• John Geanakoplos: coordination gene “ the upshot is that when coordinating actions, there’s no advantage in sending acknowledgments unless one side feels more vulnerable, or unless the acknowledgment has higher probability of a successful transmission in the previous message” (one-word “Roger” for pilots)
• Mark Twain: “ the trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that aren’t so”
• Rubenstein’s 1989 electronic mail paradox
• Robert Aumann’s 1976 agreement theorem states that two Bayesian agents with the same prior beliefs cannot “agree to disagree” about the probability of an event if their individual beliefs are common knowledge.
• Tyler Cowen and Hanson: disagreements start with different priors, but same information should get equal treatment
• Good-faith debating: sharing your priors, expressing range of confidence, “steel manning” rather than straw manning and agreeing to adversarial collaborations (what marker would decide) and betting on concrete predictions
• Robert Trivers: people deceive themselves to deceive others
• Alex Tabarrok: bet is a tax on bullshit
• Prisoners dilemma teaches that by giving up something we can gain a better outcome
• Cheap talk and costly signals
• Since the author worked with Paul Bloom in 1990 on the question of why did language evolve, the author now believes the simplest explanation is “language cheaply generates the common knowledge that makes social coordination possible”
• Thomas Schelling: focal point
• Rousseu Stag Hunt
• Wimmer and Perner theory of the mind (three year olds)
• Peter Kinderman and Robin Dunbar: four levels of recursion is the deepest most of us can go easily (he thought, she thought, he thought she thought)
• Dostoevsky and the psychologist Daniel Wagner a century later prove the brain science of the question: can you actively tell your brain to not think of a polar bear?
• “Joint attention” psychologists: this helps children learn culture
• Herbert Clark: common knowledge around a focal point
• Great Barrier Reef annual “sex festival”: the full moon is the focal point
• Curse of knowledge : assume others know what we do
• Keynesian beauty contests and many variations
• Matt Klein on SVB: a bank-run by idiots rather than a bank run by idiots
• Volunteer dilemma: The more bystanders more likely people shirk responsibility
• Ladder of charity: Jewish philosophy
• Why do levels of mutual knowledge affect charitability? From author’s online polling assessing various types of giving: “A donor who gave with common knowledge, had to give twice as much, and a donor with reciprocal knowledge five times as much, to earn the same kudos as a fully private donor. Astonishingly, when it came to the donor who simply made himself known, there was no amount of money he could give – not even 100 times as much – that would make him a charitable in the eyes of our respondent as the anonymous giver.”
• But those who imagined receiving the money just wanted more donations, and didn’t care if the donor was disclosed or not
• His research shows that modern people’s intuition‘s about righteousness, roughly follows the ladder of charity, distinguishing gifts by the opportunities for payback
• David Pinsof social paradox: we show we don’t care and care people know (social judgement and recursive mentalizing)
• Fiske relational models
• Erving Goffman’s Facework
• Martin Daly and Margo Wilson in Homicide: men fight over the common knowledge of whether they are a pushover (in studies, we punish more when others are watching)
• Dominance: I could hurt you
• Status: I could help you
• Richard McAdams using Gillian Hadfield: men and race get locked into dominance by rationally optimizing for most and others playing into lesser outcome — to avoid missing out entirely
• Laughter conveys common knowledge
• Barry O’Neill: Honor, Symbols and War in 1999: leaders engage in 45 geopolitical symbolic acts each year
• On The Origins of War by Donald Kagan: “honor” is a surprisingly high driver of war
• Why Nations Fight by Ned Lebow: interstate wars 1648-2008: the majority were for perceived revenge
• Darwin’s three principles in the evolution of emotional expressions: “serviceable habits” (showing sharp teeth); next “antithesis” (if a dog arching back shows aggression, then showing belly shows submission)
• Three self -conscious emotions
• Embarrassment: public breach of a social norm
• Shame: pubic breach of a moral norm
• (Those two cause blushing but not guilt, which he notes is a costly signal of transgression but only for common knpwwege )
• Irv DeVore: “ if two people anywhere on earth look into each other‘s eyes for more than five seconds, then either they’re going to have sex or one of them is going to kill the other”
• Why off record indirect speech? Plausible deniability of common knowledge
• FIRE: 2000-2024, 1300 scholar punishments
• Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto: we mix up facts and values (war is bad, and so early people didn’t do it)
• “It’s easy to blur the pursuit of objective knowledge with the upholding of moral norms”
• Deplatforning to avoid the creation of common knowledge: “the fear that common knowledge is what makes an idea dangerous helps explain the usual sequence in which a heretic who expresses an idea in a public arena must then be published in a public arena”
• 1973 Noam Chomsky: exploring race and IQ correlation can be ignored because they strengthen the worst elements and are like eye color and intelligence. “Society is happily ‘in ignorance’ of insignificant matters of all sorts”
• John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859) has three defenses of unwelcome opinions: it might be true; it might be partially true; or showing why it’s false strengthens what it is true
• Michael Kinsley: a gaffe in Washington is when a politician says something that is true
• “The perils of making private deliberations common knowledge serves as a counterweight to the idea that all the dealings of democratic government must be public as they unfold in real time, and that leaking them is always heroic. “

