Theocracy.
Democracy.
Hypocrisy.

You may have read the article in the New Republic last month about how 300,000 ancient books and manuscripts in the libraries of Timbuktu were evacuated in secret to protect them from Ansar Dine, an Al Qaeda cell. The manuscripts not only survived the burning of the Timbuktu library, but were smuggled in footlockers all the way to Bamako, the capital of Mali, where they are currently being hidden away by volunteers until they can be returned.

The problem is, Bamako is in the south and the climate is much wetter and thus more destructive to the manuscripts. As I write this, thousands of unique, priceless artifacts chronicling history, philosophy, science, literature, law and religion from the peak of medieval Islamic and North African civilization are slowly being eaten away by mildew.

I have teamed up with T160K, Timbuktu Libraries in Exile, to help drive attention and funding toward the preservation of these manuscripts, and by proxy, the preservation of civilization itself. There is nothing more offensive than religious zealots imposing their backwards ideologies on free thinking people. At T160K, we seek to keep these manuscripts safe from the elements while they wait out the Islamist threat in Mali.

300,000 unique books and manuscripts have been there 800 years. They should be around 800 years from now.

There are several things you can do to help, but right now we need to fund the Indiegogo campaign.

Fund the Indiegogo CampaignFind Out More

Let me explain what I mean. Since I’m white, I can’t speak to the personal experience of racism, and I wouldn’t try to do so. As an American, I am part of a society that has made identity politics a most incessant and obnoxious trope, and I have observed that the more opposed to this drivel people get, the more the boundaries of politically acceptable discourse solidify to exclude them (or should I say, us). There are things that just can’t be said anymore, things that we need people to say because without dissent, race politics becomes an orthodoxy, and orthodoxies are dangerous. That said, I have travelled to a very many places and interacted with a great deal of people of all backgrounds, ideas and identities. Almost every person I have met has been full of opinions about racism, despite the fact that few of them are people whom I would consider to be racist themselves. And I’m beginning to wonder if our obsession with race has reached a boiling point and we might need to rethink how we approach issues of race in this country before it boils over and causes some real problems.

For reference, I always look to South Africa, where I studied abroad, and to the particularly virulent, open racism that persists there 20 years after apartheid. In South Africa, everybody talks about race, all the time. It’s talked about with an openness and frankness that is surprising to an untrained American ear. I think we can learn a lot from South Africans in how they openly confront their racist past and spend every waking minute talking about it–as a result, there are no secrets, no closet racists, no sinister feeling of power behind a veil of magnanimity. In South Africa, racists white, black and coloured proudly declare their racism. It truly lays bear the shocking reality of racism; that it exists in droves, that it is self-perpetuating, that it results in bad justice, erosion of social cohesion, etc–these are things we know. But because South Africans talk about it so much, because they confront it and it is politically acceptable for public figures to say some of the most shockingly racist things, I found it oddly refreshing and somewhat hopeful. That maybe there is a post-racial future in South Africa after all.

But it is hard not to contrast the South African free discourse over race with our much more regimented, yet simultaneously boiling, discourse in America. We have confined ourselves to a very narrow and troubling politically correct discourse where the only thing it is permissible to talk about is how bad racism is and how racist white people are, and it has become completely impermissible to talk about the identity politics and tokenism which have resulted from this myopic obsession. As a result, the conversation about race and racism in America is troublingly one-sided. When I am engaged in a discussion about race, it is almost always about racism, the ism being the domain of racists and a racist society (depending on your worldview, this defines a relatively narrow or a very broad band of Americans). But in all this talk about racism, we are engaging in a more important discourse, a discourse on and around capital-R Race. The difference is that while “racism” can be easily used to segment the undesirables in our midst, race is considered not only an important preoccupation but a necessary one in order to combat racism, and thus race, not racism, is what enters the national consciousness and infects our discourse. In short, we no longer are obsessed with racists, we are obsessed with race.

