Q & A

Lomography: Analog Art in a Digital World

Maria Popova — Fri, 2 Apr 2010 13:00:00 PDT

An interview with Lomographic Society North America CEO Ulli Barta.

Last month, the iconic Lomography movement opened an ambitious retail space in Los Angeles. At the Lomography Gallery Store opening, we caught up with Ulli Barta and picked her brain about the allure of analog art in a digital world, the specifics of lomo photography, and the cultural significance of being present in the moment.

GOOD: The Lomo story is quite extraordinary—it's rare for a piece of technology to sprout a vibrant, thriving community. Even the iPod hasn't translated ownership to an actual hub of creative collaboration. How did this community evolve and where do you think it's going?

ULLI BARTA: Lomography was started as a "community," friends introducing their friends. It began as a somewhat spontaneous, underground arts movement in Vienna, then expanded further through the reach of our friends who went to study all over the world—the first Lomographic Ambassadors. The founders of Lomography organized parties, exhibitions, and meetings with friends as the main platform of spreading the word about their ideas, the 10 Golden Rules of Lomography and how to use the little Russian LCA camera as the main generator of brilliant, colorful, bursting-with-life photographs.

Over the years, these basics haven't changed. We have stayed very true to the original vision, being dedicated and lucky to expand the platform, introduce many new ideas and products, revive some existing ones, and continuously grow our international community.

Of course, we also grew up along the way—the original art movement grew into a proper business combining community, art, commerce, and analog philosophy into its own structure, but the core of what we do today is still the same: We communicate through images.

G: How is analog art holding its ground in the digital age? Is the "retrostalgic" vintage revivalist movement we've witnessed over the past decade across other facets of culture, from fashion to architecture, helping drive interest in Lomography?

UB: I think the analog movement is very important and deeply rooted in our digital time. Although analog may seems like a niche remainder of an age gone by, for me it simply represents being in the present—fully. It's about experiencing the moment, dedicating yourself to the here and now and allowing time to evolve at your personal, human speed.

It is this human element that intrigues and keeps you fascinated. There's something alluring about the ability to master an art form, at the same time allowing for the "unmanageable" and yet defining moment of the unknown. [Lomographic Rule no. 8: You don't have to know beforehand what you captured on film; and no. 9: You don’t have to know it afterwards either.] It's not just analog art that provides this; there is really a much bigger analog movement that stands for our need to not only accelerate and evolve at a speed faster and faster every day, but to feel, think, stay in the moment with all the uncertainty this can entail.

I don't think we need to choose one way over the other. The great thing about the times we live in today is that we can be at home in both worlds, giving up neither the authenticity and sensuality of analog techniques nor the curiosity and drive of the digital age.

So in Lomography, it's kind of like we have our cake and eat it, too.

G: Each of the Lomo cameras seems to have a distinct character, its own story and style. Tell us a little about the differences, both in the cameras themselves and in the sub-communities that create with them.

UB: Each of our cameras has its own concept, its own book, and many specialized techniques about and around it. We try to create cameras that allow a beginner and a Lomographer with many years of experience to be intrigued, be both at ease and challenged to jump into the new cameras’ world of images and techniques.

Our Fisheye camera, for instance, is the world’s first compact fisheye camera. There were always fisheye lenses you could attach to your cameras, quite costly, but never before was there an actual compact camera with a fisheye lens. The image aesthetic of the fisheye camera is very strong and distinctive, but when you read the booklet and book about the camera and how to use it, you find tons of possibilities to expand and work with it to achieve many different effects using this aesthetic. We have also added multiple exposure functionality on its second model [Fisheye 2 camera], and with its integrated flash, the camera is a great tool to use for techniques like light painting.

Then take the DianaF+ camera. We have reissued a highly collected photographic icon from the 1960s and ’70s, and reintroduced it to the analog photo community. We've developed a whole family of intriguing accessories around the Diana camera allowing the Lomographer to use multiple lenses, pinhole, different film formats and an exhibition format—The Diana World Tour with the Diana Vignettes Exhibition—that showcases what makes this camera so special.

Our camera books are another way to give the Lomographic community a platform, a voice, a way to be published and exhibited on a broad and international level. But beware, the Lomoraphy virus is contagious—you may find yourself absorbed online for weeks as you find out about all the fascinating content of this analog subculture—LomoLocations, our Lomographic Magazine, LomoHomes, the tremendously interesting LomoAmigos and, of course, one of the biggest analog picture archives in the world, where you can just get lost in millions of amazing, beautiful, dreamy, and vibrant images of our community.

G: How is the Lomo movement different from the Polaroid one? Do you see a lot of crossover, or is it one of those Pepsi-vs-Coke badge rivalries for photographers?

UB: Instant photography is one of the wonderful aspects of analog photography. We have always been fans, and always included all kinds of instant film cameras that Polaroid and Fuji make in our product assortment. The more analog content there is out there in the world of photography, the stronger and more present this art form is—which is a win for everyone involved.

We've learned, however, that we can offer the most access for community and the most exciting product if we develop and make our own tools. So we developed the Diana Instant Back for our Diana camera and, just earlier this month, we proudly launched the Lomo LCA Instant Back for our namesake camera, the Lomo LCA+.

Both of these instant back inventions have introduced a completely new quality and visual standard to instant photography as you can use all kinds of lenses—fisheye, super wide, macro lens, etc.—with the Diana Instant Back and with the Lomo LCA Instant Back. For the first time, you have a glass lens camera producing boldly lit, brightly colored, razor-sharp, or dreamy, blurry LCA-specific instant images. Needless to say, we are in love.

G: The new Lomo store here in Los Anegels is fantastic. How many retail locations do you have and what are your plans for these spaces, in terms of events, exhibitions and other celebrations of the community?

UB: Thank you and, yes, we are very proud of our Lomography Gallery Store in Los Angeles, the largest LGS worldwide at this point. The stores are the local expansion of our website, the localized window into the international world of Lomography. We have two locations in the U.S.—one in New York and one in Los Angeles—and have plans for a few more, but we like to develop and roll out our stores in a very organic way. Internationally, we have 12 stores, with six more set to open their doors later this year.

The big LomoWall at the L.A. store is covered with more than 17,000 lomographs and we have tons of space for the community to come and exchange their knowledge, meet other Lomographers, visit and participate in our workshops. Besides the latest selection of Lomography cameras, we also have films, bags, books, t-shirts, various other ephemera and, of course, free WiFi.

I am very happy to say that all the design and development of our stores is done in-house in our home office in Vienna. I think the design and concept of our stores is visibly different from other retail concepts, and brilliantly communicates our core concern and believes—analog photography, not as interference in your life but as a part of it. We literally built our store's display furniture and LomoWalls ourselves, does it get any more analog than that?

G: What drew you to Lomography and kept you passionate about it over the years?

UB: I have been friends with the founders of Lomography since we were all growing up in Austria. I might even be the “oldest” employee of the international team at this point. I always loved the visual aesthetic, the communicative and international aspect of Lomography and our founders’ relentless dedication to content alongside the product and community development.

I consider myself very lucky to have been part of Lomography from very early on and, together with our Vienna team led by Sally, Matthias and Wolfgang, to bring Lomography to the U.S. and grow our community and presence here day by day, moment by moment.

Guest blogger Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired U.K. and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.

I Get Fat with a Little Help from My Friends

Andrew Price — Thu, 7 Jan 2010 05:00:05 PST

James Fowler explains how smoking, obesity, and happiness can be contagious.

In their pioneering research, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis have shown how happiness, obesity, and smoking travel through our social networks. Their work has captured the media's attention. In September, The New York Times Magazine devoted a cover article to their research called "Are Your Friends Making You Fat?" and Oprah chose their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives for her fall reading guide. GOOD talked to Fowler about how our friends influence us, why there's a sweet spot for diversity, and the difference between Facebook and real-world social networks.

GOOD: How did you come to study how social networks influence us?

JAMES FOWLER: I had these crazy ideas in graduate school about how political action is really a result not of independent decision-making but of our connections to other people. For a long time, for 50 years, we've been asking this question "Why do people vote?" There are millions of people out there and even in our closest political election, the result is decided by thousands of people. If any one of those 1,000 people didn't vote, the result would have been exactly the same. [But] that's the wrong way to think about it. Voting is about influencing other people. When one person votes, it increases the likelihood that their friends will vote.

I did some research on this, and at the same time, Nicholas Christakis had been studying his own big social science problem: the widower effect. It's the idea that in a spousal couple, when one partner dies, the other person has a significant increase in the risk of dying themselves. As with voting, we knew a lot about how one person affected another, not about what happens after that. It's almost like we had been studying a bunch of dominoes on their sides, and we looked to see what happens when the first domino fell into the second domino, and then we walked away.

G: One of your findings that's received a lot of attention is that obesity spreads from person to person. Do good health behaviors spread too?

JF: When we focus on obesity what we're really looking at is weight gain and weight loss. The effects are symmetric. In a medical journal we often express this in terms of the standard thing people care about. That's why we emphasized weight gain. But weight loss spreads just as strongly as weight gain as far as we can tell. The one thing that we found asymmetry for was happiness. We found that happiness spreads more reliably than unhappiness. Each happy friend you have increases the likelihood that you'll be happy by 9 percent and each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent.

G: Are there certain kinds of people who transmit these behaviors or emotions more than other people?

JF: We find that same-gender relationships tend to be more influential than opposite gender relationships, which explains why friends tend to influence people's weight outcomes more than spouses. Another thing we found in the smoking study was that people who were more educated were more likely to influence and more like to be influenced by other people to either start or stop smoking.

G: Wow. What's the explanation for that effect?

JF: I don't know. But I think part of the function of education is to help people to adopt norms and to promote norms. It's part of making us more similar. So because of that I think it's easier to spread ideas between those kinds of people.

G: I guess education might in a way make people more flexible, too.

JF: I don't know if that's true, though. In politics, for example, the more educated people are, the more extreme they tend to be and the less likely they are to be influenced by people with opposing points of view. It's funny, because I'm a professor, and I have a lot of education, so I have a bias. I want to think that education is good thing, but in some ways education might actually be a little limiting.

G: How has coming to these conclusions influenced how you go about your own life, or has it?

JF: Oh, it absolutely has. After I concluded the obesity study, I lost five pounds and I kept it off. I realized: If I do this to myself I'm not just doing it to myself I'm doing it to my friends and my family, and to their friends and their family. After the happiness study, I became much more sensitive to putting myself in a good mood before I come home at the end of the day because if I make my son happy, there's a good chance I'm making his best friend happy and his best friend's mom happy.