Here’s how I think of storytelling, how I define it in my own practice. I keep it in a nerdy frame in the Technical.ly newsroom:

Storytelling is a process that uses character and plot to share ways to navigate a complex world.

The idea is that we take people’s experiences and map them onto reality. We match them to things that can help you understand a complex world. That means standup comedy, novels, movies, political campaigns, journalism, documentaries—all of it can employ storytelling.

And it can be used for good ends, ends you agree with, or it can be used for evil ends. Storytelling is not inherently good or bad. It’s just a human condition: we map our experiences onto other people’s lived experience.

That’s why you can like the format or not. You can like the ends or not. It’s just a thing we do. It’s like breathing.

So when there’s coverage of corporate storytellers, you can roll your eyes. When there are beautiful examples of oral historians in pre-literate societies, you can be inspired. You can consider some of it hijacking or not. None of it really matters. Storytelling doesn’t care. Storytelling is the human condition.

In my practice, I think of it as a way to strengthen local community and give more people their best shot. I happen to use a journalistic frame, but I have friends in standup comedy, fiction writing, academia, and marketing—all of whom employ storytelling, better or worse than others, more or less effectively than others.

Storytelling isn’t inherently good nor bad.

I think often of Vonnegut’s advice that the very point of life is “to experience becoming.” I get personal joy from identifying experiences and goals that give me meaning, and their pursuit is the point.

I find meaning in becoming a better version of myself, of becoming the man I want to be — and that is a lifelong pursuit. After years of resolution-making, this year I also wrote down a few areas I want to be stronger, and that better tied why my resolutions for the year fit now. Both areas of growth and resolutions are below.

Areas I want to develop

1. My home life is not yet as balanced and rhythmic as it could be.
2. I am not yet as healthy and fit as I could be.
3. The news organization I founded and lead is not yet as strong, influential and financially sustainable as it could be.
4. My journalism, writing and authorship career is not as advanced as it could be.
5. My social following and public influence is not yet as large and vibrant as it could be.

My resolutions:

• January: Turn 40 with confidence — Mark it with pride, organize something fun and memorable without being too self-indulgent.
• February: Travel abroad — Use tht passport one way or another.
• March: Pitch my new nonfiction book to at least 25 agents — Ensure my next concept gets a fair airing
• April: Evaluate buying a Technically HQ — Pool the financial resources and determine whether this is a serious option.
• May: Publish at least 4 freelance pieces in other publications — Find the right editor and concept to add new national publications to my freelance portfolio.
• June: Automate something with AI — Social video, or analytics. Technically reporting via regular data analysis. Or something that could test a new business type.
• July: Influence how the Semiquincentennial is celebrated — Between the 250-year vision statement, other organizing in Philadelphia and other markets I serve, be vocal about this anniversary.
• August: Play basketball at least monthly — Keep physically fit and active.
• September: Quarterly Date Activity — While keeping up monthly dates, elevate to at least four activities with SACMW that warrant a memorable photo.
• October: Reinforce philosophy for the kids — Introduce a few key principles to regularly reinforce via a “dad code.” Also, bump up their future savings.
• November: Contribute to election trust and integrity — We expect vitriol around the mid-term elections, be a voice of reason, clarity and balance.
• December: Technically financial performance — Complete the post-pandemic pivot, by delivering a 5%+ profit margin, with national expansion and ecosystem storytelling underwriting secured.