What form does this obsession with race take in our society? We are racial compartmentalizers. We count minorities in positions of power and obsess over racial balance. We talk about racial “firsts” (first African-American so-and-so). We still can’t decide on a good definition of Hispanic. We try to “fix” racism with countless race-specific philanthropies and entitlements. When we encounter people or public figures that challenge our assumptions about race, the we get cognitive dissonance and the discourse gets wrapped up in it. Black men like Herman Cain and Michael Steele were commonly derided as Uncle Toms during their pinnacles of influence. (This isn’t just a racial problem–we even blame women like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg for not being feminist enough, which is eerily similar to the time when Sarah Palin was being attacked by the feminist movement who apparently wanted a woman in power but only a certain kind of woman.) This systemic compartmentalization is rampant. We castigate white people with success for ignoring and/or not admitting their privilege. We castigate “minorities” (I hate that word) with success for not doing more to help other minorities. In the latter case, it is very discomfiting to see the expectations of people when it comes to diversity unhinged on those who are providing solutions.

If there’s ever a better exemplar of the problem of race in America, it’s President Barack Obama. Obama is our first black president, but he’s actually half black. It’s interesting how his mixed racial heritage rarely gets as much attention as his blackness. It’s as if there’s an unspoken rule that being biracial is too confusing for a racial narrative. He must be black, or maybe conservatives wouldn’t hate him as much, and he wouldn’t be different than every president that came before. But he’s also a possessor of a litany of American privileges that we usually associate with whiteness. He was raised in a white household by his white grandparents. He went to white colleges. How do we as Americans square that circle? Do we dare create a definition that challenges our inborn assumptions of race, or do we call him black and leave it at that? And if we have decided that a half-black man is either all black or all white, what sort of example is that supposed to set to mixed race children growing up in America, that they have to choose one or the other in order to have a place? Of course, if we make too much of a deal of his white heritage, we have also failed black kids in telling them that you can be successful if you’re black, but only if you’re actually white.

Our race discourse is about constantly deconstructing and reconstructing our racial narratives in order to make the most sense about ourselves. We all think about these things, even if we don’t talk about it. We are conditioned from an early age to internalize notions of race and culture, to be aware of racism, to know our racist history, to understand it. We embrace “diversity” and engage in an uncomfortable amount of social engineering in order to achieve some utopian post-racial future. At the same time, we are conditioned to only speak about race in euphemisms, to avoid offending (which often means avoid discussing) and to tread lightly in the public sphere on the subject. We also are very happy to shut down discussion of race, especially by white people–an uncomfortable ad hominem lobbed at white people who dare to criticize identity politics in America.

A bigger challenge to egalitarianism is that we can’t be satisfied as Americans all seeking for our piece of the American Dream. We can only be satisfied if every person fits neatly into a box on a census form and into a race coalition with its own community spokespeople. We need to conflate race and class, because the alternative is too unsettling. This is a problem because using “white” as a synonym for privilege ignores a very important factor of what constitutes racial “normality” in a society. It is fair to say that white people have a privilege in a white society. It is more accurate to say that X people have a privilege in an X society. Whatever X is in America, it isn’t strictly white. There’s a combination of looks, language, culture and history involved in X. There are plenty of white people with southern drawls who couldn’t land a job on Wall Street even if they had straight A’s. Our culture doesn’t work like that. There are also plenty of black kids growing up in Fairfield County, CT who often act, talk, and subsequently succeed like any white kid growing up in the same circumstance. Incidentally, they are often accused of “acting white.” This is part of the problem: that we use such terminology speaks to a very sad conflation between race and class in contrast to America’s multiracial, diverse reality.

X isn’t necessarily the same thing as white, and indeed, if we want there to be any progress on the racial front, we have to insist that X shouldn’t be white and it is possible, and desirable, to deconstruct the “white privilege” paradigm. This isn’t unthinkable. The definition of “white” itself has changed in history. One of the more interesting books I read last year, Nell Irwin Painter’s The History of White People, tells a fascinating story of how “white” has come to express different ethnic makeups in America. In the last 200 years alone, white has excluded, and then included in turn, people of German, Scandinavian and Irish origin. Imagine that in the late 19th century there was an entire contingent of scientists who didn’t consider Nordic people to be white enough!

