This spring Swarthmore College’s students, alumni and faculty stood up to demand that the school’s Board of Managers (their trustees) divest funding in fossil fuel businesses and technologies. I reported on that here in “The State of the War on Climate Change” a few weeks ago. The Board of Managers voted down that option just days later.
What I also reported on in that essay was that this is just the beginning of campus actions to divest in Continue reading
My fall “Talking Indies” column, “Three Money Lessons for Starry Eyed Authors,” comes out today at TW. It summarizes three important lessons I’ve learned since I dove full-time into the publishing and writing world in 2012. The column is intended to be slightly provocative and amusing as well as heuristic with respect to self-publishing. It deals, essentially, with key economic/business elements that all writers need to understand — supply and demand in the writing world is not something to gloss over if you’re an indie author.
These three lessons are not unique to self-publishing. They are true for all the arts, and not just for indie artists, but for everyone in the world of creativity.
1. There’s a shitload of other work out there, i.e., you have more competition than you can possibly imagine (supply)
2. Unless you’re The Beatles or Picasso — or Derek Jeter — no one cares what you just put onto the market (demand)
3. The digital world makes product availability infinitely perpetual (leap frogging the supply and demand problem)
All three points are obvious and essential to understand for success in the modern world where half of what we do, think, Continue reading
We’ve been through more than a decade of struggle now, haven’t we? There’s that economy thing that’s been eating at all of us this past three years. But there’s also the insanity of extremist violence and murderous intent directed randomly at those of us who are innocent.
All of this seems to have at least temporarily altered the core sense that most of us have of what counts in life. What seems to have happened is not that we’ve changed our values or our definition of the meaning of life, so much as we’ve forgotten the importance of those issues and their bedrock necessity.
This stuff ain’t going away. It’s no ones fault. Economic and social chaos have always been with us. These days, though, this chaos is amplified because of the reach of media, the density of world population, and the fact that peace and happiness in Continue reading