This is the first full year I took social video serious. I mostly hang around on TikTok and re-post elsewhere so I was surprised when I noticed my Instagram reach growing faster in the last few months, while TikTok reach declined. I was curious what might stand out, knowing that the algorithms are being tweaked all the time. TikTok does get some real large outliers (for me right now, that’s 50k+ views), so I’m interested in the averages, that exclude the big swings.

When I charted it out, two really clear moments stood out, which each can tell a clear piece of advice that will sound familiar.

(1) The algorithms really reward *every* single day posting: For a chunk of Q2, I was posting daily on TikTok and saw average views steadily growing. Then I fell out of the habit for a couple weeks and when I returned average views collapsed — and I’ve struggled to climb out since.

Even excluding large outliers, I was averaging 3k+ views per video on TikTok after posting daily for 30 days. After I broke the habit? Average views were closer to 600!

(2) The algorithms might (?) punish you for not using paid advertising: I had never paid for any social advertising for a personal account of mine before, but I was curious by how aggressively TikTok was pushing theirs. So I spent $8.91 to promote a Technical.ly video I posted on my personal account.

The company kept pushing me to buy more, but I just didn’t, and it sure looks like I’m being punished for that. Even after removing large outliers, my average views on the 15 videos before I tried the advertising? 900. Then the 15 videos after the single boosted video? A woeful 520.

I had never done a paid boost individually and gosh I don’t think I will again. Though it seems increasingly that these companies are cornering brands to a place where they will have to.

What’s my read? Social media as a strategy right now just really is a DAILY thing, but only mess with paid advertising if you intend for it to be an on-going part of your strategy.

I surprised myself by staying up later, and getting up earlier, in 2025 to read nearly as much as I ever have before. Below I share the list.

The five that most taught me something new: Navalny, In Covid’s Wake, Technological Republic, Careless People and Pronoun Trouble.

That list:

• Meritocracy Trap Daniel Markovits
• The Message Ta Nehisi Coates
• Hum Helen Phillips
• Nexus Yuval Noah Harari
• The Horse Timothy Winegard
• Holding it together Jessica Calarco
• How Economics Explains the World Andrew Leigh
• Revenge of the tipping point Malcolm Gladwell
• Tits Up Sarah Thornton
• Slow productivity Cal Newport
• Story proof Kendall haven
• Patriot Alexi Navalny
• Book of the dead Richard Dawkins
• How to hide an empire Daniel Immerwahr
• Party of the people Patrick Ruffini
• Troublemaker: Jimmy Lai Mark L Clifford
• Collective Illusions Todd Rose
• Righting Wrongs Kenneth Roth
• Superbloom Nicholas Carr
• Fascism Roger Griffen
• Rise and Decline of Nations Mancur Olson
• Storytelling Animal Jonathan Gottschall
• Technological Republic Alex Karp
• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity Peter Attia
• Story Paradox Jonathan Gottachall
• Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It Andre Perry
• Black Butterfly Lawrence T. Brown
• How to stand up to a dictator Maria Ressa
• Abundance Ezra Klein
• Free Will Sam Harris
• Careless People Sarah Wynn Williams
• We’re all journalists now Scott E. Gantt
• The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature Charlie English
• The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes
• Pronoun Trouble John McWhorter
• Of Boys and Men Richard V. Reeves
• Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke Yoni Applebaum
• How Not to Invest Barry Ritholtz
• The Gulf War Did Not Exist Jean Baudrillard
• How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle Ray Dalio
• Breaking Through Katalin Kariko
• Empire of AI Karen Hao
• Algospeak Adam Aleksic
• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling
• In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee
• How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times Roy Peter Clark
• Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home Kate Mangino
• What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate Ellen Klegg and Dan Kennedy
• Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Douglas Rushkoff
• Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane
• Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected Rory Miller
• Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline Andreas Malm

The biggest problem I see on social media is how often we confuse things that get attention because they represent something that happens often, and emerging that gets attention because it’s entirely unusual. One marks a pattern, one shares an outlier.