I would have to mention Michel Foucault at this point because the parallels of racial discourse in today’s America to sexual discourse in yesterday’s England are too obvious not to bring up. Foucault observes that the people whom we regard to be the most uptight about sexuality were the most obsessed with it. People who spent every waking minute restricting new sexualities and perversities and in doing so opened up sexuality to a whole new universe of intrigue in science, the law, and medicine, in what he calls the Perverse Implantation. Rather than sexuality becoming more subdued, it became more accessible, with the prudish Victorian discourse on sex merely a catalyst for an unprecedented interest in sex, and indeed, it is often misunderstood to have been prudish in the first place.

We have a similar situation in America with race: we spend every waking minute thinking about it and in doing so create more obsession. We can’t get enough of race. Instead of pushing past racism, we are recycling racism into a new paradigm in which all facets of the racial puzzle are reconstructed, pushed into avenues of politics, art, science, the humanities, and thus continually re-examined, obsessed over. Call in the Racial Implantation. Instead of defeating racism, we are creating a new class of racists who, like the racists of old, believe their solutions to the race problem are progressive. They also tend to be inside an echo chamber where challenges to their outlook are deflected, often, ironically enough, with charges of racism.

Given these issues of race in our discourse, racism itself isn’t surprising. I would be surprised to find myself in any modern society today without racism. It either is an extremely natural human instinct in complex societies, or it is going to be a very bad habit to break. I think everyone will disagree on the best “solution” to racism, the discussion of which I think may be part of the problem, but c’est la vie. You can’t argue with the facts: America has racists, and whites sit at the top of the racial hierarchy. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, including whites. White people, like myself, find it difficult to square their belief in an egalitarian society with the racial realities of our still predominantly white society. And that’s something that we can and should address, and there are plenty of ideas on how to do so. But the first step to solving a problem is recognizing a problem. And the problem, I believe, needs to include our obsession with race. We need to realize that our race discourse has added to, and perhaps even compounded the racism problem. I would like to see racism become just one part of a larger discourse where we look at ourselves first and foremost as perpetrators of a perverse race logic. Only then can we really begin to address the dreams of a post-racial future.

Thanks to Danilo Campos and Frances Low for reading drafts of this.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

It’s amazing how succinctly this quote (usually misattributed to Eleanor Roosevelt) describes the way most of our daily interactions work. Look at the media. Find yourself reading People magazine? Maybe you’d learn more by watching the Events on CNN. And you would learn even more if you cracked open the Economist and read about the great Ideas in there.

When you are having a conversation, the first question you should ask is, are we talking about People, Events, or Ideas? And if it’s People or Events, see if you can elevate the conversation.

This is harder than it seems. We all are tempted to talk about people that we know. We are natural gossips. These are conversations we all have had:

• He just got a new job
• They just got married
• I really don’t like her
• Did you hear what happened to him?
• Brad Pitt got engaged

Could it be because these are such easy topics? After all, it requires no intellectual engagement to discuss the petty lives of others. But people much wiser than I have said that such meddling makes the meddler even more petty in turn. So when you find yourself trapped in a conversation about People, what’s the solution?

Elevate the conversation. Talk about Events.

Conversations about Events are probably the most frequent. The litmus test for a conversation about Events is, “Could I be having this same conversation with someone else without changing it?” If so, you may be talking about Events, which again, are conversations we have all had:

• The current election
• The weather in Chicago
• Something awesome that happened last night
• A great movie you’ve seen

Events conversation require some engagement. They require both parties to understand the events in question and formulate their own opinions. But they do not demand that the parties interact with each other. Events conversations are safe, perhaps, which is why they appear to be so frequent. Have you noticed that all Small Talk is Events Talk, unless both parties have a mutual friend, in which case the conversation immediately devolves into People, the path of least resistance?

