If you can come to just one part of it, come to our free, open-to-the-public Friday night event, “What Happened to the Future,” at 7 p.m. on November 10. It will include:

• Alicia Garza, founder of #BlackLivesMatter
• Yochai Benkler, Harvard University
• Alicia Wong, Roosevelt Institute
• Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
  

Learn about the Friday event here, and register for the full conference here. A million thanks to my co-organizers, Camille Kerr, Trebor Scholz, and Palak Shah.

Study and hone

I’m now in my third year of helping to create CU Boulder’s MA in Media and Public Engagement. I haven’t talked about it much, mostly because of the busyness of doing it, but now I feel like I should. My colleagues and I have worked hard to create a space where creators of diverse backgrounds can come and study together the crafts of media and social change—activists, social entrepreneurs, narrative hackers, solutions journalists, future academics who want to get their hands dirty, and more.

Maybe this is something you need. Maybe it’s something your community needs. We need you.

Please consider sharing this program with anyone you think might be interested. Let me know if you have questions. The application deadline for this year is January 10. It’s a lot of time and it isn’t.

Bibliography

This fantastic story of a weekend inside a black women’s secret society is just scratching the surface of the much, much bigger story Jessica Gordon Nembhard tells (h/t Phil Klay).

My Study Circle teammate Caroline Savery just published an epic on the Trumpocalypse via the young platform co-op Cosmos.

Bourdieu is useful for analyzing online reputation systems.

This is one of the better Zuckerberg think-pieces lately, but this one takes us to some solutions.

Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains is helping me sleep.

Travels

• 2017.11.07: New York, NY – Lecture on Catholic cooperative economics at St. John’s University
• 2017.11.07: New York, NY – Lecture on Catholic cooperative economics at St. Joseph’s College
• 2017.11.10-11: New York, NY – The People’s Disruption #platformcoop conference at The New School
• 2018.03.07: Cambridge, MA – Platform cooperativism discussion at Harvard Law School
• 2018.03.08: South Hadley, MA – Mount Holyoke College
• 2018.03.10: East Lansing, MI – MSU Student Housing Cooperative

Order your copy today!

Momentum is building. Just last week, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a manifesto that explicitly calls for creating platform co-ops. We hope that this book will help show that online democracy is both a live option and a moral necessity.

Cooperative advantages

I’ve been continuing to follow a bunch of different leads along the cutting edge of economic democracy. In The Nation this week, read about Denver’s 800-driver taxi cooperative vying to turn Uber’s disruption into a push for worker ownership. If they keep

Meanwhile, in the September issue of Vice, I return as economics columnist with a report on Enspiral, a remarkable co-working network based in Wellington, New Zealand, which shows how trust can become not only a cooperative advantage, but a competitive one. If you missed it, also, I recently reported for Vice about the latest on ColoradoCare, the controversial ballot proposal poised to bring cooperative, universal medical coverage to all the state’s residents—now, with the help of Bernie Sanders.

Utterances

Upcoming talks and trips:

• 2016.09.29: Alma, MI – Alma College
• 2016.09.30: Grand Rapids, MI – Aquinas College
• 2016.10.06: Omaha, NE – IGNITE at Creighton University
• 2016.10.12: Quebec, Canada – Collaborative economy session at the International Summit of Cooperatives
• 2016.10.20: Boulder, CO – MALfunction with the Media Archaeology Lab
• 2016.11.02: Austin, TX – HHHI HComp plenary
• 2016.11.11-13: New York, NY – Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School
• 2016.12.08-09: Cambridge, MA – Harvard Religious Literacy and Journalism Symposium
• 2017.02.09: Nashville, TN – Belmont University Faith and Culture Symposium
• 2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

Un-branding

You might have noticed that I’m writing from a different email address. Over the past few months I’ve pivoted from a public self-presentation heavily weighed toward modes of transportation: nathanairplane, The Row Boat, etc. As much as I enjoy transportation, I’ve decided to reorient my self-presentation around the name my parents gave me when I was born. So now this is where you can find me and my stuff:

• Website: www.lelandquarterly.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Social media: @ntnsndr

And watch out, because I’m still playing around in various ways, like for instance with a shorter form of the URL; both https://ntnsndr.in and [email protected] work right now but we’ll see if it really seems worth keeping. In the meantime, see y’all there!

Krista interviewed me this summer at the Chautauqua Institution about my books, God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy, as well as my recent reporting on the politics of technology. During our conversation, under the canopy of a Greek-temple-ish structure with more than a thousand listeners, I felt I was in the presence of a mentor and a kindred spirit—someone who shares my love of exalted topics, as well as someone who had taken the time and energy to engage deeply with my work. Choose a way to listen to the show here.

Both books are still available, either directly from University of California Press (God here, Occupy here) using the special discount code 13M4225, or wherever else books are sold.

On to the hacking

Sometimes exalted topics need to get hacked. That’s why I’m taking part in an experiment called Wisdom Hackers, a kind of philosophy incubator. After spending our summers exploring burning questions, this band of artists, explorers, and instigators are sharing the results in a collaborative book, thanks to a new serial-based publishing venture called The Pigeonhole (which my new bride Claire explains here).