G: What do these results say about the merits of diversity in a community? Is a place with lots of diversity like Manhattan better than a homogeneous small town?

JF: My guess is that diversity in ideas is a good thing. Although too much diversity in ideas could be a bad thing because if you can't talk to any other person because their ideas are so different, then you're never going to be able to cooperate and get things done. There's this sweet spot in terms of how embedded people are in [social] networks, and a sweet spot for diversity that's going to encourage maximum creativity and provide maximum ability for us to realize our potential.

G: Do we know whether habits and attitudes are transmitted through digital social networks like Facebook or Twitter in the same way as real-world social networks?

JF: These online networks are the same but different. Health behaviors spread between deep social contacts. We shouldn't expect our 110 Facebook friends to have as strong an influence on us as our five or six closest friends. But we've started looked at the structure of the networks of in terms of who's smiling in profile pictures as opposed to who's not smiling. If you just look at Facebook friends, there's no pattern. But if you restrict that network to picture friends-and by "picture friends" I mean people who've tagged you in a photo and whom you've tagged in a photo-suddenly we're back down to an average of five or six people, just like the five or six close social contacts in real life, and suddenly we do find associations in the profile pictures that people put up for themselves. We're going to be collecting a lot of data from Facebook. But you have to figure out who someone's real friends are.

G: Are there any lessons I should take about how I choose my friends or the responsibility I have for other people's health?

JF: One thing people think about is, "If I'm being affected by all these people out there then what happens to free will?" I'm just a piece of flotsam floating on these waves. I tell them that just as they influence you, you influence them. If you tell someone that they don't influence anybody they're not going to take any responsibility for their actions. But if you tell them that they influence 1,000 people, I think it suddenly changes the way they see the world.

Photo by flickr user (cc) saneboy

A Heartwarming Work of Edifying Genius

Morgan Clendaniel — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:00:21 PST

Valentino Deng, the central figure in Dave Eggers's What Is the What, is turning the dream of education into a reality for Sudanese youth.

In What Is the What, Dave Eggers chronicled the Job-like trials of one of the "lost boys of Sudan," a young man named Valentino Deng. Deng escaped the Sudan and made it to the United States, where he met Eggers, who turned his story into the award-winning book. With the funds from the book's successful run, Deng and Eggers started the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation. Deng has since returned to the Sudan to lead the foundation's first project, the building of a school in Deng's village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan, the first secondary school in the region. Deng returned a trip to the United States last month, in an attempt to raise money to pay for the construction of more buildings at the school, including a girl's dormitory.

GOOD: So, is the second phase of construction done?

VALENTINO DENG: It is an ongoing effort. But we have just finished quite a good number of buildings. We opened the school in May. We have nearly 100 students enrolled and taking classes. We have four teachers. We brought in volunteer teachers from the U.S., Canada, and New Zeland during the summer, and then we are continuing with our construction.

G: What classes do you offer?

VD: It's everything: math, chemistry, physics, agriculture, history, and English grammar and composition.

G: What is the ratio of male to female students? I imagine enrolling girls isn't easy.

VD: It's one of our most challenging tasks. I wanted to admit 50 percent girls to our school. But I am faced with challenges. Most of these young females work so hard in their communities. They are the ones who fetch water for their families. They have to go to the well and carry water on their heads. You can imagine how much work that is to fetch water for showers and for cooking and for washing utensils. After school, the girls have to pound grain and cook for the family. These girls have to go to the forest to collect firewood. They have to look after their younger siblings. They have to do homework. Many families are not willing to send girls to school. And many of these girls are faced with the cultural practice of being married off before they finish primary school. So to protect them, we are building a girl's dormitory for them, to give them a more conducive learning environment. They only go back to their families during the holidays. And then on campus we will have academic programs for them so they can focus on their studies. That's challenging. With the current economy, I'm not able to raise funds to do that. That building isn't even started. That's why I'm on this tour, to raise money.

G: So that's your big priority?

VD: It's my big priority. These young women have to be given access to education, they have to be protected. Maybe after high school they will have grown to be responsible young women. Now they are still so fragile and innocent.

G: When you were thinking about how to go back and help your village, what made you pick a school?

VD: Southern Sudan is coming out from war. Many people were denied access to education. It's been difficult for the government to explain its policies to the people because the literacy rate is so low. If I educate young people, we will have opened their minds and they can in return realize their potential talent. I want to be engaged in something that can bring about a better future for the country. We hope our students can continue to universities. We will educate doctors, teachers, nurses, businessmen. Education is one of the methods of maintaining peace. Another reason is that the government of Southern Sudan and multilaterals that are investing in education have established thousands of primary schools, but little was being done about secondary school education. And we have to do something about that. I could not wait until I had the resources and the connections to do that.

G: Are you seeing effects already? Is it improving the community?

VD: It is. The money we invested in construction went to the local market. I am already seeing tea shops and more supplies in the market. We are the largest employer in the area. I see some shops started by the school, [where] the students buy tea and breakfast, supporting the community. And then I told you about people resigning to government to go back to school. That is how much people value education. I see students running and smiling, happy to be in school.

G: When you finish this next round of construction, what's next?

VD: I want to replicate this project. If you give me millions of dollars, I will build you 10 of these schools. We have 10 states. We can build 10 in each state. But I am patient, but I know that it takes time. This school will help us learn a lot, and then we can go on to build schools in other locations.

Stop Feeding Your Garbage Can

Adam Starr — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:09:00 PST

Talking to the chef of America's least wasteful restaurant

Of the 350 billion pounds of food produced in America each year, we throw away a gut-wrenching 98 billion pounds, 98 percent of which ends up in landfills. According to the EPA, landfills are the largest human-related source of methane in the United States, accounting for 34 percent of all methane emissions. Methane from landfills is generated when organic food waste decomposes under anaerobic conditions. Our rotting food is therefore a major contributor to global climate change. The retail food industry, which includes restaurants, is responsible for 54 billion pounds of this waste, and hemorrhages $44 billion a year in wasted food. Fortunately, a few chefs are working to reverse this trend.

Leading the charge against food wastefulness are chef Russ Moore and his wife Allison Hopelain, the co-owners of Camino, a restaurant in Oakland, California. They recently sat down with GOOD to discuss conservation, great food, and the steps they take to avoid wasting a single leaf of lettuce or a biodynamic drop of wine.

GOOD: Why is it important for you to use everything?

RUSS MOORE: Everything we use has value. Someone harvested it, someone grew it, someone cared about it. Most restaurants buy in bulk; they get these cheap standardized products. Our carrots come from a farmer and are not all the same size and shape; they take longer to work with, they require more skill and attention to cook properly. These are the best products as far as taste and flavor, but also the best in terms of the standards for how they were sustainably raised, grown, and harvested.

G: Is the recent attention to understanding the entire food process changing how you cook?

RM: I should stress [that] nothing is new here. This is all really old. It is classic French style; it's how you were supposed to use all of the food you had available. Using everything is a challenge and part of being a chef. It's part of what you are supposed to do.

G: What are some ways to maximize your ingredients?

RM: If I cook a vegetable in water, I'm not going to throw away that water. That vegetable has imparted great flavor, so I'll use the juices and extracts left over from, say, my artichoke water. Maybe I'm baking an egg with cardoons and mushrooms; I know that my little bit of artichoke juice from the left-over water will make sense with that egg, so I take a cazuela [a Spanish clay dish], add olive oil and the leftover juice, and then put the egg on top. I cook it in the fire, baking the egg from above in the air and below in the liquid.

Eggs are precious. We can't get as many of the Soul Food farm eggs in the winter so we have to use them all well. Say you need egg yokes to make a mayonnaise; most places just throw the egg whites away. We'll use the whites to make a meringue or give them to the bartenders to make frothy drinks.

G: How does this waste-conscious process impact your planning?

RM: We change the menu when we have a lot of something left, and we try to manage the ebb and flow of extra ingredients with creative recipes. We break down whole pigs ourselves, and render all the scraps. Recently, we had too much lard. I wasn't going to use any other fat until I used this up so we put it in seasonal cookies and donuts and the house sauerkraut. It's not just the lard of course. We'll make rillette; we'll bread and fry the head and trotters [feet] and make fritters. Tonight we'll boil pig tongues, confit some turnip greens, and smear them on toast.

G: Do you repurpose other animal proteins the same way you maximize a whole pig?

RM: Yes, with ducks. We do our potatoes cooked in duck fat. Some restaurants buy duck fat; that's a crime against humanity, a crime against ducks. If you buy a whole duck there is so much extra fat that you can easily render and save. The duck is just rich in resources. Take the giblets. Salt them, cook them confit (in their own rendered fat), and they can last for 6 months.

G: How do restaurants reconcile cost versus quality versus effort? Is there more to the mathematics of planning a menu this way?

RM: Lots of restaurants buy cheap processed meat or pork that's already broken down. It costs pennies in real life, but the taste isn't good and I don't want to miss out on the other stuff you get with the entire animal: the bones and the offal. Also, you should make sauces for the meat you are cooking with the bones and parts of that same animal. As a restaurant you either have to buy cheaper stuff or maximize every part of everything you are buying.

We consider pork per pound and consider each pound equally. We don't differentiate the value of, say, pork bone, or pork head, from filet, or loin or shoulder. We use all of it and we cook all of it. We use all of it every time.

G: How do you avoid tossing the typical scraps of fruits and vegetables?

RM: We use a lot of stuff that usually gets thrown away. For example, we make herb jam from the discarded lettuce leaves, fennel, the tougher outer parts of our greens, the lower leaves of an oregano plant; we cook them all down together and add garlic, cumin, and olives and make it into a paste: herb jam. We take quince, apple, and peach cores and peals, and we make our own infusions of brandy. We make our own bitters too, because regular bitters are full of preservatives and chemicals. We'll use the syrup that is left over from poaching quince or huckleberry or cherries and give it to the bartenders to mix seasonal cocktails or use it in desserts. The grapes in our wines are all organic or biodynamic. I cooked at Chez Panisse for a long time and was also their produce buyer. So I have always needed to appreciate the quality of the products I was buying.

G: What are some of the more innovative ways to avoid waste?

ALLISON HOPELAIN: If people don't finish wine at the bottom of the bottle, we'll consolidate all the leftover bottles at the end of the night and pour it into a wood barrel. A few months later we have house-made red wine vinegar.

RM: Our salt, for instance, is really expensive, many times more expensive than normal salt. Most restaurants use kosher salt. Ours is a coarse, minerally Celtic sea salt, and we use it for everything. It tastes a lot better and it's better for you, so we train the cooks not to throw any of it on the ground, not to toss it on oil spills. We can only afford it if we don't waste any of it.

