Creative Politics will be spitballing all the usual policy areas (and hitting them in the back of the head with regularity), with a special emphasis on market, community and technology based solutions, not archaic command-and-control, as part of our overall philosophy. Topically, in all likelihood, we’re likely to focus (with one s, New Yorker!) most on basic governance, the electoral system, the environment, education, employment, grassroots globalization, health (not just care), taxes, and technology, though our ultimate apples of accord will be determined by the Creative Politics community and the authors/creators among us.

But we strongly believe that the siloing of concerns into single issues has been a big part of our problem, and that solutions are going to cross not only boundaries between policy domains but between politics and everything else in the world.  So beyond the purely topical, as an American-sized helping of our special sauce, there are a number of ongoing series we hope to run with, refine and add to with your help, and hope you’ll contribute to as authors & thought leaders, including:

Thought Experiments: Einstein imagined riding on a beam of light; we’ll be imagining the health care system without insurance, higher education without student loans, laws the length of executive summaries (rather than War and Peace), a world without money (or Saudi Arabia), and more, in all cases assuming the system in question still has to meet at least the same baseline goals it has today…

Art of the Deal: Taking great works of art and applying them to politics, sure, we’re all on that canvas, painting with the same brush, but even more so we want to highlight all the great deals out there to be made, if only the ‘sides’ were talking to each other, and were willing to apply a little artistic creativity…

Talk, Talk, Talk: Lasting creativity and change is going to begin with dialog.  We’ll explore to the point of virtuoistic verbosity what it will take to vault the Knievel-width chasms in our divided country and make convo constructive, both fig and lit, with plenty of Afropop spice notes spliced in: political phrases that belong in time-out, the best responses to classic mindless arguments (that drive us crazy), mantras for our time, emojis we could use, the ultimate clickbait, neologisms needed (especially positive ones), and more…

Politicians 2.0: So often we vote as much for the person as we do for the policies they support. What are the qualities we wish our politicians had to equip them–and us–for the rowdy ride ahead? Who are the model 21st century politicians in our midst, and why…?

Call of the Wild: One of the worst ways to start any persuasive argument today is to assert “the thing that distinguishes man from the animals is…” This series will examine natural phenomena that inspire and move us, and how what we see in and learn from them might be applied to the political world…

Domain Expertise:  Richard III was right–it’s often the “little things” that trip us up, a school of below-the-sonar issues that lead to collective drag we can’t account for, or one problem bigger than we realize that ripples out until it washes kingdoms away. Through what you do for a living, no matter what you do for a living, we believe only you know where many of these landmines lie, on the one hand, and where the secret passages and portals are, on the other. We hope/expect to get writers from a wide variety of occupations telling us what would make their profession, and by extension, our country, hum more efficiently and effectively, maybe even save our collective lives. That’s why we decided not to go glib and call this series Domain Masters or, God help us, DomainTricks…

Green Balloons: We’ll be getting policymakers and deep state veterans to share their most audacious dreams and ideas under the cover of pen name anonymity–the same ironclad protection we swear to Hamilton we’ll give to you as well.  And if the people love what you have to say enough to overcome your bashful of reservations, you’ll be able, at any time, to brush off the imaginary rough edges in your pieces and reveal your true identity in your author profile 🙂

Fixer-Upping: How often do we hear that we don’t need new laws; we just need to enforce the ones already on the books? And how often is that the end of the story, even though it may be true? The reality is that many of our laws aren’t enforced or downright silly because they’ve never been tweaked or updated to reflect actual conditions in the field. Rather than hold them up for laughs, what rules and regs could benefit from being brought into the 21st century (starting with the Electoral College), and what are the best ways to do it…?

Political Games: The game of politics isn’t, not to all of us who deal with its consequences every day, but there’s no doubt about the connections between politics and the games we play.  Make those games better, and make life better too?  How about vice versa? These days we could do worse than call an audible or two, from the high temple of football to the frontiers of play where the next “diversions,” a.k.a. the roads we will take, lie. After all the best offense is a good defense and the other way around. Are you ready to get off the bench and play?

Traveling Agency: The beauty of our decentralized form of government is that we have thousands of ‘laboratories of democracy’ running experiments every day.  We, the community, will be identifying local programs we love, and imagining how they could be spread, expanded–even repurposed– across the country. We won’t be stopped at the border, either, in either direction–can we get an ahem?