Next time you are having a conversation about People or Events, see if you can elevate the conversation. Talk about Ideas instead:

• Is it in America’s best interest to be in Afghanistan?
• Can capitalism cure poverty?
• Do employees perform better when they can work from home?
• What should Europe do to curb the debt crisis?
• What is the role of religion in modern life?

It requires effort to turn People into Events and Events into Ideas, but it’s totally doable. For example, turn People into Events by asking and inquiring what People do for a living, then turn Events into Ideas by deconstructing the problem they are trying to solve and learning the foundational concepts that make that problem worth solving.

Most people like talking about Ideas. After all, everyone has them. But they may not be comfortable openly discussing them with casual acquaintances. Or perhaps it’s just easier to stick to well trodden ground, where the risk of confrontation is low and the social rewards may be high.

But I’ll tell you one thing: the people I remember the best are the people who want to talk about Ideas from the get-go, and who don’t care about the petty formulations of People and Events. If I meet an Ideas person, that’s someone I want to get to know better.

• Kwame, from Ghana, joined the National Guard the month after getting his Green Card last year. He was shipping out in a week to Afghanistan for a yearlong tour. As a member of the army, he had to renounce his Ghanaian citizenship, and since he won’t get his US Citizenship for another three years he is currently a man without a country.
• Tom is a truck driver for his day job. He used to be an avid gamer to battle his loneliness, but discovered Sidecar was a great way to meet new people. He was born into a Catholic family and has discovered recently that he’s an atheist. He thinks the hoopla over the new Pope is ridiculous.
• Paul is a Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem, went to school in Zimbabwe, lived in Mozambique and South Africa, immigrated to Minnesota, married a Spanish teacher from Peru, and they moved to San Francisco. In Palestine, his father was a well-known politician, and in our conversation it seemed that he went through a lot of effort to separate himself from the family, for reasons unclear.
• Kemal is a Yemeni immigrant. His brother owns a large textiles company in Yemen, and Kemal has been trying to help him outsource some high skilled jobs to the United States, which is proving to be extremely difficult. He loves soccer and currently is a soccer coach at a high school. When his wife first got pregnant, he was hoping it would be a boy so he could teach him soccer. But she had a girl. Then another. Then another. Kemal is now the proud father of five girls, and he jokes that soon he will have enough for a soccer team, if they showed any interest in learning it.

Who have have you met through your ride sharing service?

Kuglóf is small as coffee shops go, with a naturally lit interior, high wooden tables and chairs, and an intimate seating area with a sunny view of the arched passageway it calls home. Outdoor seating is also available, with a view of gorgeous Elizabeth Bridge and the Danube.

Reminiscent of a hipster Brooklyn café, Kuglóf has immediate charm. The staff is friendly and–thankfully for me–English proficient. The croissant and pastry selection is superb; all seem to be freshly baked each morning. Adding to the homely appeal of the place, the croissants are self serve. My favorites are the mini croissants which are perfectly sized for dipping. Unlike most Budapest cafés, it is open until well into the evening with a full selection, so it’s perfect for a late Sunday croissant or for getting homework done on a Monday night.

All your typical coffee shop fare is served, including an array of cool drinks (iced coffees, smoothies, etc). Their cappuccino cups are of a tapered design I’ve never seen anywhere, and even their gorgeous construction does not do justice to the coffee inside. The coffee is frothy and smooth, professionally and (I believe) hand ground.

I highly recommend the hot chocolate, made in the classic Euro-cocoa style. Available in milk and dark, the cocoa is a melted delight, served with a touch of added chocolate shavings for that chocolate-induced heart attack you always dreamed of.

It’s not often that a café gets everything right. The staff, the decor, the selection, the quality, and the view make this all a place worth visiting. It also stands in stark contrast to the opportunistically placed Café Molnár next door. Even so, I hope Molnár continues to draw tourists like flies to honey, so real gems like Kuglóf are left to the insiders. It’s worth it.

