I value humor, kindness, and the ability to tell a good story far more than money, status, or the kind of car someone drives.
We made an amazing video about Newtown's struggle to figure out what to do with all the letters and art sent to the town.
Broadly speaking, in the past few years, we've more than doubled the editorial staff [in Mother Jones], as part of ramping up daily operations that have resulted in huge gains in audience, a slew of awards, new multimedia endeavors, and of course scoops like the 47 percent.
We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.
We've investigated the gun lobby and its political donations and how it spread the Stand Your Ground laws from Florida.
We do a lot of "capital I" important stories, but one I'd highlight is the work we've done on guns, not only for the acclaim it's gotten but also because it showcases all the different kinds formats we use. So we compiled a database of all the variables of all the mass shootings in America - work the government doesn't do, thanks to the NRA - which allowed us to surface patterns and make data visualizations of it.
We started out covering income inequality in the magazine [Mother Jones], but that ongoing body of work positioned - and sourced - us well to put both Occupy and the 47 percent in context.
We are trained to ask "What's wrong and how we fix it?" Instead, start by asking - "What works, what have we got, what's possible and who cares?"
An elegant simplicity is an understated, organic aesthetic that contrasts with the excess of consumerist lifestyles. Drawing from influences ranging from Zen to the Quakers, it celebrates natural materials and clean, functional expressions, such as are found in many of the hand-made arts and crafts from this community.
If Grandma Goldman ever smiled, she must have done it in the bathroom with the door locked. She had been the undisputed head of her own family, ruling with an iron hand and a mouth full of rocks.
The skeptic, being a lover of his kind, desires to cure by speech, as best he can, the self-conceit and rashness of the dogmatists.