Radical Transparency

A celebration of calm...

Clipped illegally from The New Yorker's Cartoon Bank.

I bet The New Yorker would sell more mugs and tee shirts (and magazine subscriptions) if they posted all their cartoons to a blog (like this one) and made it easy for people to embed and share and attribute. Just sayin.

I found out today that David Murphy, the Philadelphia Daily News sportswriter whose Phillies blog I've been reading this season, doesn't root for the team.

He grew up a fan, but he doesn't feel right, as a professional journalist, wanting the Phillies to win.

I'm a little bit shocked. And sad. And jealous that I don't get paid to write about the Phillies every day.

So I poked around the internets a bit, kicked the tires on a couple of other Phils blogs (something I've never done before, which surprises me), and subscribed to Beerleaguer.

It'll be fun to compare.

Coke and hookers just made their first appearance on the Carrot Project Blog.

It's subtle, but they're there.

And, in the name of radical transparency (and maybe also for the love of all language and metaphor), they'll stay.

Until we find out that they've made someone feel uncomfortable.

And then we'll take them down. Because no joke should ever get in the way of being nice.

Maybe I'm extra special partial to this because I've fallen in love faster with Raul Ibanez than any other baseball player, and it's a little unsettling to see him react so angrily to what I consider to be an understandably suspicious, imperfectly presented, but ultimately harmless blog post, but maybe my rapture runs deeper. Maybe the debate really does provide a totally fascinating angle from which to look at press and rumor and the evolution of information flow...



Good for ESPN for hosting the discussion. Good for Jerod the blogger for participating with cool and humility. And good for Raul for offering stool samples if requested. Radical transparency, baby.

I don't know anything about this new Michael Phelps scandal except...
 
(A) I saw a headline that read:
 
If Barack Obama Can Admit to Smoking Pot, Why Can't Michael Phelps?
 
And (B) I was invited to join a Facebook group called:

Michael Phelps smokes POT which makes him cool. Fuck the British Tabloids.

So I clearly have no real reason to comment, but, since blogging is blogging, I will:

If Michael Phelps has, at any time during his high stakes swimming career, won a big race while stoned, then I have a whole new level of respect for his swimming skillz.

Note: One sentence post? One sentence post. Not the most traditional (grammatically legal) capitalization or spacing scheme, but I think it works. Party.

Apparently, two blogs and a Twitter account isn't enough for me.  Apparently, I'm over my fear of multivoicedness.  And, apparently, I can't resist linking to Gabe and Max at every opportunity.

The Carrot Project Blog, as of a couple of hours ago, is happening.

And that means I'll be reorganizing a bit.  Thoughts about The Carrot Project there. Intermittently coherent rambling from a rookie social entrepreneur on A More Perfect Market.  Music and rumors about Himalayan dams on Radical Transparency.  Observations that fit into 140 characters on Twitter. 

Or something like that.  We'll see.

I've let the blogging slide a bit over the past few days. 

I've been coughing.  I've been in New York.  I've been happily slammed by the flood of relatives rushing in for winter vacation.  I've been inarticulately raving in my head about profit as an illusion.  I've been asked where I'd fit into a world in which all businesses already operate sustainably.  I've been listening to Cake.

And I've been keeping up an email correspondence that just revealed this link.

If you didn't catch it the first time, click again; watch closely; and read quickly.

This is why I blog.

So much fun to see one of your crazy thoughts spark a totally independent but equally crazy thought in someone else.

Conversation at its late night best works that way.

An old colleague just sent me an email accusing me of watching Doogie Howser, MD.  Unclear exactly what she was implying, but it was in response to my suggestion that she get an email address that does not betray her '80s-level technological capabilities.  She still rocks the dot AOL.  And not nostalgically or for humor.

Anyway, her email led me to think for a moment about Dr. Howser, and that thinking turned into this response:

My childhood sitcom trajectory was very simple: Cosby Show to Fresh Prince to Seinfeld.  I made the occasional while-we're-at-it foray into Cheers and Friends and A Different World and Blossom, but never did any of those capture my imagination the way Bill and Will and Jerry did. 

Capturing the imagination.  That's a weird expression.

Anyway, I do remember that Doogie kept a journal on the computer, and I remember thinking that that was totally cool.  Doogie Howser, MD introduced me to blogging.

Read this article this afternoon.  By Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker.  About Wall St., subprime mortgages, and what Lewis hopes is the beginning of the end of what has been an outrageously long period of frustrating and fascinating financial madness.

It's by far the most gripping and well-crafted explanation of bad lending I've ever read.

And I think it's noteworthy for another reason as well.

Lewis writes:

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, "I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it's silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.

That's crazy.  And scary.  And reason to think long and hard before you publish. 

Or, better, reason to remain engaged with your audience.  Don't tell a story and walk away.  Stay for follow up questions.  Give everyone your contact info.  And check back in from time to time, just to make sure. 

In other, smaller, and probably more immediately practical words, respond to the comments people leave on your blog.