Revivalist History: The great American writer William Faulkner once said (in the middle of one of his least known works, even) that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. We agree; we think a lot of clues as to what we should do next lie in what we, as Americans have–as usual–forgotten we did before. Zinn only knows, we’ve achieved, and said, some pretty amazing things while under the influence of novelty and change (OK, so we’ve worn more than a few lampshades too)…

Like A Prayer: What would a revival be without a big tent where we can fill ourselves with American faith, what American faith, faith as Americans, means today? More broadly and transcendentally, what it means to *be* American, what values and rituals are implied, and how best to practice what we’ve preached in our policies…

Seeing, Believing: Life has gotten too meta, and too often our policy positions are both strongly and superficially held as a result. In this series, members of the Creative Politics community will share stories of the personal experiences that have led to their most strongly held political beliefs. Let’s get real, friends, and define American faith further in the process…

Ideaology: Ideas from everywhere–Newton’s laws of motion, relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos, complexity, Moore’s law, the spread, read option, and triangle offenses, sexual and group selection, the red queen hypothesis, fast thinking, slow thinking, free energy, Zen, game theory, the periodic table, diversity, the 80/20 rule, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, big data, osmosis, emergence, genetics, memetics, network effects, Bernoulli’s Principle, complementarity, emotional intelligence, dialectics, the golden spiral, antifragility, semiotics (just for starters)–and how they could apply to and inspire politics and policy…

Incorporation:Ways the government, and campaigns, really could and should run more like a business, what we still do best in the world, even as our leadership in other areas crumbles, by applying real business concepts and principles, not just hand-waving vagaries like greater accountability or efficiency, especially methods that 21st century businesses are actively using to revolutionize the economic world, e.g. iteration and productization…

Debates Unlimited: Gourmet food fights re: highly provocative questions, the kind that look really rhetorical but really aren’t–e.g. “Is fraud part of what makes America great?”–that deliberately spill into the virtual aisles as you feed your reactions directly into the fray; there’s no “we blogger, you reader” fourth wall here.  Discourse conducted by history’s rules, in which no one wins by shoutest loudest or thinking/talking fastest, featuring not just enervating questions, but fresh, if alarming perspectives from the kinds of people who used to show up in/on what used to be the “safe spaces” for honest no-holds-barred intellectual debate…

Political Science: At our base, at the fulcrum of the only nation founded both by persecuted religious groups and followers of the Enlightenment, science is where everything now hangs in the balance, and we will return to it again and again in topics as varied as restoring faith in expertise and diagnosing diseases in the body politic…

Richard Stands: We all start together, in a classroom, hands over hearts, reciting a simple pledge to each other. And we’ll be spending a lot of time and thought on every possible way to get back there, to the united states, to make every day Christmas in July…

Bronze Bullets:  There are really no silver bullets in policy, but holding out for comprehensive solutions is often idiologue’s errand; not only is it nearly impossible to get the level of supermajority levels of support necessary to enact them, they’re often riddled with misguided mistakes and miscalculations, almost by definition.  But for many problems, there are one or more simple steps (just a brace, really) that could and should have ripple effects far beyond their initial impact. We call these bronze bullets, and this series will be dedicated to exploring them…

If I Ran: With no apologies to OJ, community members will be sharing what positions they’d take, how they’d win, how’d they serve their country and their neighbors if they ran for Congress in the districts where they live.  As diverse as our elected representation appears to be today, there are still many countries’ worth of Americans and their experiences not represented in the hallowed halls at all.  Our hope is that by providing the best platform for the voiceless–anonymity–powered by great production values, we can inspire a two if by sea change in of by for that the world’s best research tool–the invisible hand–tells us will insure we not only fail to perish, but thrive…

Ripples: In one of the greatest political speeches of all time, Bobby Kennedy famously invoked the power of individual actions, each one a “ripple,” that together become powerful waves washing away injustice and oppression.  Members of the community describe their time in the water barrel here, when actions they took because they felt they had to do something, were, without organization or coordination beyond GMTA,  joined by others to change the world.  It’s the most magic we get, and happens more often than we might think….

