Has there ever been a more delightful sequence of nouns in a story about the White House than in this story about the Obamas' planned vegetable garden? This is really terrific news. It's a small thing, of course, but small things count.

gardening, gardens and cities, home economics, politics

Andy

:

The Obamas will feed their love of Mexican food with cilantro, tomatilloes and hot peppers. Lettuces will include red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic. There will be spinach, chard, collards and black kale. For desserts, there will be a patch of berries. And herbs will include some more unusual varieties, like anise hyssop and Thai basil. A White House carpenter who is a beekeeper will tend two hives for honey.

Total cost for the seeds, mulch, etc., is $200.

The plots will be in raised beds fertilized with White House compost, crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, lime and green sand. Ladybugs and praying mantises will help control harmful bugs.

McSweeney's is best known for subtly self-aware singer-songwriter-style low-key comedy, but here is a perfectly straightforward yet strangely impressive interview with a 911 dispatcher. Now that's a cultural good that has reshaped our world in beneficial ways. One of its few problematic consequences: thanks to American media, 911 is so widely known around the world that people in other countries often dial that number even when their country's emergency number is completely different.

communication, crime, government, public safety, technology

Andy

:

Q: You sound like you’re able to handle the ups and downs of this job pretty well.

A: I think the key to doing this job, in addition to multitasking and speed of movement, is to be able to handle the emotional components. I’m good at it; I’m empathetic and I don’t take it home at the end of the day. I can talk about things like domestic violence; it’s just a reality.

Q: How long have you been doing this job?

A: I’ve been doing it for nine years. My job now is training supervisor, so I manage ongoing training. New trainees go through a nine-month process; we have an academy. They learn call-taking, radio dispatching, the medical aspect, interpersonal skills.

And you have to know geography. Geography is so important, because people can call and have no clue where they are.

Will the crunchy sonic artifacts of the MP3 audio compression process become as beloved as the warm crackle of vinyl records or the lulling hiss of magnetic tape? For some listeners, it already is.

context, cultural worlds, music, noise, technology and change

Nate

:

[Stanford music professor Jonathan] Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way.   He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises.   In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality.   He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with…

Our perception changes and we become attuned to what we like [...] The context changes our perception, particularly when it’s so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it’s more than the convenience of listening to music on the move.  It’s that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception. All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It’s mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won’t be obvious to them.

This is one of my personal favorite articles from the Christian Vision Project: Dana Robert's wonderful rereading of Patrick's little-known Letter to Coroticus. It's loaded with insights about culture, Christianity, and mission. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

cultural worlds, ireland, mission, slavery

Andy

:

The importance of St. Patrick to growing Irish self-confidence was expressed in 1921 by Seumas MacManus, author of the sentimental favorite Story of the Irish Race: “What Confucius was to the Oriental, Moses to the Israelite, Mohammed to the Arab, Patrick was to the Gaelic race. And the name and power of those other great ones will not outlive the name and the power of our Apostle.”

The irony of MacManus’ paean to Patrick as the emblematic Irish religio-political race warrior is that Patrick himself was a “Brit,” born into a Christian family in the Roman colony of Britannia. Even though the Britons and the Irish shared a Celtic cultural heritage, they were historical enemies who raided each other’s territories and enslaved the vanquished. Young Patrick was such a slave. He escaped from an Irish master after six years of harsh servitude. Later in life, as a Christian priest, he returned to Ireland to share his faith as a missionary.

Why did a former slave risk his life to teach his captors what he believed about God? How did he become the beloved St. Patrick, the “Apostle of Ireland”? Why would the Irish—or any other group of people, for that matter—accept a former slave in their midst and then be willing to be transformed by his message? These questions uncover an essential, and paradoxical, lesson about the practice of Christian mission. The more deeply Patrick engaged the particularities of Irish culture and identified himself as Irish, the more authentic and believable was his expression of the ideals of a universal community in which there is no longer “Jew or Greek,” “slave or free,” “male and female” (Gal 3:28). . . . The paradox of St. Patrick’s Day is that in celebrating the creation of Irish identity, it also commemorates the incorporation of a particular people into a vision of universal and multi-cultural community.