AH: It's not just the food. Our table is made from a tree that fell down in a storm. All the chairs and benches are used church chairs and pews. The still and sparkling table water bottles were originally gin bottles from an artisanal distiller; after we used the gin we repurposed the bottles. We also carbonate our water with a machine so we don't have to use any new water bottles.

G: You cook everything over an enormous wood fire. That must consume a lot of wood.

AH: Our firewood is all orchard prunings, so they don't have to cut down trees. We still use it conservatively; the peppers for dinner were all cooked on the embers from brunch.

G: Is conserving food and celebrating the product to this degree something that is unique about Camino?

RM: We didn't open a restaurant just to save and preserve, but we don't throw anything away at home either; we compost everything. It's hard because you have to create a lot of systems, and it creates more work. But it seems impossible for us not to be doing this. If we are going to have this one small restaurant then we think we should be able to do things right, and make it a good place, not be needlessly wasting anything. A lot of it has to do with personal connections, with actually going to someone's farm that you know. Farmers work harder than us, that is hard work. We don't want to throw any of that work away, someone grew it. Someone sloshed around in the dirt and the rain for this food, the least we can do is serve it well.

Photos by Shing Wong.

When the Streets Have No Names

Morgan Clendaniel — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:00:04 PST

Talking to the director John Hillcoat on his staggering new film, The Road.

Cormac McCarthy's award-winning novel, The Road, depicts an unnamed man and his son on the run through a world destroyed by some unnamed disaster. Food is scarce, and roving bands of cannibals scour the countryside for survivors. This week, the movie adaptation hits theaters. While incredibly bleak, the film is oddly appropriate for Thanksgiving, as it reveals the most beautiful underpinnings of our humanity-our capacity to love and to be loved, even amid abject depravity. GOOD talked to John Hillcoat, the film's director, about what might cause the apocalypse, the necessity of gun ownership, and whether we're already being eaten alive by corporations.

GOOD: Was it hard to work on a movie this bleak? Did it bleed into your personal life at all?

JOHN HILLCOAT: I never saw it that way, so I never had any problem. To me, it's a love story. The apocalypse is drama. It's setting a scene, putting characters under pressure to create conflict so that you discover something about them. Admittedly, Cormac [McCarthy] is very precise with how quickly we can slide under pressure into our lowest state. But as he's said, the book is about human goodness and kindness, and so I always saw it as a beautiful thing, as opposed to this bleak thing.

G: Even in light of the apocalypse?

JH: That's just the background, the scenery. The apocalypse has been around since before the Greeks. Every generation has had its apocalyptic stories. What is the worst fear for mankind? The end of the world. However, in our age right now, the fears are starting to compound. There's been a wave upon wave. There is the environment, terrorism, all this stuff that's come to the doorstep now. But a lot of the world has already been living the apocalypse. I mean, the homeless; when all your possessions are in a shopping trolley and you're trying to live out in the street. If you're in Iraq, or in the Twin Towers, or if you're surviving Katrina. There is a reality out there, but not on a global scale. I think the greater the obstacles, the more special it is when people are able to survive and make choices.

G: The Road has been called "the most important environmental book ever written." But the cause of the disaster is left unexplained. Is the environmental perspective something you considered when designing what the post-apocalypse world would look like?

JH: The great thing about the book is the way that you can project into it. Even to the extreme of the characters not having names. And, likewise, with the big event. To me, [the environment] is the overwhelming issue right now. It's catching up with us. Seeing how powerful nature is is really something, but I didn't want to spell that out. Nuclear terrorism could jumpstart things. Or something that just comes out of the blue, like a meteorite. If you're the last people trying to survive, how it happens is irrelevant. But there is that element of the wakeup call, reminding us how vulnerable and how special we are. This is why Thanksgiving is the perfect release date, to remind us of basic things. I think there is a lot to be said for really basic things, like goodness and kindness, that we completely forget. I think there is a moral. It's a parable. It's meant to be some kind of reminder for us.

G: It's a bit ironic how closely this film follows on the heels of the bombastic apocalypse in 2012, isn't it?

JH: It seems to be a zeitgeist out there. But they're very different approaches.

G: Yours is the more realist.

JH: I think, with the book, there is great humanity there. It's really about who we are, what's important, as opposed to the roller coaster ride. Although, it has that.

G: So, coming out of the movie, the first thing I did was call my dad.

JH: That's great.

G: But then the second thing was that I was thinking, I might need to get a gun. It just struck me that the gun was so helpful to the Man and the Boy. And it made me reconsider a lot of what I think about guns.

JH: So you're packing now?

G: Not yet. But I want to know if that was something you considered. It just seemed so integral to their survival.

JH: I think that's more to do with the mythology and what Cormac writes about, which in some ways it's a new frontier, it's like the Wild West. It's survival. All those frontiers, whether they're in the future or the past or happening right now, they're always rife with extreme conflict. But your first response is what I hope carries through, as opposed to a lot of people arming themselves to the teeth. I don't think its come to that yet.

G: There is quite a bit of religious imagery, especially a pivotal scene in a church. Was that intentional? Did you consider this a religious parable? Or am I reading too much into it?

JH: The church was just one of the locations. We looked at a lot of photographs of major conflicts, like the second World War. I saw this image of a bombed out church, and what interested me was the change of things and their meaning to this whole other extreme. It's an abandoned place, where people aren't coming together to worship. Quite the opposite. It's interesting how things change. At the moment, the most powerful things on the planet are corporations. Yet, things could change so that they're totally meaningless. That's one positive thing about the apocalypse. Getting rid of corporate cannibalism.

G: And replacing it with literal cannibalism?

JH: Well, I don't know which is worse. But going back to the church: People can read different things. It can read on a mythic level or just appear on the human level, which is how I was approaching it. A story about human goodness can be a metaphor for so many things, whether it's just the better side of humanity or some higher power. We didn't want to hammer home any definitive answer there. You know, the book is the most translated book of modern time, and I think that's because of the different levels you can read into it.

--

Header photo by Javier Aguirresarobe © The Weinstein Company, 2009; Hillcoat photo by Macall Polay, 2929/Dimension Films, 2009.

Oren Moverman Shot The Messenger

Patrick James — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:00:01 PST

A conversation with the director of a powerful new film about notifying families of our war dead.

The Messenger tells the tale of a young soldier, played by Ben Foster (Six Feet Under, 3:10 to Yuma), who has just returned from a brutal tour of duty in Iraq. After he is charged with the task of notifying families when their sons and daughters die overseas, Foster's character finds himself strangely connected to one of the widows he notifies, played by Samantha Morton, and he struggles with the ethical and emotional fallout of those feelings. The film (which GOOD helped develop and produce) was directed by Oren Moverman, (who wrote Jesus' Son for the screen and co-wrote I'm Not There). He was kind enough to speak to us about the unique challenge of making a military film during war time.

GOOD: The film focuses on soldiers played by Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster, whose job it is to notify the next of kin when a soldier dies at war. You've described the film as not being about the horrors of war, but about something else. What do you mean by that?

OREN MOVERMAN: I was referring to the bigger picture of what the movie's about, thinking that while it is a movie set against the backdrop of the military during war time. What goes on in the movie is actually really universal because the truth of the matter is that we all get notified. We all get news that someone we love has died or we tell other people and people find out about us. I was just making the point that the movie addresses something that people can relate to regardless of the military context.

G: Sure, the experience universal, but the context is specific. How did the actors prepare themselves to give those notifications?

OM: We did a trip to Washington D.C., where we went to Walter Reed Medical Center, to Arlington Cemetery, to a notification center in Arlington. We spoke with soldiers who have done notifications and been to war. We got their perspective. We got to interact with them. But the actual notification scenes were actually scenes we didn't rehearse, and we didn't prepare in the traditional sense.

G: Why?

OM: We wanted to capture something very raw in those scenes. We separated Ben and Woody from the people they were going to notify, so they never got a chance to talk about what each side would do. We threw everyone off set so we could shoot in every direction, so nobody new what we were going to shoot. We encouraged the actors to go off script. And we shot long takes: When the scene started, we started rolling, and when the scene ended, we stopped. So there was no interruption. Basically, it's the kind of thing you can't prepare for in life, so can't prepare for it in acting. It's just trying to create a raw, immediate moment, where people receive the worst news they can possibly get: how would you react? How would move in that space? All those things were left open.

G: Ben Foster's character, also, is pretty unprepared to deliver that news.

OM: The challenges were the same with all these roles, really. On the one hand, it was to make them as realistic as possible for the world that they were moving in. On the other hand, you wanted to make it work in the way a movie should work. The challenge was actually to find that balance and tone, to were military people can watch this and find it a good representation of what they're going through, and civilians would watch and say, This is something I didn't know about. When you're working off things that are happening right now, you have to be very careful and gentle about how far you're going to push them.

G: What has the response been from the military community?

OM: The response has been very strong. We've had all kinds of soldiers watch the movie. Generally we've received a lot of gratitude. It's very humbling to hear them talk about our portrayal of what they're going through. They seem to appreciate the fact that we put the spot light on them to make their story heard.

G: Was that a cause of fear or stress for you-how the soldiers might view the film?

OM: Yeah, you always worry about that, but you have to just put it out of your mind and make the movie. The thing is you know you're going to have a mix of audiences, so you have to just concentrate on making the movie as truthful as possible, and making it as honest as possible, and making it work as a movie. Then, the audience part-getting people to see and react to it-that's a whole other mystery.

G: There are some very complicated relationships in the film. One of those relationships is between Ben Foster's character and Samantha Morton's, whom Foster notifies of her husband's death. Can you talk about what the characters are up against there?

OM: Well, what we tried to do is hard to explain, not only for us, but also for the characters. If you asked them about finding each other, they could try to explain it, but they wouldn't be able to articulate it. The truth of the matter is, it's impossible to explain the thing that draws any two people together. In this particular case, they don't know what the relationship is. And that level of mystery has them very interested in one another; there's a strong pull happening, an odd dance between them. Ultimately, her character gets to tell her story just like he does. That was one of the most important things, to almost stop the movie, to listen to the widow, because there are thousands and thousands of stories like this.

The messenger is currently showing in New York City. For a list of openings around the country head here.

Photos courtesy of Oscilloscope. Header: Woody Harrelson (left) and Ben Foster; middle: director Oren Moverman; lower: Ben Foster (left), Jahmir Duran-Abreau, and Samantha Morton.