Legendary psychologist-duo Kahneman and Tversky have a name for why this melts our brains: the availability heuristic. If a vivid example is easy to recall, we start treating it like it’s common. Two viral stories that look similar in your feed, but mean totally different things:

• Ghost jobs: The memes hit because it’s a pattern. The Congressional Research Service defines “ghost” postings as roles that don’t exist or that employers aren’t planning to fill immediately. People share them because they’ve lived them.
• Aviation scares: The Alaska Airlines door-plug blowout was real and serious, and investigators found the bolts needed to secure the plug were missing.

But it’s also viral because it’s abnormal, not because it proves a new baseline. MIT research still finds commercial flying has been getting safer over time. Same “viral” energy, totally different signal.

Yet today’s climate change movement, advocating against environmental destruction, have calcified into purely nonviolent pacifists. A whole range of tactics have been deployed by successful movements, even excluding violence on people but focusing on property destruction. Was the fall of the Berlin War a violent attack on a wall?

That’s the short, provocative and effective 2021 climate activism book by Andreas Malm entitled: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. It inspired a film of the same name. The movie is a fictional narrative, but the book is a challenging, but important, nonfiction read for activists.

As the author argues, the two most common defenses of nonviolence:

• moral: we are the good guys, so nonviolence is the only option and
• strategic: it is always taken too far, so it is actually the better option

Yet this “strategic pacifism is sanitized history,” Malm writes. All so-called nonviolent movements benefited from “the radical flank effect,” in which a more violent group pushed the issue even farther. In contrast, the nonviolent movement seemed sensible. In this way, even if radical and more centrist groups despite each other, they actually work together.