The demo video that goes with this interview is the usual sort of awkward/amazing combo that I've come to expect from the MIT Media Lab's works in progress. As for the interview, I think I just enjoyed that the people inventing sci-fi type tools aren't always inspired by sci-fi itself. Finally, at a more meta-level, I wonder if something like the TED lectures would be possible without the streak of overstating the importance of everything—the portentous, too-loud theme music at the start of the videos nearly keeps me from watching, but many of my fellow viewers must love it.

horizons of the possible, literature, media, sci-fi, technology and change, ted

Nate

:

We’ve been using “Minority Report” as shorthand to explain the device, or the heads-up screen in “Robocop.” But was this device influenced by science fiction

I’m not a very big fan of science fiction. I think that I’m a very big fan of living in the physical world. I’m good with digital technology, but I start to miss the physical world. I miss riding my bike, talking to friends. Technology now separates us from the physical world more and more. Even social networking sites are taking us away from the physical world.

At the lab, we like making things that we can touch, we can feel, we can take with us wherever we want to go, that we know how to interact with. The digital world has power because it has dynamic information, but it’s important that we stay human instead of being another machine sitting in front of a machine.

Whatever science fiction movies we watch now, we can make the technology real in two days. What we can do is not important. What we should do is more important.

Rusty Pritchard is one of the terrific, thoughtful people behind Flourish, a national conference for pastors and church leaders on creation care in Atlanta this May. If you care about these matters, you should be there—I will be.

environment, gardens and cities, horizons of the possible, nature, video

Andy

:

Loving nature, it turns out, is not just an instinct but a virtue. Like nature itself, the virtue of loving it requires cultivation. There’s no question that the trait of biophilia is good for us and good for God’s garden, but we aren’t able to retain a love for nature simply because it’s built in. We must actively create, and re-create, every generation, a culture that loves, and therefore tends and keeps, God’s garden.

To quote researcher Zaradic:

“We need environmental stewards now more than ever. Yet we are raising a generation of young people whose primary experience with nature is virtual. Real nature is a full sensory experience, with frequent open-ended problem-solving opportunities and no off switch. We should all make outdoor play a priority for our children and ourselves. Nature: use it or lose it.”

A typically insightful, indispensable essay by Clay Shirky.

business, horizons of the possible, internet, publishing, unintended consequences

Andy

:

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

N. T. Wright answers several very good questions from Ben Witherington about the thesis of Surprised by Hope (which is also one of the main underpinning ideas of Culture Making).

grace, new jerusalem, resurrection, work

Andy

:

We are not building the kingdom by our own efforts, no. The Kingdom remains God’s gift, new creation, sheer grace. But, as part of that grace already poured out in Jesus Christ and by the Spirit, we are building for the kingdom. I use the image of the eleventh-century stonemason, probably illiterate, working away on one or two blocks of stone according to the orders given to him. He isn’t building the Cathedral; he is building for the Cathedral. When the master mason/architect gathers up all the small pieces of stone at which people have been working away, he will put them into the great edifice which he’s had in mind all along and which he alone can build—but for which we can and must build in the present time. Note 1 Corinthians 3, the Temple-building picture, and the way it relates directly to 1 Cor 15.58: what you do in the Lord is not in vain, because of the resurrection.

I have absolutely no idea how it might be that a great symphony or painting, or the small act of love and gentleness shown to an elderly patient dying in hospital, or Wilberforce campaigning to end the slave trade, or the sudden generosity which makes a street beggar happy all day—how any or all of those find a place in God’s eventual kingdom. He’s the architect, not me. He has given us instructions on the little bits of stone we are meant to be carving. How he puts them together is his business.