Action, In Words and Pictures

Joe Ippolito — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:00:06 PST

A new book looks at the surprising and inspiring ways people of all stripes can affect social change.

With his new book Actions Speak Loudest, Bob McKinnon has brought together some disparate names to explain how change is fueled by action-not just talk. From Newt Gingrich to Donovan McNabb, Jeffrey Sachs to Jimmy Carter, the book illustrates the many ways in which changemakers leave their mark. McKinnon also heads up Yellowbrickroad, a communications and marketing company that promotes social change through programming, communications, advocacy, and action. We sat down with him to talk about his new book.

GOOD: What inspired the book?

Bob McKinnon: We all have this implicit promise to leave the world a better place for our children. Generally, over the course of previous generations, we've been able to keep good on that promise-but what the data now points to is that we may not make good on that promise. We may actually be creating the first generation of children to lead shorter, unhappier, unhealthier lives than their parents, which, in a country with the resources, ingenuity, and the brainpower that we have, is sort of an unacceptable outcome. So the thought was "What do we need to do to draw a little more attention to this promise and the issues that affect it?"

G: And what did you come up with?

BM: We have a short attention span in terms of being able to deal with multiple issues at one time; we've got an "issue of the month" mentality. We talk about childhood obesity for a while or maybe climate change gets a lot of attention. We don't treat them holistically. Our point was to talk about these issues in one project and for us to show how connected they really are. We then wanted to give people some very specific things to act on in the hopes that small actions can accumulate into something much bigger and more powerful.

G: The book has a lot of contributors. How did you pick what to include?

BM: We wanted to select contributors who had demonstrated an action-oriented approach. There's a wonderful Helen Keller quote we use in the book: "All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming." That's what these people represent. So, our contributors range from Jeffrey Sachs to Jimmy Carter, Rachel Ray to Dave Eggers. Some of them are household names, but there are also people who have experienced the issues that we're talking about and have a very firsthand knowledge. For example, there's one written by Richard Castaldo, who was paralyzed at Columbine. I think those are some of the best essays in the book.

When you look at the contributors and what they share in common, these are people who reached into the muck and mire of life and made something more beautiful-a better outcome.

G: The book also has a companion website where you're encouraging user-generated content.

BM: We wanted it to be a resource, so if people are interested in the work of our contributors or the organizations that are listed in the book, they get more information about what these organizations are doing and how you can get involved directly. We also created a widget, which scrolls through the different actions that are encompassed within the book so every time you visit the site, you can be inspired to do something very immediate. People can tell us about their own actions, about what they've done to make the world a better place. It's been a great way to allow people to demonstrate how their actions are speaking loudest.

G: Who are you hoping to reach with the book?

BM: People who love social change and have an interest in a broad variety of issues. Juan Williams, who contributed both a chapter and the foreword, said two really cool things about the book: One is that a person who has this book in their hands is a dangerous American because they're empowered to make change. The other thing that he said is that when you look at the contributors and what they share in common, these are people who reached into the muck and mire of life and made something more beautiful-a better outcome.

Buy Actions Speak Loudest here.

The Kids Are All Right

Siobhan O'Connor — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:28:46 PST

Ten9Eight, a new documentary by Mary Mazzio, looks at how turning kids into budding businesspeople may be the antidote to the dropout crisis.

When President Obama delivered his stay-in-school speech, reminding students for the umpteenth time that they can't all grow up to be rappers and basketball players, he caused a stir. It sparked overblown controversy, but it also brought into the national conversation the fact that every year, 1.2 million kids drop out of school-or, one every nine seconds. It's a shamefully high number, which is why filmmaker Mary Mazzio focused her lens on the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship program in her new uplifting new documentary Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon. NFTE is a program that helps students from low-income communities learn skills that will actually help them more forward in life-preventing them from dropping out in the process. Her film, which opens today, offers a dynamic picture of inner-city life, following a handful of kids as they compete in NFTE's business-plan competition, all the way to the nationals. We asked her a few questions about the process.

GOOD: The competition starts with tens of thousands of kids. How did you choose who to focus on?

Mary Mazzio: The competition starts in the classroom, then it goes to the school, then it's cities, states…. I waited until it was regional, it was down to 1,000 kids: I saw all of them, and to be honest, I wanted to follow all of them. It was unbelievably hard to choose. I originally wanted to just do six kids, but that was almost impossible. I thought, I can't just do six kids! So I then looked for kids I thought would win, and who had compelling and diverse stories of the inner city.

G: You seemed to go to great lengths to paint a dynamic and upbeat picture of the inner city.

MM: So many stories that come out, and so many documentaries, it's so effing bleak, and it's all stereotypes. I didn't know much about inner-city life going in so I learned a lot in the process. And one thing I learned was that for all the Rodneys [a character] in the film, who are so sweet and aspirational-there were hundreds or thousands of kids just like him and they need so little. All they need is a good education. This program isn't the be-all end-all, but this is a pretty great tool in the anti-dropout toolkit.

G: Because kids are learning things that are relevant to their everyday lives?

MM:
G: What, that kids stay in school?

MM: No, that they're given a reason to be excited about school. Instead of losing a generation of kids, we do something about it. These are tomorrow's job creators. They can help take us out of the recession: they have the chutzpah, the smarts, the energy, they just have no money.

G: Right, but since not everyone can win, I guess the idea is more that it gives kids a sense of what is possible. What did you think of Obama's stay-in-school speech a couple of months ago?

MM: Oh my god. It shocked me with the controversy it created. I was stunned. I think we're so polarized in this country that it's paralyzing for the nation. But here's the one thing about this film: I am as left as they get-full disclosure-but I have been getting calls from all kinds of folks on the right, about how excited they are about this film. Here is a common ground, because it's business, and it's "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," and that makes sense to someone on the right, and someone on the left. The idea of creating your own opportunity is appealing to the right, but opportuinity and education to me are nonpartisan issues.

G: Or, they should be.

MM: The message about teaching people to be entrepreneurial is nonpartisan. Tom Friedman wrote an editorial recently about how you can't just be good at what you do, you have to be entrepreneurial and you have to be an innovator. We call it "entrepreneurial" in the film but really it's about teaching kids and encouraging them to be innovators.

G: The bootstraps argument can be a little contentious when you're talking about kids, though, because it can be argued they can only do as much as they are set up to do. Not every kid gets to go through this program.

MM: Well that's the point: Every kid needs this kind of education. The second goal of this movie is for policymakers and people in positions of influence to say "Whoa, this kind of education is life changing. Why isn't this in every high school economics curriculum?" Why is it-and let me get on my soap box real quick-that you have to go to a vocational school to learn quote-unquote business. That is ridiculous. When you have a generation of people, especially women, who can't balance their own check book, who don't know what a 401(k) is, and you have to go to a vocational school to learn that? It is so backwards that to learn financial literacy you have to go out of your way. The issues have to be taught to our kids.

G: And that's what this program teaches them?

MM: It's innovation and financial literacy. It is my hope that the people who serve these kids to realize how aspirational they are, and that they only need a little bit of water! What is that water? This kind of education so they don't drop out.

G: You have said you want to make sure kids to see it. How will they?

MM: We signed this innovative arrangement with AMC theatres. It's unprecedented to have a documentary in a multiplex-in an urban multiplex-and not just your arthouse cinemas for the NPR crowd. There [were] free screenings for kids and teachers on November 12, then there is a wider release. We're also having a screening at the Smithsonian in DC chaired by policymakers, people from treasury, and influencers. We are taking a multi-pronged approach.

Gabriel Echoles and Rodney Walker, pictured at top, were finalists in the competition. Photo by Richard Schultz. For more information visit Ten9eight.com.

Ten9Eight opens today in major cities.

Digital World Explorer

Andrew Price — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 06:00:38 PST

The digital ethnographer Michael Wesch on the dark side of social media, what we learned from Iran, and why the future of the web depends on human interests-not market interests.

As a graduate student in Papua New Guinea, Michael Wesch studied how the introduction of books and literacy changed government and society. Now, as a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch examines how digital media is changing human interaction. His YouTube video "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," has been viewed more than 10 million times and he has won several awards for his cutting edge work and his teaching. GOOD talked to Wesch about the dark side of social media, how Anonymous helped the protesters in Iran, and how we can prevent augmented reality from going wrong.

GOOD: You sometimes describe yourself as a digital ethnographer. What is this new field like?

MICHAEL WESCH: It's a big field and it's growing so fast that it's hard to pin down what it is and what to call it. Some people talk about cyberanthropology or virtual ethnography. Then, of course, there are all these other fields that are a lot like what we do. Media ecology, a lot of what media studies people do, and some of the things journalists are now doing look like digital ethnography. It's wonderfully undisciplined and that's what's so fun about it. When there gets to be a discipline for it I'll probably go find something else.

G: In your video "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" you say social media is going to force us to rethink big ideas like government and identity. Are we getting closer to understanding how they'll be rethought?

MW: Oh boy. This is really a profoundly difficult question. I think what comes across in those videos is a sense of optimism. But the spirit in which they were made was actually one of critical optimism. There's a dark side to social media.

G: What's the dark side?

MW: There's more engagement in social media by the entrenched powers we hoped it would subvert. So, for example, you know who's getting really good at the social media? Advertisers. When I first saw social media, I had this dream that "Okay, now we can save our young girls from the deleterious effects of body image in advertising," you know? But it's back in social media forms and it's kind of insidious.

G: But can't these technologies help us confront global challenges also?

MW: There are definitely a lot of movements in those directions. I don't know, though. What stuck in my mind as we were getting on the pessimistic kick is Iranian election protests. That's where you had a pretty impressive political push, helped along by social media. But at the same time there were a couple of flags raised in that moment. One was that nothing happened, really. The country still ended up in the same place. Secondly, the impact of social media may have been overblown, right? We were sitting there watching a trend on Twitter but it didn't take long for it to disappear off Twitter as soon as Michael Jackson died.

G: It was totally eclipsed. In a day. That was really discouraging.

MW: I'll tell you: I keep up with that event as a little case study, and there are some really harsh videos posted from Iran. Deaths happening and stuff. And I follow the comments. Today I checked the comments and there was one that said "This is why we have to annihilate all the Muslims." But the wording was less kind. A lot of "f-ing Muslims" and so on. So then it's like "Man, what do we have to do?" I'm in a moment of reflection right now. This first burst of hope and passion wasn't enough.

G: Could you argue that while the Twitter frenzy about Iran may not have changed the outcome, it still helped familiarize people outside the country with what's going on there?

