Her name is Siri

10/06/2018 by Pat Shiplett 1 Comment

Based on her voice we speculate that she’s a woman but there’s no way to know for sure.

No one remembers who first brought ‘her’ to the coffee shop. And no one doubts that she came to us with only the best of intentions.

What we do know that she is incredibly, preternaturally well-informed and it that can be unsettling to have her around.

An unbroken stream of palaver runs through this place. The conversation is never allowed to die. The topics center on current events, trivia and extreme radar weather forecasts.

Although the group is well-educated, dealing in facts isn’t the point. We huddle together for something more fundamental than the truth. An unspoken courtesy holds that every opinion deserves the benefit of the doubt.

You can lead a perfectly uninformed discussion over the value of Vitamin D and crypto currencies. Nobody’s stopping you. You can create your own school of philosophy out of thin air. You can caucus with the roundness-deniers among us who speculate about the shape of the earth.

Unfortunately the nature of our chats started to change a few years ago.

Now thanks to ‘her’ we can check facts instantly. The days of uninhibited flights of imagination and free associations are behind us.

Nothing crushes a friendly bull session faster than someone whipping out a smart phone and asking Siri to verify a fact.

Andrea Hart (Copy of original) (Copy of original)

08/06/2020 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

There’s no reason you’d connect the woman at our coffee shop with undocumented Zimbabweans or…be aware of her reporting on the policies of South African authorities.

These are experience Andrea Hart herself hadn’t imagined.

Some years back the kid who was the first in her family to go to college and to travel overseas caught a break. Her feel for words and ideas earned her a full scholarship at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

She learned that a muscular press is vital for a democracy and that groups lacking the ability to tell their story will be exploited.

While studying abroad she reported on economic migrants for the Cape Times and later covered general news and features at South Africa’s first totally interactive newspaper.

Fast forward ten years, Andrea now heads up community engagement activities at City Bureau. She is a cofounder of the non-profit, civic journalism lab.

Paid journalists are brought together to provide access to quality, trustworthy information that helps urban communities generate their own solutions. Residents receive hands-on training while engaging in civic processes. City Bureau fills the need for tech support and working space.

In a world of hard facts and stubborn realities, of two steps forward and one step back, professional burnout is a constant possibility. As a powerful affirmation for its staff members, City Bureau (which is not funded by taxpayer dollars) recently won a $1 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

The last time we had coffee Andrea said it’s important to “avoid the hero narrative” as something that can isolate an underserved community and make its people forget their own strength.

“Heroics are a false God.” she added.

Andrea Hart

09/10/2018 by Pat Shiplett 1 Comment

There’s no reason you’d connect the woman at our coffee shop with undocumented Zimbabweans or…be aware of her reporting on the policies of South African authorities.

These are experience Andrea Hart herself hadn’t imagined.

Some years back the kid who was the first in her family to go to college and to travel overseas caught a break. Her feel for words and ideas earned her a full scholarship at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

She learned that a muscular press is vital for a democracy and that groups lacking the ability to tell their story will be exploited.

While studying abroad she reported on economic migrants for the Cape Times and later covered general news and features at South Africa’s first totally interactive newspaper.

Fast forward ten years, Andrea now heads up community engagement activities at City Bureau. She is a cofounder of the non-profit, civic journalism lab.

Paid journalists are brought together to provide access to quality, trustworthy information that helps urban communities generate their own solutions. Residents receive hands-on training while engaging in civic processes. City Bureau fills the need for tech support and working space.

In a world of hard facts and stubborn realities, of two steps forward and one step back, professional burnout is a constant possibility. As a powerful affirmation for its staff members, City Bureau (which is not funded by taxpayer dollars) recently won a $1 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

The last time we had coffee Andrea said it’s important to “avoid the hero narrative” as something that can isolate an underserved community and make its people forget their own strength.

“Heroics are a false God.” she added.

Reasons To Learn A Foreign Language

08/28/2018 by Pat Shiplett 1 Comment

There are thoughts you can’t think in English.

Studying a foreign language changes your brain.

Studying a language is a kind of travelling.

You like crossword puzzles, it’s like that.

It will improve your English.

Each new word becomes an old friend.

Learning to read for the second time is as magic as the first.

Doing the difficult for no practical reason appeals to you.

People are nice to people learning their language.

You’ll end up with an irresistible accent.

Many of you have mentioned you have studied, you’re now studying or hope that one day you’ll free up the time to study a foreign language. And why not?

I’m heading back to Barcelona for several weeks of classes — hoping that this time I’ll be able talk to people in their language and later introduce them in ‘Out Among Humans.’

A lot of them will want to practice their English, they always do. So we’ll compromise and end up somewhere in between two languages.

I’m okay with that — I still need a safety net.

What Doesn’t Kill Us…

08/19/2018 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

Our Founding Fathers were well aware that a dishonest and disturbed man or woman would occupy the White House from time to time.

They gave us a constitutional auto-immune system to help us survive our mistakes, with the ballot box being our first and most powerful line of defense.

This year’s mid-term elections are only months away — thirty-seven states and D.C. offer early voting.

It’s important to verify your voter registration now. A remarkable number of properly registered citizens have been wrongly purged from voter rolls. Deliberate voter suppression is a fact of life. almost exclusively in Republican-controlled jurisdictions.

Simply search online for your state’s election board to find a website or a number to call. I was able to verify my status in less than 4 minutes.