When I wake up, the first thing I do is check my email and morning social networks. When I am on the bus to work, I either read a book or play chess online. I spend a good ten hours out of each day on the computer. When I take a break, I am listening to or playing music. On weekends, if I am not socializing with friends I am talking on the phone or watching TV. When I eat, I usually do it in combination with some social activity or watching something or listening. Even when I am going to sleep, I often have a podcast playing in the background. In other words, there is hardly a single moment in my day where I am sitting silently, completely unconnected to any external stimuli. My haircut may be the only time that happens. This seems sad to me, and I’m sure it’s not a unique experience.

What has happened to me that I cannot abide any time by myself with my own thoughts? I don’t have anything particularly scary to think about, or anything that would prevent me from being introspective. I don’t usually feel lonely or depressed. Yet I always feel the need to be constantly engaged with, and when I am too lazy to do the engagement myself, I turn on a machine to do the engaging for me. Internet browsing and television are probably the worst distractions, because they provide no level of intellectual engagement. At least when reading, I am forced to exchange ideas with the author. Chess is a good game because it forces strategic thinking. And I enjoy educational podcasts like RadioLab and EconTalk. But even with educational engagements, I still am being led to think by something else, and don’t have the time to do my own thinking.

There was something about the experience of the haircut that made me think about all the thinking I *can’t* do when everything else is on.

When I was in middle school, I had a teacher that would take us outside for “sky writing,” where we were obligated to stare at the sky for 5 minutes and then write. It worked very well for me, as it gave me an opportunity to clear my head of distractions and even to change perspective for a second, to realize the vastness of the universe outside of my self. Perhaps it would benefit me to take 5-10 minutes each day to just meditate in the absence of distraction.

Or, I can just get haircuts more often.

So what is a corporation?

In a free society, corporations are voluntarily organized by and among a collective of individuals–investors, employees, volunteers, and customers–in order to pursue a common goal. If you look into any large corporation, you find nothing less than tens of thousands of real people, all on a team together. The goals of that team can be very different. At BP, the goal of the team is to explore, dig and extract new oil wells on the one hand and ship, refine, and distribute gasoline on the other. At Walmart, the goal of the team is to produce and purchase a variety of items so they can be sold at mass market prices in their retail stores. To take the opposite end of the corporate spectrum, the goal of the team at a hair salon is to make women beautiful.

In other words, corporations have no sentience on their own. This may seem blindingly obvious to anyone who has worked for a corporation of any size. Corporations are, first and foremost, collectives where people collaborate to perform labor in exchange for money, which is exactly what people as individuals do. Except in a corporations, people can be often more productive working as a team than they can alone. If someone takes a job with corporation instead of producing and selling a product all by themselves, it is often because they can earn more with their skills as part of a team than they can alone. And the more successful the team is at producing and selling a product, the larger, more specialized and more efficient the team becomes.

I am not suggesting that all the people who make up a corporation are equal, but merely that their incentives are aligned. Shareholders, for instance, have a much bigger stake in the corporation’s successes and failures than employees. But those employees benefit from greater corporate profits in the form of greater job security if not increased benefits and wages, and when corporations lose money, they are the first to suffer. The level of commitment and risk may vary among members of a corporate team, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less of a team, for the same reason that a quarterback and a wide receiver have very different risks and rewards that come together for a common purpose.

And yet, everywhere you turn in politics today, there is an attempt to demonize and dehumanize corporations, to “make them pay” for whatever real or imagined harm they have inflicted, and in general, hold them responsible for the world’s ills. This trend is especially alarming in Europe, where hating on corporations is in vogue, and just yesterday Angela Merkel announced a G20 conference to tackle “corporate tax avoidance,” a particularly bad euphemism since it ascribes evil intent to a perfectly legal practice, encouraged by many G20 nations themselves. Corporations are routinely maligned as rapers of the environment, destroyers of wealth, vanguards of global destruction, and, of course, kingmakers behind elections. The American Left is particularly adept at these forms of accusations, although the right takes its toll in its own crusade against nonprofits like Planned Parenthood. And the Right is more prone to defending corporations, while corporations themselves deserve neither to be attacked or defended while sparing the individuals who make them up.

