Start where you live: Learning to see local power

Democracy doesn’t happen only in legislatures and city halls. It also happens in the neighborhoods, districts, parks, and main streets where people decide how to live together. Hyperlocal is a book about how that work actually gets done.

The places that hold us together

It’s become downright difficult to find places where people who live different lives can simply spend time together.

A pattern‑based approach to public problem‑solving

For organizers, educators, and public‑sector innovators who are trying to redesign how we tackle complex social problems, Pattern Languages for Public Problem‑Solving: Cultivating New Seeds for Social Change is a conceptual and practical gateway into using pattern thinking for civic work.

America Unfinished: A plain-sight inventory of the state of the nation

This letter is being posted on July 3, 2026, the day before America’s 250th anniversary. Like many people, I’m not feeling particularly celebratory. The fireworks, the flags, the fighter jets, the politicians blessing the republic, the sponsors blessing an innacurate myth, the logos blessing the sponsors—the whole noisy American pageant arrives at a moment when many of us feel more weary than triumphant, more anxious than proud.

The way we come together matters.

Earlier this month Alex Ross wrote a lucid, unsettling portrait of the stubbornly hopeful Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher who spent much of his life asking how human beings might learn to govern themselves together. I had to read “Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age” twice: once because it is deliciously dense with philosophy and intellectual history, and again because I kept recognizing themes that have long shaped my own thinking.

The legitimacy gap in democracy is no accident. It’s a feature of the design.

Jeremy Lent knows the modern economy from the inside. He built a successful internet company, then came to believe that the very systems rewarding him were also producing loneliness, inequality, ecological damage, and civic decay. Since then, he has turned his attention to a harder question: why our political and economic institutions so often concentrate power upward instead of distributing it outward.

Societies struggle to confront major challenges when so much wealth, decision-making power, and political influence are concentrated in a small group of technology companies.

What would it look like to have a government that genuinely served public rather than private interests? (One can dream.)Consider the Finns, who treat infrastructure less as a profit center than as part of the basic fabric of everyday life. In Finland, broadband access is treated as a legal right, and communication networks, education, and public services are designed around security, accessibility, and social trust rather than short-term financial return.

Why I still hold onto some of my flower-child hope

I came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s when pop songs promised revolution and the distance between what we could imagine and what we could build felt easy to cross. In less than fifteen years, our culture underwent profound shifts in racial justice, gender equality, ecological awareness, and attitudes toward American power—changes so rapid they seemed to prove that consciousness itself could reshape the world.

We don’t have to wait for the whole system to change to begin living differently.

Ed Whitfield has spent a lifetime working across the long arc of American reform—civil rights, anti-war organizing, and, more recently, community economics. What emerges is not a grand theory but a disciplined practice: a way of thinking about freedom that is concrete, local, and cumulative.His biography matters because it grounds his worldview. Raised in Little Rock, a leader in the 1969 Black student takeover at Cornell, later co-founder of the Fund for Democratic Communities, Whitfield has also lived as a working musician and instrument maker in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His thinking reflects all three worlds—movement politics, new system design, and cultural life.

The news feels hopeless; my neighborhood doesn't.

I know I speak for millions when I say that, in a time when the daily news feels endlessly bleak, I’m hungry for reminders that ordinary people still have real power close to home. Writing in Ms., Kerani Mitchell offers exactly that, with a tapestry of examples that give both context and inspiration to the question, “What can I do?”She grounds her overview in the Social Change Ecosystem Framework, a practical map that helps people and organizations see the different roles needed in social movements and identify which ones they are best suited to play. Developed by Deepa Iyer of the Building Movement Project, it centers shared values such as justice, equity, solidarity, and community care, and identifies roles—such as w

How shared hardship reveals our innate capacity for belonging, agency, and interdependence

Sebastian Junger has spent much of his life moving toward the places most of us avoid—storms, war zones, the thin edges where systems fail and people are forced to rely on each other. In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, he turns from the question of how we survive those moments to something more intriguing: why, inside disruption, so many people feel more awake, more necessary, more alive than they do in the steady drift of ordinary life.

"Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war."

Thich Nhat Hanh once suggested that “the next Buddha will be the Sangha”—not a lone savior, but a community practicing together. Rebecca Solnit takes that insight as both spiritual and political. In a recent interview about her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, she argues that the strongest counterweight to Trumpism and climate crisis is not a heroic leader, but civil society itself: ordinary people who, over time, quietly bend the world in new directions.