MW: That's a good point. The hopeful side of this is that new media itself will create more of a culture of transparency. It's a lot harder to get away with things when you don't control the media completely. It's pretty amazing that even in a place like Iran they can't control the media and we see it a lot in China where there's subversion of the government controlled media. That's one of the exciting things.

We've been studying 4chan and Anonymous, which are sort of the dark holes of the internet. But they also have bright spots. These happen to be places where methods of maintaining anonymity are constantly being practiced and updated. Even though they often use that anonymity for nefarious activities, it filters back into things like the Iran protests. People in the 4chan community who knew how to keep people anonymous immediately reached out to protesters in Iran and offered them a bunch of washed servers that they could proxy through.

G: That's kind of awesome.

MW: Yeah, 4chan had been protesting Scientology and they basically copied the whole method they were using for Scientology, where they've also had to maintain anonymity, and moved it over to the Iran problem.

G: While we're on the subject, what do you think about the whole Scientology versus Anonymous confrontation?

MW: It's a fascinating thing to watch.

G: They're such different groups, but both a little crazy in their own ways.

MW: I think it was the exact right target for Anonymous and that's why it has sustained itself. Anonymous targets a lot of things. Usually it's a flash in the pan. It's like a three-hour ordeal and it's done. But for some reason, Scientology is the perfect nemesis for them and that's what makes it fun.

G: So a question of terminology: Are we still working with Web 2.0? Are we at Web 2.3? Where is this going?

MW: I think a lot of people are sick of the word "Web 2.0." Now "social media" is okay to say. But there's always been this trajectory. Web 3.0 people imagine as the semantic web. Web 4.0 is probably a mobile semantic web. And the technology for that is already here. You can hold up your iPhone with a certain app and you can actually see tweets coming at you from various locations.

G: This is what people call augmented reality.

MW: Right. You can imagine how useful augmented reality would be while you were shopping. You could take a picture of a bar code on a product and get all sorts of additional information. But this actually highlights one of the most important things about participation and media literacy. Let's just start with the basic fact that what we see through our screens is increasingly becoming part of everyday life. That's the next stage of the web: The world itself becomes a hyperlinkable object. There are now tiny pictures that can be put inside other pictures that you can't see but your phone can see. And they're essentially URLs. So every object that's produced in the next five years may actually have a URL in it. And that means you can take a picture of any object with your phone and get information about that product.

But here's the thing: If we have a certain amount of participation, the information you might get when you take a picture of a product will be information about how healthy it is, how healthy it is for the environment, how much people were paid to make the product, whether there were labor issues involved, all those things.

But if we don't have the participation and the literacy to make that happen, instead we'll have just a barrage of advertising, which is obviously biased towards selling the product. That's the problem. We need people with human interests and not market interests participating. That means people need to participate in their spare time and not when they're on the clock for some company. The hopeful vision is that we have enough literacy and participation to become a smarter planet, but that's going to require a push.

Photo (cc) of Wesch at Pop!Tech 2009 by Flickr user Kris Krüg.

AYM ’09: Moldova's “Twitter Revolution”

Erin Mazursky — Tue, 3 Nov 2009 07:00:20 PST

Interviews from the Alliance of Youth Movements summit: Natalia Morari.

On the 6th of April of this year, 15,000 Moldovans rallied in the streets the day after their national election to protest the Communist Party's rigged victory. It might have looked like any post-election protest in an emerging democracy but there was an important difference: This protest was organized entirely through new media-Twitter, email and text messages, and social networking sites. The number of peaceful protesters continued to grow over the course of a few days, and they eventually succeeded in upsetting the Communist Party's majority in parliament.

Guest blogger Erin Mazursky spoke with Natalia Morari, one of catalysts of the protests and keynote speaker at the recent Alliance of Youth Movements summit. Morari now leads ThinkMoldova, a platform to help young Moldovans take part in the future of their country.

ERIN MAZURSKY: How did you mobilize so many people in such a short period of time?

NATALIA MORARI: When the results were announced the day after the election, with the Communist Party as the winners, so many of my friends were saying they wanted to leave Moldova. The country was in mourning. So a few of us met up at a café to talk about what we might be able to do. We decided to do a flash mob that evening in the center of Chisinau, Moldova's capital city.

We immediately began sending out messages in every way we could-through Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS-with the message: "If you believe your vote was stolen, if you did not vote for the Communists, come to the center of the city." And people came. We are generally a quiet people, and tens of thousands in the street is a big deal.

EM: What is your hope for Moldova?

NM: My dream used to be to live and work in Moscow. I left for Russia in 2002, went to college there, and became a journalist. In 2007, I was arrested in Russia because I was writing about various corruption scandals. The experience made me come back to Moldova, and I realized that my place is there. I really want to do something great for my country's future and raise my children there.

So many young people leave for the West, get their degrees, and never come back, but these days more and more of these young people are coming back with the intent of making real change. My hope for this country is that together, these young people can help shape a better future.

EM: How is ThinkMoldova helping to make this happen?

NM: ThinkMoldova is currently creating a platform for young, educated people interested in politics, economics, and social life to come back and talk about how we can best develop the country, and who are willing to start working on the issues in our country when they are young. We are bringing in people from all over the world who have helped shape progress in their own countries on issues from tax reform to infrastructure building so that we can learn from others' experiences and apply it to Moldova.

EM: How is this generation, the so-called Millennial generation, different from generations past?

NM: The only thing that's different about our generation is that we have this great opportunity to feel like we are a part of the big world. If I were born in Moldova 100 years ago, I never would have seen other European countries or dreamed about visiting America. Now, we can travel all over the world sitting just in front of a laptop. We have more freedom of expression, a greater access to information, and new experiences just because we can communicate with each other through the internet.

It's a question of who uses this information and to what ends, of course, but you are not just born in your country. Our generation isn't confined to our respective nationalities-American, British, Moldovan-we are global-Americans, global-British, global-Moldovans. We have more possibilities now, and I think that's great.

EM: What was your favorite part of your experience at the Alliance of Youth Movements summit?

NM: It was really crazy to meet someone like Oscar Morales, who mobilized 12 million people around the world against the FARC, or a kid like Shubham Kanodia, who is just fourteen, who made a great social movement in India after the Mumbai attacks. The most interesting thing was to find how similar we were and know that, for example, someone who was in Ecuador is experiencing different problems but driven by the same principles. All these people were young and all these people do believe that they can make real changes. To feel like we were all connected was the great thing about A.Y.M.

Erin is a proud member of the Millennial generation, an independent nonprofit and political consultant, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a contributor to the GOOD column Canapés and Kalashnikovs.

Philanthrocapital Gains

Patrick James — Mon, 2 Nov 2009 10:30:27 PST

The Economist's Matthew Bishop weighs in on Bill Clinton, Dambisa Moyo, microfinance, and the state of philanthropy.

The first edition of Matthew Bishop and Michael Green's Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World was released, as Bishop puts it, on the morning of the global economic collapse. The book, which outlines the changing landscape of philanthropy and offers a prescription for effective giving through business acumen, was received well by critics but its timing was less than opportune. It did however find a fan in former President Bill Clinton, who penned the forward to the paperback edition, available November 12, which includes new chapters on philanthropic innovation in the age of Obama, and the state of giving in the wake of the economic crisis. GOOD talks to Matthew Bishop, who co-authored the book with Michael Green and is also a writer for The Economist, about the changing landscape of philanthropy, the importance of responding to critics of aid, and whether the end of poverty is just a pipe dream.

GOOD: We've had a model for giving that goes back to Rockefellers and Carnegies. What are the shortcomings of traditional philanthropy, and how does it differ from what you call philanthrocapitalism?

MATTHEW BISHOP: The shortcomings with much traditional philanthropy are not applicable to the Carengies and Rockefellers, which are in some ways first generation models for philantrocapitalism. The problem is more with foundations that have grown up in the second half of the 20th century where the founder hasn't been engaged, so they've become rather bureaucratic organizations with a scattergun approach, without really enough focus on sustained long term impact-a program-related rather than a capacity building approach. If you look at Rockefeller, who was kind of a philanthrocapitalist 1.0, he had what he called scientific philanthropy: Analyze the underlying problem in society, and use a long-term, strategic, business-like approach over many years to come up with a solution. Gates's effort to eradicate malaria would be a classic modern example.

G: The book was released on the eve of the global economic collapse-

MB: The morning of, more or less.

G: Right. What were the challenges of releasing a book about capitalism and philanthropy during that economic climate?

MB: The media in general lost all interest in philanthrocapitalism as a phenomenon, because all they wanted to know about was what's going wrong and how do we stop it from getting worse; where has all the money gone? But at the same time, there was an awareness that there was less money around, which means a greater willingness to look at collaboration and merging of nonprofits, which is becoming an opportunity rather than a disaster for philanthrocapitalism.

G: What's the biggest obstacle for the nonprofit world right now?

MB: There are too many small nonprofits that do very similar things, and not enough scaling up into big, efficient nonprofits. But, equally, part of that is due to the founders of nonprofits preferring to create their own entities rather than working with others to grow a really big, effective institution. [Most nonprofits] haven't invested in the management capacity to be effective they way you would in the business world.

G: In February, just after Davos, you wrote a piece for the Huffington Post explaining a modest proposal, as you put it, for the leaders of the world's 1,000 biggest firms to each put aside a year's salary to promote social entrepreneurship. What was behind that idea?

MB: The reason for that proposal was that we felt that, because of the crisis, capitalism had a real credibility problem. Sadly, there hasn't been a commitment. There's talk of Goldman Sachs making a contribution from their profits and bonuses as a response to criticism, but anything less than a few billion will be seen as tokenism. If they had done it in January or February, I think it would have been something that would have helped re-establish faith and trust in the leaders of the system. But that trust isn't really there at the moment.

G: Trust isn't there. But there are also problems of trust when it comes to aid. How do you respond to criticism of aid by someone like Dambisa Moyo?

MB: You know, Dambisa is a friend of mine. She's an incredibly talented economist, and she's reacting to what she has seen as an African woman in terms of the abuse of aid, so many of her criticisms are valid. Now, she's exaggerated: The idea that all aid is worthless is wrong. And the sad thing about her timing is that her book's release coincided with her own firm, Goldman Sachs, abandoning many of their investments in Africa. And this is a year when more aid was probably needed. The broader point is that Africa's future depends on its ability to generate jobs for itself. But the ecosystem, the infrastructure that makes jobs possible, is not going to happen spontaneously. You need to have some combination of government and private nonprofit money, what we call smart aid, coming in and actually building, making sure that government works more effectively. It would be better for her to say, How do we create better partnerships between philanthropy and government and private businesses to actually build that better Africa that is needed? Not dead aid but smart aid.