My contribution, which formed during a search for new social contracts around the world, ended up becoming a reflection on our culture’s fascination with hacking itself—the allure and the trouble. It will become available on November 10, but in the meantime, subscribe to the book here (yes, you can subscribe to books now) and read the work of my fellow hackers.

And more

This fall I’m honored to begin a new column at America magazine, a leading Catholic weekly. Follow my columns and blog posts at my author page.

In August The Nation published my dispatch from a hacker monastery in Matera, Italy.

The first in a series of articles on working hours appeared in Vice magazine in August as well: “Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?” It kind of blew up.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist?Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: The networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new.

More at Al Jazeera America.

Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision.

The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.

Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.

After ten years in the making, five years in the writing, and a few days doing little drawings, my first book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, is now becoming available. This is a guide on how you can get it for yourself and—please, please please!—help spread the word.

Buy the book

There are some choices for how to do this.

• Get it direct from University of California Press—with the discount code 13W3359 it costs just $27.96 for the hardcover. Shipping now!
• Help Amazon put everyone else out of business by ordering it there for their ever-varying low price—though it won’t ship until around the pub date on June 10. And leave a review if you’re so inclined!
• Ask for it at your local bookstore or find it wherever else books are sold.

The ebook version isn’t out quite yet, but it will be coming in a few weeks.

Come to the party

It isn’t a book release without a party!

• The big main release event, “An Evening of Song and Abstraction,” will take place on June 4 at 7 p.m. at the gorgeous Cathedral of St.?Joseph in Brooklyn. I will be reading from the book along with sensuous, hanting renditions of medieval music by the ensemble Resonanda, which is reuniting for the occasion.
  • RSVP and invite your friends on the Facebook event page
  • Retweet this tweet
• Other God in Proof events are in the works, in New York City and elsewhere. If you want to help arrange an event in your area, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Spread the word

Media is social nowadays, so I can’t do this without you.

• Tell your friends the old-fashioned way: There’s no substitute for that.
• Share the link: To send people straight to the basic info and buying options, this webpage is where I’m stashing all the latest updates and reviews.
  • Share this Facebook post
  • Retweet this tweet
• Review it on Amazon, Goodreads, or B&N: If you liked the book, tell the world why!
• Draw your own proof: Already, some people who’ve read the book have felt inspired to come up with proofs for various things of their own! I’ve set up a proof-making contest, which I hope you’ll enter, and the most popular entries stand to win free copies of the book courtesy of UC Press. See what others have come up with at GodInProof.com, and enter by tweeting proofs to #GodInProof or emailing them to [email protected].

Finally…

…a word of thanks. I am so grateful for your support and your willingness to help God in Proof reach readers who might not otherwise find it. I can’t do this without you, and I’d love to hear what you think about the book.

Resonanda was founded in December 2004 by Stephen Higa, who is currently a professor of medieval history at Bennington College. Since its inception, Resonanda’s members have taken an experimental approach to the performance of medieval song. In order to resurrect this antique repertoire, they work closely with medieval treatises and the nuanced period notation, relying heavily on improvisation, oral learning, and a wide variety of reconstructed vocal techniques. Resonanda savors lilting melodies, startling harmonies, and striking voices blending with fervent clarity and naked devotion.

Staff from Unnamable Books, an independent bookstore located nearby in Prospect Heights, will be present with copies of God in Proof for sale.

An after-party will be held following the performance with excellent beer, wine, and small dishes at Atlantic Co., 622 Washington Avenue.

RSVP on Facebook here.

The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

Law, law, law. The other day I published an essay about the renegade lawyer William Stringfellow. Today I’ve got a new one at Harper’s?exploring what Occupy Wall Street has to do, if anything at all, with the First Amendment. Most people think it does, and I think they’re mostly wrong. Here’s a bit of it:

As the movement matured, … it became common practice for occupiers to make reference to the guarantees of the First Amendment as they justified their actions to the public. The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” passed by the General Assembly on September 29, states, “We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right.” It further calls on “the people of the world” to “exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.” The “Statement of Autonomy” passed on November 1 described the occupation as “a forum for peaceful assembly.” Meanwhile, lawyers working on behalf of the movement were trying to establish, on First Amendment grounds, the occupations’ legal right to exist — even as the constant police presence around the occupiers suggested that they had none. The “right” the legal documents spoke of were more an aspiration than a reality.

Ultimately, however, the struggle didn’t play out on legal grounds; Zuccotti Park remained occupied mostly thanks to extra-legal pressures. When the city proposed to clean the park on October 14 — effectively a forcible removal — thousands of people arrived before dawn to stand in the way. A month later, when the eviction finally came, it was as a surprise in the middle of the night. The difference wasn’t so much legal as tactical.

In the end, I think the “peaceable assembly” this movement is doing is less about the letter of the law than about a law inscribed in us elsewhere—in the conscience. Call be a bad lawyer. Or maybe just go ahead and call me an anarchist.