Why is it so easy to detatch corporations from the people who make them up?

I think for your run-of-the-mill politician on either the Right or the Left, it is politically popular to complain that “corporations are making record profits,” whereas it would be unpalatable for a politician to complain that individual tax-paying men and women are making too much money (not to mention complaining about the jobs that follow). When a politician says that an auto company should get a bailout, that is more persuasive than suggesting that tens of thousands of employees instead receive a welfare check directly from the government. It helps to be able to hold up certain corporations as “criminal,” but corporation can’t really commit a crime, only people can. Nothing is stopping us from going after criminal individuals who make up a corporation, and we should go after them just as we do anyone else committing a crime. Yet it is far easier for politicians to attack corporations as criminal rather than individuals.

So why do we continue to dehumanize corporations?

I think one of the biggest things to drive a wedge between people and corporations has been the corporate tax. Corporate taxes aren’t really corporate taxes at all, but are in reality taxes on the people that make up that corporation. If a corporation pays money in taxes, it must take that money from the corporation. If that money comes out of the pocket of shareholders, it is a tax on shareholders. If employees must earn less to cover the cost of the tax, then it is a tax on employees. If prices must go up to compensate for the tax, then it is a tax on consumers. The corporation as an entity has not paid anything, as it does not have any money of its own (much like the government doesn’t have any money of its own). Instead, the people who make up that corporation–the shareholder, the employee, and the consumer–have paid for it.

As it happens, we already impose these taxes separately: we tax shareholders for their holdings, tax employees for their income, and tax consumers for their spending. If we were to eliminate the corporate tax entirely, surely these taxes could be appropriated to the individuals from whose pockets the money came out of in the first place. But by taxing the corporate entity, we allow shareholders, employees and consumers alike to pretend that the corporation is an entity separate and apart from themselves. At the very least, the corporate taxes imposed offset the direct cost on the individual in the short term and lets the individual believe his money is safer than it would be without the corporate tax. This is an illusion, but a compelling one: we have let it drive us to raise taxes on corporations to the highest level of any country in the industrially advanced world.

Finally, I think one more major factor in creating a dehumanizing membrane around corporations is caused by corporations themselves: branding. Branding is, definitionally, creating a unified identity and persona behind a corporation. Through branding, corporations, subvert individual identity to the wisdom of the collective. Although corporations are collections of free people, the big ones present like unifaceted behemoths; ironically, the more people a corporation contains, the less human it appears. As consumers, we allow the branding of corporations to define our attitudes towards the work those corporations do, especially if we don’t approve of it. It is easier to rally against a logo that stands for a purpose rather than lash out at the indivdual actors, for the same reason it is easier to fire on an advancing enemy under one flag than it is to hunt urban guerillas. The corporation has proudly and intentionally presented its mission for all to see, and this makes its existence even the more offensive if their mission is distasteful. The fact that profit is the primary goal of the corporation is added salt in the wound. Never mind that profit, like taxes, doesn’t belong to the corporation at all, but belongs to the shareholders, employees and consumers of the corporation.

Let’s end anti-corporatism

Now, I think that it is generally true that people will ascribe a set with the actions and morals of a much smaller subset. It is generally true for racists who use the actions of a small minority of people to justify hatred of an entire group. It is true for misogynists who prefer to paint all women with the brush of a few bad ex girlfriends. And it is true for anti-corporatists, who feed on news like an oil spill or financial system collapse as evidence of the global evil of corporations. It would of course behoove the anti-corporatists to know that their prejudice towards corporations is usually based on the behavior of a small minority of corporations, usually in one or two industries. If pressed, they will of course not attack with the same vigor barber shops, restaurants, bodegas, hardware stores, bars, nightclubs, Hollywood movies, publishing houses, newspapers, coastal fishermen, travel agencies or farmers’ markets, which are all organized as corporations. Nor will they attack corporations established for an eleemosynary purpose: Churches, preschools, health clinics, hospitals, cancer research institutes, civil liberties organizations, or rotary clubs.