As the author writes: “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• In the author’s withering critique of the ruling classes: “They can do nothing but burn their way to the end”
• “At what point do we escalate?”
• John Lanchester: “it is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism”
• Author calls the lack of action among activist for such a key problem  Lanchestes paradox
• XL pipeline protest lessons, forcing Obama action
• Greta Thunberg turned angrier as the movement progressed (author is complementary)
• September climate protests and Friday for Future: intentionally global and they make pains to make clear it isn’t just rich folk demanding an end to emissions
• German Ende Gelände
• But offensive physical force has been “studiously, scrupulously avoided” , a commitment to absolute non-violence that has stiffened over the cycles of movements
• The “action consensus” for big movements like in Groningen always say they won’t damage machinery or hurt people, and in Groningen like elsewhere this peacefulness has attracted numbers and sympathy from the wider press
• (Authors hometown is Malmo)
• Nonviolence to attract big numbers: “this is the main way forward” but will it be “the only way?”
• Of nonviolence: “Must we tie ourselves to its mast”
• Analysis by Tong on committed emissions by coal plants and other infrastructure already puts 1.5 degrees
• First cycle of climate movement had no figurehead but the second had Bill McKibben, well regarded, led Keystone XL and always nonviolent (inspired by MLK’s idea of “unearned suffering)
• Two common defenses of nonviolence: moral (we are the good guys, so nonviolence is the only option) and strategic (it is always taken too far, so it is actually the better option)
• XR Group formed with inspiration of the slavery analogy that nonviolence isn’t just good now (that it will cause a rebound of support) or in this situation but that history shows it’s always best ; suffragettes and ghandhi also viewed as non violent /-
• Civil rights and anti apartheid movements thought of as non-violent, but author challenges this
• But that’s all contested: Robin Blackburn argues the violent slave led uprisings was the very proof that the Quakers and others used as signals that change was necessary, London suffragettes did use property destruction (window panes and others documented by Diane Atlkinson’s “Rise Up”
• Gandhi didn’t condone violence against British but joined in their wars , to show strength — he was livid when other Indians damaged trains
• In November 1938, Gandhi wrote a letter after Kristallnacht encouraging Jews to stay nonviolent
• Environmentalists using half stories “to look at history with one eye”
• Charles Cobb’s 2014 book “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed” says the primary question of the Civil Rights era was “what is the best way to resist”— and in their context, nonviolence resistance proved an effective tactic more than guerilla warfare but that’s more about the particular needs of that movement and that time (my note: true mass media)
• Author thinks Gandhi’s Indian independence movement is less compelling a nonviolence story than the American Civil Rights movement, but armed Black groups and others protected those nonviolent efforts
• Dr King had guns in his home after a bombing
• “The civil rights movement won the act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.” -MLK and Malcolm x needed each other
• “The radical flank effect”
• Greta Thunberg (who was born in 2003 by the way) has been more Rosa Parks than Angela Davis or Stokley Carmichael
• As Mandela said “ I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective”
• “Strategic pacifism turns this method into a fetish, outside of history, unrelated to time”
• Maxine Burkett, a prominent scholar on climate justice and law, has used an analogy in her work comparing aspects of climate change to slavery as productive economic forces to emphasize the moral and ethical dimensions of the climate crisis and to advocate for “climate reparations”.
• Climate scientist James Hansen argued fossil fuels are like slavery, in that it has no compromise, the whole system needs removal
• Roger Hallum of XR: climate change movement is like overthrowing a dictator, which requires 1-3% of the population to engage (which author is challenging)
• The 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan is very influential among climate activists but author sees flaws in true quasi mathematical data set (contrasting violent Gaza independence protests and non violent Slovenia isn’t quite complete)
• Egyptian Revolution’s violent and peaceful factions were “synergetic and complementary” :Neil Ketchley (and this is like Iran and others)
• Ketchley and Ali Kadivar: democratic transitions 1980-2010, most successful movements start peaceful and then use violence if forced
• “Strategic pacifism is sanitized history”
• “From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s, it has been defamed, and equated, unlearned and turned unreal”
• A “deskilling of movements”
• “So here’s what this movement of millions should do for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2 emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. ‘We are the investment risk,” runs a slogan from Ende Galande, but the risk clearly needs to be higher than one or two days interrupted production per year. “If we can’t get a serious carbon tax from a corrupted, Congress, we can impose a de facto one with our bodies,’ Bill McKibbon has argued, but a carbon tax is so 2004.”
• Damage existing plants too, “or property will cost us the earth”
• “Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say, I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.,” wrote one West German columnist in 1968, relaying the words of visiting black power activist
• Why? Increase investment risk, and demonstrate an alternative path
• A pipeline in Colombia was punctured so many times by leftist guerillas that it was nicknamed the flute
• 1936: Palestinians attacked the British mandate pipeline for political combat
• Yemeni Houthi rebels in Sept 2019 used drones to attack Saudi Arabia pipeline
• Author lists many other examples of oil pipeline attacks — Nigeria, Chechnya and others
• The far right has taken violence and extremist attention
• “This is “pathological human irrationality in the midst of this crisis. Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.”
• 2007 campaign to deflate SUV tires, more “direct action as prank” than sabotage but it created a storm of attention
• But why focus on individual consumption (liberal focus), rather than the fossil systems?
• Dario Kenner’s 2019 book Carbon Inequality: “unequal ability to pollute” – tight correlation between income and wealth and CO2 production
• Otto Natire ‘s 2019 report: richest 0.54% emit 1/3 more than poorest half
• 300 super yachts in the world use as much CO2 in a year as 10m residents of Burundi
• 56 countries have a lower per capita annual Co2 output than a single flight between New York and London
• Influential 1991 essay Sunita Narain and Anil: SUV carbon is not the same as methane from subsistence farmers
• Henry Shue used that essay to develop luxury versus subsistence emissions in 1993, but author argues now we have run out of time and so now no one has a “right to emit” (fortunately what we need is not emissions but energy)
• Macron’s 2018 fuel tax viewed as subsistence not luxury emissions tax (yellow jackets)
• Reznick and Montoya: standing rock pipeline explosion
• “Righteous property destruction falls within the boundaries of nonviolence”
• Gospel of John: Jesus overturns the money changers tables and chased them from the temple for selling cattle
• Breaking the leg of a child and a table are not the same: “physical force that injures inanimate objects does not on this view count as violence because it cannot have the results that constitute the prima facie wrongness of what we call violence”
• Was Fall of Berlin Wall violence against the wall?
• Argumentum ad populum (appeal to the people/popularity) is a logical fallacy claiming something is true or good simply because many people believe, like, or do it, rather than providing actual evidence
• … but ultimately because of widespread views “ we must accept the property destruction is violence, and so far is it intentionally exerts physical force to inflict injury on a thing owned by someone who does not want it to happen”
• But injuring a subsistence farmer’s tools or groundwater is far worse violence than a luxury good
• William Smith’s three criteria for direct action:
  1. disrupting practices that lead to irreversible harm,
  2. urgency must require protection lawful advocacy (mellower tactics were tried but went nowhere) and
  3. third a higher charter that wrongdoers have ignored
• Terrorism is “ the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terror”
• Just war theory argues separation of combatants and non combatants
• Does the state have more strength in violence? Yes but they have more of everything. It’s about creativity and intention
• Violence and mass mobilization are appendages of the same movement
• “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”
• “the American allergy” to selective political force and sabotage  “is a pathology”
• Like MLK in the late 1950s, XR and other pacifist environmental groups need an extremist flank that they can denounce to give them respectability
• Haines: “ a division of labor in which moderates and radicals perform very different roles “, the latter stokes up the crisis to a breaking point, the former offers a way out
• — but per William Smith, such direct action is bound by “community of opinion” (they operate outside the legal framework) and have a “duty to advance” their cause — so overly extreme can reverse a movement
• “Negative radical flank effect”
• Author dissects XR London October 2019 movement disrupting London tube and is rightly critical but also reminds me: the climate people need to go to where the disruption is largest— super rich are in suburban enclave with SUVs in the U.S.
• Author says blocking public transit is “as if the civil rights movement would’ve blockaded the entrance to a black Baptist Church in Alabama or Egyptian revolutionaries trooping away from Tahir to attack an oppositional newspaper.”
• And white middle class action has support to get arrested that others do not
• Climate camp
• Roy Scranton’s 2018 book We’re Doomed, arguing we’ve already missed the climate window and should manage our decline
• The Sorites Paradox (from Greek soros, meaning “heap”) is a philosophical puzzle about vague terms, showing how gradual changes lead to absurd conclusions, like removing one grain of sand at a time from a heap, eventually leaving one grain, yet logic suggests it was never a heap to begin with
• Wallace-Wells: “ the fight is definitely not yet lost – in fact we’ll never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however, warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less”
• Did Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion and the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising fail in losing? Were those killings just?
• “Climate fatalism is for those on top” – aside from religious fatalism, the most at risk climate locations want action
• The ecotage and monkey wrenching of 1990s, something embodid by the degrowth today (2011 Deep Green Resistance book)
• Michael Loadenthal tracked their action : EF!, ALF, ELF never killed anyone but their attacks were widespread. The climate movement took off because it was unrelated and do capture general interest