Unpopularity Contests: We’ll be polling you regularly, anonymously if you prefer, to get your darkest, craziest beliefs, the ones you’re sure would get you excommunicated from your political tribe–if only they knew–in expectation of surprising you that you’re not only not alone, but much of what you thought was beyond the fail can actually make policy that’s no longer afraid to speak its name…

Wishticles: Who doesn’t love a good list? It’s one of the most popular online formats and provides universal context around the world. It’s also the source of an ongoing arms race between list-makers and their advertisers vs. their readers (you know what we mean).  What if, instead of conflict, there was collaboration–lists the community built together–and instead of time wasted, social good was the result?  Then we’d have wishticles instead of listicles to peruse–and we will…

Products We Love:  We’re Americans, so we all love products, and we’re all the descendants of immigrants, so we probably feel a little guilty about it too.  But what if some of the products we love, in the right hands–or all hands–could be used to make the body politic a better place? Here’s to making materialism a thing again, in an increasingly abstemious age…

Tree Talks: At the world’s oldest continuous running summer camp, on Newfound Lake in New Hampshire, there has been a simple, yet powerful ritual observed each week during the summer since 1895.  A counselor, ranging in age from 18 to 80, stands before the rest of the camp, underneath a spreading pine tree on a ridge with a panoramic view of the lake–one of the clearest in the nation–and speaks about a value or an approach to life that has been especially close to his heart, why, and how he keeps his eye on the prize it offers.  We will join them to share our own life experiences here…

Real Americans: The phrase “illegal aliens” tells you all you need to know how far we have fallen from the nation of immigrants. Aliens? From another planet? Really? At the same time, liberals look at the Trump-supporting white working class voter they see in their mind’s eye and his rallies and ask: who are we trying to deport again? We want this series to be a beginning of the end of that. For each column, an immigrant and a white working class voter will exchange their life stories by email, then a series of questions they’d like to ask each other. Those life stories, those questions and their answers are what you’ll see, not as one-time color near the end of a newscast on a single network, but as an ever-expanding tapestry of who our country is, really, starting where it’s most torn and frayed…

Youtopias: All visions of the future and visionaries welcome, but our youngest bloggers will be in charge of this one, because we’ve handed the precocious generation a real set of conundra to work through in this world we’re leaving behind. If they want to completely slice through the knot, remake everything in their own image, who can blame them? Utopia has gotten a bad rap because so often the individual spirit gets crushed in the pursuit of its perfection.  One thing’s for certain about the iGeneration: they won’t let that happen. Can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Nyasoso: The first of what we hope will be many podcast series. Nyasoso is a tiny village in Cameroon with an outsized impact on the world, thanks to a diaspora that’s surprisingly typical of modern Africa.  We believe that even as the pace of change accelerates to inhuman levels and information explodes beyond even the multitasking capabilities of Shiva, the 21st century will also represent a return to roots and the hard-won wisdom at the origin of man. To this end, we’ll be visiting with and learning from Cameroonians in the homeland and all over the world via vehicles ranging from savings societies to throwdowns, off-licenses to book clubs, talking drums to top 10 lists…

George’s Restaurant & Tavern:  All this thinking can work up a healthy appetite. At the OGeorge W’s inn at virtual Mt. Vernon, we’ll be making, chowing, and swigging down the hottest (be sure to blow) constitutional fare, every dish with political twists and stirs, all poll-tested in our kitchens to insure they’re gaffe-free, spiced with every other way we can think of to mix food and politics…

Spiricorps Ficciones: Home (and Homer) of the tales we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, especially those we tell so convincingly we no longer recognize them as stories, until we take them apart.  Welcome to the deep end of the tidal pool, where philosophy and literature, the underpinnings and explorations of politics as it should be, glide and soar on outstretched wings, buoyed by the tension created when & where air, water, and the greatest thinkers/creatives in human history (including the collective we) meet, share, and collaborate on political narrations, realer than real, from screenplays to poetry, to forms yet to be conjured, serial and stand-alone, guardrailed by thoughtful analyses, at the technological intersection of experimental and accessible

Swan Songs:  A black swan is an event that lies outside normal expectations, and that includes the term itself.  When you hear someone excuse themselves for missing something because it was “a black swan,” it only shows they don’t get it: life in the 21st century is all about seeing the swans before they seize you.  That’s what this series will be about–finding them and turning them back into ducklings, and pretty ones at that.  Example: all of the Internet is backed up on magnetic tape that’s made by only two companies, both located in Japan, along with plenty of earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear power plants: what could go wrong?  If you see something, say something (research shows 85% of us won’t)–these pieces won’t help you sleep at night, but they might help your grandkids…