G: The new edition of your book champions things like Kiva, which GOOD has covered at length. How do you respond to the criticisms of microfinance that keep popping up this year?

MB: I think there's been some backlash because microfinance was being presented as a silver bullet for poverty, which no one who's really been involved in it over the years would claim. I was an adviser to the U.N. Year of Microcredit in 2005. One of the themes of that year was that the standard idea of a group of women in a village lending money to each other as a vehicle out of poverty, that while a lot of good had come out of it, that wasn't the primary demand of poor people. They want a much broader set of financial services, including just the ability to save and put your money in a safe place, and have insurance against things like extreme weather conditions that would threaten a harvest. I think the exciting thing is that we're starting to see those services developed, not in the least because of cell phones technology, which is becoming a sort of payment system in the poor world, and is allowing innovation. There's massive demand for financial services. In that sense, this backlash against microfinance is fighting a war that was over years ago.

G: Do you think that there's a realistic timeframe for seeing an end to global poverty?

MB: I think in terms of for-profit development work, next year is going to be very big. SKS Microfinance, which is an Indian microfinance for-profit company invested in a venture capitalist firm, is going to go public, and I think is going to be the breakthrough moment, where people realize you can actually make a profit by delivering these bottom of the pyramid services and do good at the same time. That will be the take-off moment for a whole series of investments in that space. To my earlier discussion of Dambisa's work, I don't think you'd get those business models without people doing the philanthropic work first, because you have to figure out how you develop markets and create and environment where people have the confidence in the business model. But I think you could have dramatic progress through those models in the next 10 years or so.

AYM ’09: A STAND Against Genocide

Erin Mazursky — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:00:12 PDT

Interviews from the Alliance of Youth Movements summit: Daniel Teweles.

STAND, the student-led arm of the Genocide Intervention Network, began in 2004 as an effort to end the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Now STAND works not just to end mass atrocities in places like Sudan, Burma, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but to prevent them, and has grown to include 800 active chapters in high schools and colleges nationwide, making it one of the largest student organizations in the country. Guest blogger Erin Mazursky sat down with Daniel Teweles, STAND's National Student Coordinator, during the Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City to talk about the Millennial generation-people born after 1980-and how to get through to senators.

ERIN MAZURSKY: So, you get to work with some incredibly passionate students doing very important work. What do you like most about your job?

DANIEL TEWELES: Hands down, making connections between seemingly disparate people. Everyone can get behind the work that we're doing whether it's high school students in Kansas or nursing students in New Jersey.

EM: Can you tell us about an upcoming project to look out for?

DT: What I'm most excited about is our Pledge2Protect campaign, specifically the pledge on camera partnership with Witness. It's the first time video has been used for advocacy on this scale. On the last day of our upcoming conference, taking place in a couple of weeks here in Washington, D.C., we're sending people up to Capitol Hill to meet with all 100 senators. With them will be a video of constituents from each of their districts. We are replacing the talking policy heads that are usually talking about these issues with the Senator's high school science teacher, their biggest donor, the mayor of their town.

EM: We hear a lot about the Millennial generation being geared towards making a difference. Do you think is there is something unique about this generation of youth?

DT: Yes and no. I don't think there's anything unique about this generation, but I think there's something unique in the time that they're growing up and the tools available to them. What happens 10,000 miles away affects us now. In the past we wouldn't have known about it or wouldn't have known to care, but now we have the tools to be connected and to act.

EM: STAND has been a force against genocide for the last five years. How do you keep the momentum going on a crisis that seems unending?

DT: What STAND does really well, and what helps our staying power, is that there's no typical genocide activist. We attract students of all ages and backgrounds, and as a result we're shaping future leaders-not just anti-genocide activists but activists in general.

EM: You were surrounded by 40 some like-minded youth at the summit in Mexico City. Name someone who made a big impression on you.

DT: Prashan de Visser from Sri Lanka Unites. Despite my work, I'm generally a cynic. It takes a lot to inspire me, but his life story and the work that he's doing is truly amazing. It's replicable, and can really be used as a model throughout the world. Seeing groups like that and the work of Jaime Carroll and Brian Center from A Better LA, where their work is scalable, challenged me to continue to think of new and innovative ways for social change. Seeing groups that are coming up with solutions that can be used everywhere was really cool.

Erin is a proud member of the Millennial generation, an independent nonprofit and political consultant, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a contributor to the GOOD column Canapés and Kalashnikovs.

Three Years of Silent Retreat

Patrick James — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:03:26 PDT

A conversation with one of the West's only female lamas, Christie McNally.

In late 2010, in the sun scorched highlands of Arizona's Chirakawa Mountains, some 50 Buddhist students will embark on a retreat. For three years, three months, and three days, they will have no contact with the outside world, and they will not speak a word. The retreat will be lead by Lama Christie McNally, one of the only women in the world to carry the title of "lama" (or teacher), and Geshe Michael Roach. (The Buddhist degree of geshe is comparable to a doctorate in the United States.) McNally and Roach are the founders of Diamond Mountain, a school some 100 miles from Tucson which is modeled after Buddhist monastic tradition, and which is not far from where the retreat will take place. Earlier this month, while Lama McNally was visiting the Asian Classics Institute of Los Angeles's Mahasuka Center to teach from and talk about her book, The Tibetan Book of Meditation, she spoke to GOOD about what would move someone to take a vow of silence for three years, and what it's like when those three years are up.

GOOD: A lot of people might be surprised to learn of retreats like this in the United States. You've spoken before about how, in this country, mastery of a craft or practice isn't widely pursued. This sort of retreat seems, to me at least, like an attempt to achieve mastery of meditation. Could you speak to that?

CHRISTIE McNALLY: In cultures like India or in previous times, people had traditions of apprenticeship. They'd want to be a blacksmith, so they'd spend 12 years at the feet of a master. By the time they were done, they became a master themselves. That's how people learned things in the old days, they would fully master them.

G: Which sounds quite different than, say, a semester long internship.

CM: Or even college in general. You see a teacher for a semester? And then you never see them again? In this culture, we dabble and we educate our children to be dabblers. That's what I did in college. I'd take this psychology class or that philosophy class, but there was no emphasis on going to your full potential. There's so much potential in everybody, but nobody is living up to it. But, when I was in the three-year retreat, meditating, and when I got to single-pointed concentration, finally, after many months of really pushing myself and really trying to master something-I didn't do anything else-I got to a certain level of meditation, a level of mastery. It was like feeling alive for the first time, like I had been half asleep this whole time, and finally, all of these synapses woke up, and I could really see the world. I think anybody could get to that level with a certain amount of effort. But in this society, we are anti-concentration: we surf the web all the time and our minds are going from this object to that object in a nanosecond. There's no tradition for just sitting down and keeping the mind on a single object. Maybe musicians. That can be a kind of mastery.

G: With music, though, people get hung up on the idea of talent, as if it's-

CM: Natural?

G: Yes, like if they're not instantly good they might never try.

CM: Yeah, they give up.

G: What about with meditation. Does talent factor in?

CM: Well, certain people will be naturally better than others, just like certain people will be naturally better at basketball. But the people with passion who really want to meditate will quickly and far surpass the people with natural talent who don't practice. The key to meditation is to do it every day.

G: Do people experience fear or doubt while they're going through the retreat?

CM: Sure, of course. Before they go into retreat, I think, is a major step. Trying to explain to all your family members that you're going to leave for three years, and not talk to them, and basically be dead to the world. They're like, why? Why would you leave me? But that's a good thing, because if you're not really sure in it, I don't think the three year retreat would be very useful.

G: Is there any sort of communication among people at retreat?

CM: It depends. When I did mine, I didn't have any communication to anyone at all, except for the caretakers. That was very limited. It was like "Get me more toilet paper." [laughs] We asked them not to send us any letters from anyone. We asked them not to send us any news. We didn't know about 9/11. It happened during our retreat and we found out a couple years later. They didn't tell us. I think we were the only ones on the planet who didn't know about it.

G: That's astounding. What was it like coming out of retreat?

CM: When you're in retreat, you're doing the same exact thing every day, in the same exact place every day. It's really freeing because your mind doesn't ever have to process any new data. Everything becomes really really subtle, and your inside world gets really huge. We weren't talking for three years. During the last month or so, people would come talk to us, because we had to learn how to talk again. The first time somebody came, we talked to them for a half an hour, and I went home and I slept for 11 hours straight; it was so exhausting. Later, when I first got out of retreat, it was like I could see everything about people by the way they carried themselves and the way they moved. I could tell all the things they were thinking-don't worry, I can't do that now. But, it was very difficult getting so much input, and it took me a while to learn how be with people again. In a way it was great, because I could look at someone and help them immediately. Still, today, I can see certain karmas that people need to work on, and that's the blessing of the retreat. But it's not as strong as it was when I first got out.

G: Did it change the way you communicated with people?

CM: Sure. Now, I can always tell when people are not telling the truth, and I always call them on it. I don't think I could say that before. It's very helpful as a teacher and have that capacity, for your students.

G: What about with your family?

CM: There was a little bit of distance at first. I felt almost like I was a new person, so much had changed. But we have so much love that transcends all that, and very quickly, my dad and I got to the place where we are now. At one point, at a book-signing in New York, he said to me, "I just realized that you're helping more people than everyone else I know combined will ever help in their lives." He was so proud, and that was so touching that he saw that in me.

Diamond Mountain photos courtesty of ACI-LA.

AYM ’09: Fighting the FARC with Facebook

Erin Mazursky — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:43:32 PDT

Interviews from the Alliance of Youth Movements summit: Oscar Morales.

From Obama's campaign fundraising to the election protests in Iran, we've all heard that Twitter and Facebook are rewriting the rules of public engagement. Guest blogger Erin Mazursky talked to participants at the Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City to find out how the nonprofit leaders of tomorrow are using technology.

Oscar Morales is one such leader. In January of 2008, he created a Facebook group called "Un Million Voces Contra Las FARC (One Million Voices Against the FARC)." One month later, he was organizing a 12-million person, 200-city protest against Colombia's violent guerrilla group. Mazursky talked to Morales about kidnappings, the importance of timing, and what makes this generation different.

ERIN MAZURSKY: You got 12 million people to turn out around the world to protest the violence of the FARC using Facebook. That's a pretty huge turnout. How did you do it?

OSCAR MORALES: The biggest thing was timing. We as Colombians have been attacked by the FARC for 40 years, and no one has said anything. It was due time. I got the idea to launch a Facebook group around the emerging story of Clara Rojos, who had been kidnapped by the FARC in 2002 and given birth to a son while in captivity. We couldn't believe that they kept the child and the mother inside the jungle. In 2007 FARC announced the liberation of Clara and her son. But they lied. Emmanuel had been abandoned in a clinic two years earlier. When the country found this out, the anger was uncontrollable.

As this story was unfolding, I decided to launch a Facebok group on January 4th called "Un Million Voces Contra las FARC" with the message "No more kidnapping. No more death. No more FARC." By January 5, we already had 2,000 members. By the 6th, we had 4,000.

We just kept growing exponentially, and we soon realized we needed to take the momentum from the internet to the streets. We were able to find volunteers in 200 cities around the world to organize marches.

EM: What was it like on the day of the march?

OM: It was such a magical day. We were tired and fed up with violence. It was like a national party of solidarity. It wasn't happy, but people were marching for peace with their families, dogs, cats. It was a celebration of peace and freedom without forgetting that people are dying in the jungle.

EM: So all of that happened almost two years ago. What now?

OM: Because of the incredible turnout, we gained a lot of respect and recognition from other groups, particularly around that region. Now we have formed the One Million Voices Foundation which works to give youth ways of engaging in civil society and making Colombia better so they don't take up arms and join the FARC. We have also joined forces with youth in Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela who deal with the same kinds of issues in their countries.

EM: What do you have in common with the other participants at the summit?

OM: A lot. It's very rewarding to know that we're not alone-that we have the same passion and activism and desire for freedom as others around the world.

EM: Do you feel like there is something different about this generation than generations past?

OM: My father and mother could never have imagined that they would be able to talk to people in Northern Ireland, Tokyo, Australia. Now all we need is internet access, and thank God access is available to more and more people every day.

Erin is a proud member of the Millennial generation, an independent nonprofit and political consultant, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a contributor to the GOOD column Canapés and Kalashnikovs.

AYM ’09: Getting Cuba Connected

Erin Mazursky — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:00:05 PDT

Interviews from the Alliance of Youth Movements summit: Roots of Hope.

From Obama's campaign fundraising to the election protests in Iran, we've all heard that Twitter and Facebook are rewriting the rules of public engagement. Guest blogger Erin Mazursky talked to participants at the Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City to find out how the nonprofit leaders of tomorrow are using technology.

Verónica Nur Valdéz and Felice Gorordo, ages 25 and 26 respectively, are the co-founders of Raices de Esperanza, or Roots of Hope, a U.S.-based organization that works to empower Cuban youth. Here, they tell Mazursky talked about new uses for old cell phones, Cuban bloggers, and the value of face-to-face communication.

ERIN MAZURSKY: What does Roots of Hope do?

ROOTS OF HOPE: We work to empower Cuban youth. We are not a political organization. Rather, we promote academic and cultural exchanges between youth in the United States and Cuban youth living in Cuba.

EM: What specific projects are you working on now?

RoH: We have two main flagships to our organization right now. Our Cell Phones for Cuba campaign collects used cell phones from the U.S. and sends them to Cuba. Per capita cell phone use in Cuba is on par with sub-Saharan Africa. For young people on the island, cell phones are tools. Increased communication and interconnectivity are good for everyone, so we are helping to find ways to make these connections. We also have a publication called Ex(CHANGE) Guide that outlines a number of different ways to connect with Cuban youth-everything from traveling to Cuba legally to using the internet and new media.

EM: Cuba is one of the most closed societies in the world with the most restrictions on media and internet usage. How do you create more communication in the face of these restrictions?

RoH: Cuba has an intranet with a very effective firewall, but only two percent of the population even has access to this. The internet is only accessible to very high ranking officials, who have government jobs. Oftentimes they will "rent out" their username and password to their friends after work, who pay them to access the outside world. This is how, little by little, young people are connecting to their counterparts in other parts of the world.

Roots of Hope works to get youth connected to the internet. This is the first way many Cuban youth are able to connect with the outside world. Bloggers are also becoming more vocal and finding ways to circumvent the system, which is incredibly important in creating outlets for Cuban youth in realizing their voice.

EM: What role has technology played in helping you to build a movement behind your work?

RoH: Technology has, without a doubt, helped us to reach a much broader span of people. When we started, we were simply making phone calls to people that we knew, and relying on them to spread the word. Now, through social networks, we can spread the word through many different outlets.

EM: What are some of the biggest challenges your group faces?

RoH: We are a completely 100 percent volunteer organization, so the internet is our office space. This can be really helpful, but interacting with people virtually leads to things being lost in translation. We have to find ways to bring people together face-to-face in order to be as effective as possible. As great as online coordination can be, nothing replaces face-to-face interaction.

EM: How do you like Mexico City?

RoH: We have been here many times, but the summit is great. We are fortunate and humbled to meet these dynamic young leaders. This is a network unto itself that is being created that helps to reinforce all of our causes.

Erin is a proud member of the Millennial generation, an independent nonprofit and political consultant, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a contributor to the GOOD column Canapés and Kalashnikovs.

A Design Book For the Rest of Us

Siobhan O'Connor — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:00:17 PDT

In his new book, Glimmer, journalist Warren Berger tries to explain to the uninitiated what designers have been saying for years: that good design really can change the world.

Design can change the world, you've no doubt heard. In certain circles, this is not news-it's a given, central to the best problem-solving and world-changing ideas around. But how exactly does the thinking of a legendary designer like Bruce Mau accomplish that? And how do you explain that idea in a way that makes the rest of us non-designers care? One way is to show people how design can change their own lives. From there, the leap to the rest of the world seems a lot smaller. This is strategy of Warren Berger, in his new book Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World. "If you're talking about the kind of design that can help solve problems," says Berger, "we should all care, because we've got a hell of a lot of problems."

GOOD: You were a relative outsider in the design world when you took on this subject. Did that help or hurt?

WARREN BERGER: It can be a little overwhelming to come in and try to make sense of that world, because there was so much I didn't know, and still don't know, about design. But as designers themselves understand, it's good to come at something as an outsider, because it allows you to see things that the insiders are too close to see. It means you can ask naïve questions like, "Has anybody ever noticed that the principles that work well in designing an iPhone might also work well in helping someone reboot their career?" Also, being an outsider means that you are able to speak about the subject in English, instead of the native tongue, Designese.

G: Why should we all care a little more about design?

WB: Well, if you're talking about the design of Alexander McQueen stiletto shoes that look like upside-down armadillos, I'm not sure we should care more. But if you're talking about the kind of design that can help solve problems, we should care because we've got a hell of a lot of problems. The McQueen shoes being one of them.

"Being an outsider in the design world means that you are able to speak about the subject in English, instead of the native tongue, Designese."

G: Was that a question of design-as-problem-solving one you wanted to take on with the book?

WB: Actually, I went into the book not really thinking design could change the world. I just wanted to understand designers and how they think. But eventually I came around to the view that design has the potential-potential, mind you-to change everything around us. And that means it can change the world. It's not that designers are superior to the rest of us. It's just that they've worked out some methodologies and approaches, through decades of practice, that are pretty good at reinventing things and solving problems. And so if we find ourselves, as we do now, in a position where we have to reinvent and solve problems, why not at least take a look at what these guys do and see if it can be applied? I don't think that's such a crazy idea.

G: Do you think designers have done a good job communicating that outside these specific circles?

WB: I don't think the design community knows how to talk about social design without sounding arrogant. And they get beat up if they talk about it, sometimes by people within their own industry. They get accused of being imperialists, or of being naïve meddlers. They get reminded of things like, "You know, the last time designers tried to fix things they gave us public housing projects." So a lot of designers want to get into social efforts, but they're almost apologetic about it. On the other hand you also have design-can-save-the-world zealots who really are naïve and kind of insufferable. I think designers need to find a balanced way to talk about this-optimistic, unapologetic, yet at the same time humble and realistic.

G: Can you give me an example of design in our everyday lives that has changed the way we work?

WB: The coffee mug. Imagine if everyone at the office had to drink coffee from their cupped hands?

G: Bruce Mau, a central figure in your book, is an oddly divisive character. Why is that?

WB: Within the insular world of design, he became a boldfaced name, and that created some resentment-and a suspicion that he's a self-promoter. Maybe he was at one time, but all I can tell you is, I wish right now he was more of a self-promoter-I could use one of those to help hawk this book. Also, he tends to make all those big bold pronouncements about how design can change the world. A lot of people hear that stuff and say, "Give me a break!"

"It's not that designers are superior to the rest of us. It's just that they've worked out some approaches through decades of practice that are pretty good at reinventing things and solving problems."

G: Why did you pick him as your narrative focus?

WB: Well, it's partly because of his Massive Change philosophy-he thinks design can do anything, and I wanted someone like that at the center of the book. I also wanted an interesting character. Mau has a good sense of humor and a great back story: He came from this godawful mining town in the middle of nowhere, and spent his early years working the family farm. The first time I interviewed him, he told me, "I'm the only designer you'll meet who can put a pig in the freezer if you need it." The best thing about Mau, though, is that he's so good at articulating the power and potential of design in a way that can get anyone engaged and excited. I think more designers could use that gift.

G: Was he easy to work with?

WB: Bruce was easy to work with-when I could get him focused on the book. But like a lot of designers I met, he always seems to be doing 22 things at once, and that started to catch up with Bruce from a health and well-being standpoint, right as we were working on the book. So one day, he disappeared-went off and enrolled himself in some intense holistic health program. He called me at one point and said, "The next time you see me, I will be a different person." And when I saw him after that he was like 40 pounds lighter, had shaved his beard, improved his sleeping, and had come up with an elaborate new plan to manage his work schedule. He'd redesigned his life! So of course that became part of the book.

G: I mean, there's design like a cheap laptop used in developing countries, and there's design like the infographics on this web site-but when you start talking about redesigning one's life, you sort of lose me.

WB: Think of it this way: If we accept that design is, as Paula Scher says, "the art of planning," then what's more deserving of a good and thoughtful plan than your life? Designers, by virtue of what they do for a living, have figured out this art of planning, and they've demonstrated that they're really good at turning plans into reality. So why not borrow some of their approaches and methods and see if they can be applied to our own life challenges? Maybe you don't use it all the time, maybe it's just something you have in your back pocket. And as different challenges come up-What am I going to do about this big career decision? How am I going to decide where to live? How do I bring more creativity into my life?-you turn to your trusty design methodology and see if some of those principles apply to the situation at hand. It's surprising how often they do.

G: What happens when this methodology is applied to solve global problems? Can you think of an example where this has really worked?