American journalism leaders rightly view local news models as worryingly limited. After nearly 20 years founding and operating a local news org, I believe many take too narrow a view of how to address that worry.

That’s why I was interested to read What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate, published in 2024 and written by Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy, two well-regarded journalism insiders who also host a podcast on local news. (Clegg is a longtime Boston Globe veteran who founded hyperlocal news site Brookline News; Kennedy is a Northeastern University faculty member.)

The book came out two years ago, and for fellow local news nerds, it’s still worth adding to you collection. Buy it!

Below, I share my reflections, and I have criticisms, but they’re more about the broader local news discourse than the book itself I come with peace and love.

The book, with chapters dedicated to different local news efforts around the country, is an effective representation of a thoughtful, serious and passionate class of journalism boosters — almost all veterans of a past newspaper era. In my view (having never worked at a newspaper), this book’s representation comes with both strengths and weaknesses that I’ll expand on below:

• The “pros”: the authors assemble a charming and inspiring collection of hardworking, community-minded locals using journalism across the country, with special attention to City Hall, public affairs and the necessary mechanics of government. Good people doing good work!
• The “grows”: even with a dash of diversity here and a nod to the internet there, the projects all look like rough variations on the same newspaper format: “town-square” style, general-interest coverage about a particular group of people in a particular geography. I believe this is too limiting a view, both of form and model.

To be clear, I love these newspaper-inspired, (mostly) nonprofit local newsrooms that have sprouted up around the country. They do great work. They are important. I want every state, every county in the country to be blessed with one. (If you work on one of these, keep doing it!)

My challenge, then, is not on the dozens of examples in the book, and in most local news discourse. Instead, I want to challenge two gaps, in both the book and the wider local news discourse: (a) an over-reliance on a single business model that has emerged and (b) all the focus is on the (important) journalism, and none is on the actual mechanics that make the model.

