There are three main variables in any election: the candidate, his team, and the circumstances surrounding the election, and you only have control over two of them. By early 2007, after forming the Sparkill Civic Association as a way to protect the neighborhood I grew up in from federal control, I was committed to running and had been fortunate to gain an experienced team with a long-standing interest in politics. We won a committee primary, we fought two incumbents to win the election, and yet two years later, there were still people in my own party calling me “a damned kid.” They may still be calling me that. I recount this very brief...

Where there are people, there is gossip, fightin’ words, praise, criticism, and for every great idea, thousands of good ones are left in its wake. Twenty years ago, you’d have to sit by a water cooler to figure out what your employees were saying. I now work for a company that captures criticisms and great ideas in real-time, digitally, not only with everyone’s consent but with their excited participation, too. And those insights translate into dollars every single day. This is only the beginning of the “digitize everything” age. Thousands of photos posted every second, much of the same (Eiffel Tower, 31 million images; Lady...

The Obama administration issued guidelines via the Federal Health and Human Services department (which was nearly impossible to find verbatim: http://1.usa.gov/ynRWno) that require private health plans to cover women’s contraception without requiring a co-pay, as well as provide other “preventive services,” including domestic violence screening and woman-specific doctor visits. The Catholic church successfully argued that to require Catholic institutions to provide contraception violates their religious expression, winning an exemption for non-profit religious organizations specifically. The debate devolved into a secular vs. religious...

Everyone loves to talk about children. Children are the future (so buy this product). Invest in your children (so accept this school budget). Children must be prepared for tomorrow (so give me another term). What about the rest of us? We are the currently employed, the ones who are busy creating the future today, the ones who are paying for the educations of tomorrow. Self-help books are old hat. Self-help sites are in. There are three veins of modern digital learning that are available at low or no-cost for adults. Choose Your Own Adventure (Course) When I decided to go to the University of Southern California, it was after begrudging...

Over 100 years ago, one of America’s earliest education reformers, John Dewey, published “My Pedagogic Creed,” succinctly and wisely declaring that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.” (http://bit.ly/Ac8Svd). No doubt our social consciousness changed faster in the past 20 years than in the past 200 with the advent of personal computing power. The question is not whether old world educators relent, it’s when. The digital world took me quickly and at age 11 I began publishing a monthly newsletter, The Tappan Times, inspired by my father’s childhood newsletter,...