WB: I can think of a lot of examples. But let's be clear, when we talk about changing the world by design, we're talking about small changes. An individual solving a problem in a particular place, which then changes the lives of the people in that place-and maybe spreads to other places. I think of the story of Jock Brandis, which I tell in the book. He's a regular guy who goes to some impoverished village in Mali and notices that all the women have bleeding fingers from having to peel peanuts all day. He decides to design a mechanical peanut sheller, even though he has almost no resources or materials to work with. He embraces those constraints and applies basic design principles and voilà: He creates a device that can shell nuts. Productivity in the village skyrockets. No more bloody fingers. Now the Universal Nut Sheller is being used in lots of places in Africa, India, and so on.

"When it comes to solving problems around the world, it's not just a matter of creating a gee-whiz object. In fact, the object is the least of it. You have to design the whole ecosystem to support that object."

G: You talk about the difference between design we want and design we need in the book. That reminds me about this thing that keeps coming up among designers working on social change: It's not enough for something to just look cool anymore. It has to work well, for a long period of time, be cheap, make use of local resources and be widely implementable. Who do you think is doing a stand-out job?

WB: Well, it's an older example, but Martin Fisher and KickStart meet all those criteria you just mentioned. Fisher figured out that in order for something to be of any use in poor areas, it had "be cheap as a chicken." His water pumps certainly proved to be affordable, durable, and scalable. And they've had a huge impact on the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people. That took a lot of work on his part-not just designing the pumps, but creating an environment in which those pumps could succeed. When it comes to solving problems around the world, it's not just a matter of creating a gee-whiz object. In fact, the object is the least of it. You have to design the whole ecosystem to support that object. Think of the XO laptop-the object itself was great design, at least I think so. But they had trouble with everything else.

G: In focusing on design as a solution to problems, is any of the fun lost?

WB: I don't think so-I think the fun is increased. What's more fun than solving a problem? I know the answer to that: sex. But otherwise, what's more fun than solving a problem?

Warren Berger is author of Glimmer: How design can transform your life, and maybe even the world (Penguin Press), which you can buy here. He is also the editor of the blog GlimmerSite.

Heads of the Class

Patrick James — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:31:07 PDT

An edifying conversation with the founders of KIPP Schools.

It's mid-October, which means that all across the country, kids are back in school. While it's no secret that public education is in need of repair in the United States, there are a number of inspired, incredibly effective schools and teachers doing hero's work. KIPP Schools (part of the inaugural GOOD 100) , the astoundingly impressive Gates-Foundation-backed charter program founded by Teach for America alumni Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, continues to bring real results to kids across the country. We spoke to KIPP's founders about how the schools get such good results, and just how hard it can be to try to teach.

GOOD: You guys both did Teach for America. Would you say that KIPP's design grew out of that experience?

MIKE FEINBERG: Definitely. When we were Teach For America corps members, we were very bad at teaching. However, we made a commitment to being the constant-not the variable-for our students. And that motivated us to be committed to try to become as good as teachers as possible to benefit our students.

G: What do you mean you were bad at teaching?

MF: Most new teachers suck and I would say I was probably one of the more sucky of the new teachers. I had no classroom management skills, and I was taking a bilingual fifth grade class, which made it even more complicated. My butt was getting kicked daily by 32 pre-adolescents, which was an incredibly humbling experience for me. It brought me to tears on several occasions.

DAVE LEVIN: I think teachers' training and teachers' preparation is a huge issue. By in large, too many teachers begin their professional journeys unprepared for the real challenges. And I think that's just the nature of it.

G: What changed for you guys?

MF: I found some amazing mentor teachers like, Harriett Ball, who took us under her wing and taught us how to teach and taught us that our struggles weren't inevitable, that they could be fixed. And that we could improve. We became better teachers, better classroom managers, better disciplinarians, and better motivators. We started seeing things a little bit better and that made me a little more confident, and pretty soon I was doing what I hoped was a decent job teaching.

G: Harriett Ball helped get you to the point where you founded KIPP schools. How did turn that idea into reality?

MF: The idea happened in late 1993, one night, when we stopped blaming other people for why our kids weren't doing well and accepted the responsibility ourselves. We wrote up the ideas on paper that night, and it was a given in our minds that we weren't simply doing an exercise; we were writing a plan to action. So we tried to get permission from the district to [implement these ideas], and in a couple of cases we got some permission to start doing something. Where we didn't get permission, we went ahead and did it anyway and asked for forgiveness on the back end.

G: Once you'd established that first public charter school in Houston, how long did it take to know if it was working?

MF: I would say lunchtime on day one. When the kids started running back to class after lunch, because they wanted to go back in and learn more.

G: These days you guys are running an organization, but I hear you still make a commitment to interact with the kids.

DL: Exactly, yeah. Mike and I spend most of our time out teaching principals and teaching teachers, but I look for every opportunity to get in the classroom.

MF: The best way for any school leader to have a pulse for his or her school-the academic pulse, the emotional pulse, the cultural pulse-is by spending some amount of time teaching the kids. When I was running KIPP academy, I was also the fifth grade math teacher and the seventh grade basketball coach.

G: What's the most important thing a teacher needs to know?

DL: The really fundamental component is to have a relationship with the kids. In terms of motivation, as teachers and as educators, we have to remember that we're in a marketing war for the hearts and minds of our kids. And I think that's really critical. There are a lot of real things out there that are competing for the thoughts of our students. Our job is not to throw up our hands about it, but rather to really dig in and figure out what we can do.

A Portrait of Advertising by a Young Man

Patrick James — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:09:00 PDT

Doug Pray's new documentary, Art and Copy, chronicles the evolution of creative advertising by exploring connections between great art and great ads and how the latter influence our lives.

Advertising has been around forever, but over the last century, it has evolved at a remarkable rate. Creative geniuses like Hal Riney, Lee Clow, Mary Wells, George Lois, Dan Wieden, and David Kennedy helped transform the business into an artform. Doug Pray's new film, Art and Copy, is something of a love-letter to those great minds, delving into the ways their work helped reshaped the business, and how advertising, for better or for worse, continues to both mirror and shape our world. He spoke to GOOD about what advertising means to him and where it goes from here.

GOOD: In your film there's a banking ad by Hal Riney from 1970 that unfolds like a love story between young people, set to popular music. At the time, this was revolutionary. It makes me wonder: Did advertising start getting creative at precisely the moment that rock music sold out?

DOUG PRAY: That's really interesting. I'd consider that, but not quite how you phrased it in terms of rock 'n roll. I would say that advertising generally mirrors society. And my movie is more about the reaction to what we call the creative revolution. These people were trying new ways to break ground in advertising, which had been around forever. But it wasn't until the sixities, seventies, and eighties that people started thinking, We can do so much more with this. We can actually use this to make great art or movies or sitcoms. Like Mary Wells's Alka Seltzer ads or Lee Clow's 1984 Macintosh commercial, with Ridley Scott and these Orwellian overtones.

G: We tend to create a conceptual divide between art and commerce. But those ideas are wholly united in the people you profile. They see themselves as artists, but are quite comfortable with their roles in commercial society. Is that why they're so successful?

DP: Well, pretty much everybody in my movie has a conscience, and most of them think that most advertising is really bad. They definitely think of themselves as artists, but they're at peace with the concept that they are using commerce. So instead of looking at that like it's some horrifying, manipulative thing, they look at it like they have this inordinate task: not only to move people artistically or emotionally, but then to make them buy something. There, it instantly takes a left turn from all the other art forms in the world, which exist just for the sake their own experience. Plus, they have thick skin, because they make their art for these giant committees and people saying "no" all the time.

G: And they all seem to have this perspective that committees are the enemy of good creative work.

DP: Very much so.

G: But that's fascinating, given the nature of marketing departments at most companies.

DP: Some of their greatest work came when they were working directly with the client themselves, like how Dan Wieden, working directly with Phil Knight at Nike, was able to oversee some of the most brilliant advertising ever. Regardless of what anyone thinks about Nike-that's a totally separate point. Same thing with Hal Riney. My movie is almost misleading because it only profiles the greatest of the great. But unless you're really at the top, with most advertising, you're dealing with like middle managers. Every single business is being brought down by that kind of thinking-market research, committees, the sort of MBA mindset. It gets in the way of pure creativity, which is never about being safe.

G: That reminds me of a New York Times interview where George Lois, whom you profile in the film, said that creating a committee to make decisions about magazine covers equates to gang rape. He said, "you need to get one guy who understands the culture, who likes comic strips, goes to the ballet, visits the Metropolitan Museum."

DP: Only George would use that terminology. Ha.

G: Your film touches on the volume ads we see on a daily basis, but it does so really quietly, with text running over long, sweeping shots of satellites and billboard towers-vehicles for the transmission of advertising. So structurally, we have audible conversation about the excellence of ads, and silent words about the volume of them. Why did you make that choice?

DP: The statistics that, as you say, we quietly added in, were very much the last step. I wanted to subtly remind the audience how much of our economy revolves around advertising, and how big a part of our modern environment they've become. Even if you hate advertising, you're wearing pants because of it. Like being a socialist living in a capitalist economy: Whether you're with it or against it, you're being shaped by it. In pointing out some of the more negative things, like that children watch 20,000 ads a year, it was about responsibility. I know I didn't make a negative, ad-bashing movie, and I've taken some heat for that. What I'm saying is, Look, advertising is not going to go away, but can't it be better? If you hate advertising, then make better ads.

G: That's a more nuanced approach, I guess.

DP: Well, plenty of people who've seen the film have just said, I can't believe he's not just taking these guys to task. But, I'm just so bored with the exact same arguments, that all advertising is nothing but pure manipulation, or that we're these weak little sheep being lead around. If it was that easy, we would have been living in a 100 percent totalitarian society way back in the 1930s. It's really hard for corporations to figure out how to advertise. And there's an enormous number of campaigns that just fail. Look at Microsoft.

G: What direction do you see advertising going?

DP: As long as our system of commerce is based on having to tell people about what you're making, it's going to take any form that exists. People are talking about the death of the 30-second commercial, but it hasn't really died. It's just that now there's internet advertising. And newspapers are clearly taking a major hit, but now there are ads on your cell phone. I don't find all of these things pleasurable, but as long as people are sensible and fighting it when it's really invasive, as long as you can turn it off, that's the key.

G: One phrase near the end of the film is, Everything is an ad. Is that true or a little hyperbolic?

DP: I don't know. Maybe. I mean, it's just gotten more subtle. ... But if they ever put big ads in space at night, that's when I'm done.

Header image: Chad Tiedeman, erects a billboard for iPod during the filming of Art and Copy. Photo by Michael Nadeau.

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