(a) The Single Model Problem

The book’s chapters seem varied: a beloved site focused on Minnesota’s immigrant communities (Sahan Journal), a cherished legacy print newspaper in Iowa (Storm Lake Times Pilot) and a scrappy Connecticut news site with radio distribution (New Haven Independent). These are important efforts that I admire. But the model that underpins them all (insofar that this book explores them at all) look similar: town-square news for a geographically-bound community (be it identity, town, state) backed by philanthropy, reader revenue and mix of events and modest advertising.

It’s a good model! But it sure seems like only the one model. That feels like a monoculture. And monocultures are fragile.

The authors rightly quote journalism researcher Nik Usher’s warning about over-reliance on reader-revenue models in particular, which tend to target “the rich, white and blue.” Not because reader revenue isn’t important — it absolutely is — but because it’s misguided to treat it as the only acceptable replacement for subscriber revenue.

My theory for why we have such a narrow view of how local “community news” is filed is because online it’s difficult to quickly determine quality and longterm investment, so we defer to “if it acts like a local newspaper and looks like a newspaper, then it must be acceptable local news.”

(A few months back, I talked about this with Caroline Ross and Caitlin Morelli, via Rodney Foxworth, who must have thoughts, since he introduced me to David Bank )

(b) The Disinterest in Mechanics Problem

Worse, even that town-square business model goes without detailed review. A few examples from the book:

• a local news site franchise company (TapInto) is cited, but not whether something actually works about hyperlocal advertising.
• Mentions go to my pals at Report for America, and its offshoots led by Steven Waldman, but not a lick about if/how/why RFA newsrooms attract new financial backers — or why a legislator should direct new state funds for information to a news org rather than, say, a church group.
• The idea of “events” being a revenue opportunity is mentioned several times, but not why specifically anyone would sponsor one, or what precisely someone is buying with a ticket.

As best as I can tell the point of all of this is only “because people want local news.” But we know well that fewer and fewer people think “local journalism” is a thing they want. So why don’t we ever engage seriously with anything that looks really different?

I crave other, widely-ranging examples, both of editorial outside of the newspaper-ish model (museums! schools! researchers! advocacy orgs! civic associations! membership groups! affinity groups! financial firms! creators! interest groups! or anything we’d call “niche!). AND of more varied business models that would come with them (anything more specific about those “events”; anyone competing with “marketing” and “PR” with something journalism-based; data services; job placement; market intelligence or research and analysis).

I know real people doing different, compelling stuff with local news and information: I’m thinking about Matt Wynn, Sabrina Vourvoulias (that WhatsApp group!), David Cohn (texts, and then some!), Andrew McGill (pushing on the AI front), Colin Dean (local voting!) even Alexander Peay and the curation by Liz Kelly Nelson and Adriana Lacy (creators!). (And many others!)

For 20 years, I’ve heard local news leaders say at conferences we’re advancing news and information in new ways. Most seem to imagine newspapers with a donate button.

This sounds too much like what I was talking about with Jim MacMillan, Andrew Nusca , Greg Linch , André Natta , Danya Henninger and Daniel Bachhuber and Lou Dubois and Sean Blanda 15 years ago at unconferences. Or with Jessica Estepa and Matt Thompson and Nina Sachdev and Penny Riordan and Meghan Murphy at some ONA somewhere. I really do think we’ve progressed a ton, so I want the prevailing local news dialogue to too.

##

It’s a good book! A helpful collection of well-liked efforts. I recommend it. But my local news tribe seems uninterested in the details of why other businesses work.

It felt telling that in a chapter dedicated to the well-regarded NJ Spotlight (an organization I respect greatly, led by John Mooney ), the authors thoughtfully name every newsroom member, but only a single business teammate gets an airing. Even then, I’m not sure there was any insight. (Would they consider selling reader data? With whom do they compete that is not a news organization? When their audience will always be smaller than social media, why actually does their aggregate audience matter?)

So what does work in local community news, in the estimation of the authors? Local control and deep care in producing high-quality local journalism, with fairly vague references to reader revenue, supportive philanthropy and charitable advertising and a splash of “events,” without much digging into formats. (The half-dozen event planners I’ve employed through the many years must be screaming “What kind of event do they even mean!?)

My bet is most of us reading this essay would much prefer to discuss the granular details of the sloppy, and unedited, writing I did on a Sunday night, rather than the granular details of, says, a local news events model. That would have been my stance at the beginning of my career. Then, unable to get a journalism job in the Great Recession and needing to pay rent, I got really interested in the cost of renting chairs and the effects rain has on attendee show-rates. We need the details and to encourage a range of models.

I admire Clegg and Kennedy. They’ve made important contributions, and this book is one of them. Thank you! It contains many earnest and important examples of community news, and how that information helps people.

It also mirrors what I find dispiriting about our decades of local news discourse: Nostalgia for when big, lively newspaper newsrooms could overlook the rest of the operation.

Below I have my notes for future reference.

• In 2011, a Chicago is the World blog post coined “news deserts”
• Penny Abernathy: “ghost newspapers”
• “Pink slime journalism” is a metaphor for low-quality, often partisan websites masquerading as legitimate local news, using generic names and automated content (sometimes AI-generated from press releases) to spread propaganda, influence opinion, or harvest data, rather than provide real journalism,
• Henry David Thoreau: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas may be have nothing important to communicate”
• For the role of the press, Lippman wrote of “the manufacture of consent,” but Dewey believed in a better informed citizenry
• “When many Americans are highly engaged with national news, especially with the divisive talk shows that are carried on cable outlets, local journalism can be a way to bring us together”
• Nikki Usher: reader revenue paywall has to target “the rich, white and blue”
• …although Boston Globe charges $1 a day, in line with inflation adjusted newspaper prices from 1980
• All the orgs they profile are free to access
• NJ Spotlight , and state funded civic consortium is the book’s first chapter — but puzzlingly little about any of the models in detail , like what value is being created
• NJ Spotlight’s revenue mix: quarter from events/advertising, a quarter from individual donations and half from grants — Mooney’s goal was a third from each, a la that Texas Tribune model
• TAPinto: franchisee pay $5k (not clear if one time or annual) to get website, they keep 80% of any advertising
• [[The book makes me think, what my ideal be for Technically? Maybe 40% underwritten, and 20% each from advertising, grants (to encourage public-interest reportage) and individuals for an online community (and our annual conference)]]
• The authors name all the journalists but not the other staff of NJ spotlight
• Minneapolis news ecosystem is another chapter, including Sahan Journal (grant funded from Minneapolis Public Media), NewsMatch and Knight etc , AJP
• Decentralized nonprofit video news site Unicorn Riot is funded reader donations
• Influential news sites founded by rich guys: Minnpost was led by Joel Kramer who paid himself $1, Voice of San Diego started by a venture capitalist (Buzz Woolley)
• A lot of Google and Facebook talk of digital advertising monopoly but not talk about why those companies ran away with the cateogry
• Star Tribune rebound in quality, whihc had MinnPost evolve to more magazine-style
• Another chapter is on Steve Waldman and his Rebuild Local News, including policy strategy
• They ask Waldman in their podcast if the policy can cut out corporate chains and he says yes by employee count but why? The idea is to tip motivation into scale, so if motivating higher-quality journalism is the focus, and it can do that, why parse?
• Nonprofit newsrooms can’t endorse candidates.
• Waldman: “ I don’t think it would necessarily be a good thing if the entirety of the local news system were nonprofit.”
• Tiny Bedford Citizen (many retiree writers active in town affairs) represents what Howard Ziff calls the choice between cosmopolitan and provincial journalism — those distant and objective and those living in that community (for tiny towns the provincial means lots of overlap, the old chain days meant junior trained reporters who weren’t there long)
• Ziff: neither model is superior, they are different
• Experienced Corps: RFA for retired framer journalists (there are more retired than working)
• Bedford Citizen has a glossy magazine that sells agent ads
• Colorado Sun: public benefit corp, free to read but premium stuff behind a member paywall – 200k subscribers, 17k are members , 1.2m unique monthly visitors
• Memphis MLK50
• Mendocino Voice co op
• Meredith Clark newsroom diversity survey
• LoveBabz LoveTalk is a 
  WNHH Community Radiopodcast and show hosted by Inner City News CT editor Babz Rawls-Ivy, featuring interviews with New Haven’s community figures.
• Stork Lake Times Pilot is another chapter
• Center for journalism and liberty
• Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro cofounder National trust for local news
• Texas Tribune: nonprofit model of donors and sponsors
• Media Monopoly book by Ben Bag