In addition, the anti-corporatist slant willfully ignores the unrelenting progress and prosperity we have experienced as a society using the corporation as a vehicle. It is not a coincidence that the formation of the first corporations in 17th century Holland (debatably the first, but certainly the first legally defined joint stock operations) coincide with the explosion in private capital investment, exploration, mass employment through international trade, and real distribution of wealth through wages that characterized the late mercantilist period, sowing the seeds (or tulip bulbs) for the industrial revolution. The reasons for this are complicated, but in short: the corporate vehicle allows private investors to protect their personal assets and take risks, while at the same time providing a legal structure for many people to work together in pursuance of common goals.

I’m not suggesting that corporations are victims, but just that our rampant anti-corporatism too easily misses the vital distinction between the corporation as a legal entity and the corporation as a living organism with real human beings as its working cells. We do not benefit when we deprive corporations of oxygen. We only benefit when the corporation is allowed to thrive as an organization of free people assembled to accomplish a common purpose.

It would read like a bad farce, but it’s true. And it is true not because we weren’t aware of what was happening, but because we didn’t care enough to do anything to stop it. “They’re all terrorists,” we tell ourselves. “The government wouldn’t go after them unless they had reason to believe they did something wrong.”

Something is definitely wrong when Pakistanis are rightfully protesting our government’s actions whilst we remain disturbingly silent.

Never mind that the Justice Department memo “justifying” the execution of American citizens abroad came out barely three weeks after the suicide of Aaron Swartz brought national attention to prosecutorial overreach on computer crimes, going after kids with hard jail time for exploration of computer systems no more harmfully than playing ding dong ditch.

Never mind that this is the same week that the two out of three branches of government are aggressively pushing to take guns away from law abiding citizens (even though the same government has no problem sending billions of dollars in unrestricted weapons to Israel and Egypt).

Never mind that the administration, with cover from the Supreme Court, has forced people to buy health insurance from megacorporations, while those same corporations now mysteriously have more power than they had when Obamacare was passed. And, not coincidentally, health insurance premiums are rising, not that we couldn’t see it coming.

Never mind that the executive branch continues to raid marijuana dispensaries that are operating legally under state law, and the most openly drug using president in history is secretly jailing thousands of nonviolent drug users like himself.

I fear that the greatest threat to liberty is not our government, but ourselves. That we would be so complacent in this farce as one by one our rights are trampled upon. That we would continue to defend our ideas as constitutional and the others’ as unconstitutional, when in reality we seem content to pick and choose the parts of the constitution we agree with and discard the rest. “Let’s give up on the constitution,” said one prominent constitutional law professor in December. How soon before more people believe that? How soon before government’s legitimacy crisis comes to a head?

It ends now. I’ll be calling my congresspeople today on the drone strikes issue. Please join me in doing the same.

We were behind a guy in his 20′s who ordered an Italiano, the sub we were going to get. The friendly sandwich samurai happily assembled the sandwich and when he was done, folded it tightly, cut it in half, then wrapped it. When it was our turn, we ordered the one big sub for two, and the sandwich artist did the exact same process to build our identical sandwich. However, this time, he folded it, wrapped it in paper, and then cut it in half.

Years of working in tech, and the best UX I’ve seen is in the simple and seemingly unimportant gesture of cutting after wrapping a sandwich, so that two people could easily split it, and cutting it before wrapping for one, no questions asked, all brilliant use cases seamlessly accounted for.

This is what UX means. It is the attention to customer needs, even if those needs go against normal conventions. It is the meeting of those needs with the best possible assumption, and making their day just a little bit easier. It’s providing the same great product but adding that extra detail that makes the product worth buying again.

Thanks for your attention to our customer experience. We’ll be back.