Songlines & Perfect Pitches: Playlists for every political mood, purpose, and occasion, pitches for political movies and exhibits we’d like to see, creative political research we’d like to see carried out, and more…

Everyday Civics: The little things we can all do to make the places we live communities again, with a greater spirit of shared purpose, and the tiny ripples of hope we can send forth beyond city limits to form mighty currents capable of sweeping aside the most daunting of obstacles (yes, we still miss him).  As Elie Wiesel once said, “the opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference…”

21st Century Citizenship: Beyond the everyday, we believe that what it means to be a citizen will change dramatically in this century and government will need to evolve rapidly in response.  21st century citizenship will require active participation by all, with special roles for the young and old; 24/7/365 engagement; the blurring of boundaries between governments and the governed; comprehensive civic education integrated into all subjects at all grade levels, including life; increasing expansion of civic responsibility into all areas of life–individual, organizational, political, community, and social; the bold embrace of technology and globalization as positive forces for change.  Forget shareholder value; in this century, it’s citizen value that must be maximized, and we’ll all be talking about how…

Dear Diaries. Living blog posts by Creative Politics community members telling the ongoing stories of what they’re doing to help our nation get to a better place…

21st Century Warfare. According to McDonald’s rule, war between nations will become increasingly rare, but intrastate conflict appears to be on the rise worldwide. But civil war is so 20th century; 21st century warfare is about never letting our grievances against people who don’t know get to that point of inescapability, nipping buds like a landscaping artist, using ourselves as troops and the Net as our air cover to effect change without ever having to supplement the water diet of our favorite tree. Priority number one: how to root out the bad actors and parasites (from banksters to doctor rating sites) that make us all feel exploited and virtually gun-shy. It’s no accident that the smartest bird in the world is the New Caledonian crow, with a fully-developed culture and arsenal of technology.  How and why? Because it has no enemies or competitors; unlike other birds, it never has to look up and around as it pursues its craft.  Put more bluntly: there’s going to be no e pluribus unum until we obsolete caveat emptor…

Uproots:  So many remain politically passive in the face of outrage because they feel they have no choice, it’s just the nature of the world we were born into.  But while in some cases, “it is” might really be “what it is,” it’s almost certainly not what it was, and therefore not what it must be.  One at a time, like political etymologists, our merry band of meddling kids will be taking life’s apparent indignities and tracing them back to their origins (no, they don’t all lead to Reagan) to empower to choose again…

Mischief/Making: Small ways to subvert the status quo, light monkey-wrenching that you can definitely try at home, illustrated and with results…

Caretography: Every site needs eye candy, right? For CP that means cool cartograms, our own and others,’ enlivened by our highly elastic definition of what constitutes a map (including the 21st century version of Mad magazine back covers, collaborative art), colorful analysis of what they mean, and–unlike those who forget “a thousand words” can penetrate cracks in reality light and sound cannot reach–creative implications for policy.  We also pay homage here to the earth mother–data–that gives maps their birth, leveraging decades of “gold standard” new media research expertise to ask the questions pollsters and others should be asking–and aren’t…

There Ought To Be An App: Technology is going to be key to reinventing the relationship between government and its citizens, but too often politics is stuck in backwaters, congratulating itself on approaches businesses have been using for decades.  Tech is tee-ball for many of our writers, so we’ll regularly be putting out ideas for apps, services, improvements to existing platforms, even potential hardware that would help online politics finally live up to its promise, with enough detail that, if you’re game (or a gamer), we can build together…

Who Can Do:  Many of us come from an education background, and we know that those who can do, teach, not the other way around.  So this series will be dedicated to education writ large, right back to its ancient taproot–educare, to lead out, to creativity in education and, especially, the restoration of adult creativity that’s going to be needed if creative politics is going to succeed at all…

Thin Air:  Organizations and/or movements we wish existed, sometimes for real, sometimes just for a laugh, complete with visualizations of what the homepages of their websites would look like…

Freeing Will: From choice architecture to sunk cost fallacies, we’re learning more all the time about all the ways the human mind can be fooled. So why not figure out the ways we can get our fellow citizens to act more in their own interests (instead of asking what’s wrong with the states in which they live), or better yet, determine, as Rousseau put it in not so many words, how to manipulate them into thinking for themselves?  Why not make the best of the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics?