Leaf lard = “fat lining the abdomen and kidneys in hogs which is used to make lard [syn: leaf fat]“

So the Thursday before Christmas and the road trip up to Lake Tahoe to see the Lehoullier and Phillips clans with the promise of an apple pie, I stopped at the Ferry Terminal at the foot of Market Street on my way to the Larkspur Ferry to see if I could track down some of this porcine ambrosia. Chowhound had a discussion thread on where to find leaf lard in the Bay Area that pointed me to the Prather Ranch store first, but they were out (and quel horror!, the sales dude said, hey, you can use any ole lard for your apple pie, it’ll be just fine. No way! It’s leaf lard or nothing!)

So I headed down to the other end of the Terminal, to Golden Gate Meats and found it: leaf lard in a bag:

Plenty of time to get on the ferry. . .

. . . and over to Larkspur as the sun set.

The next morning, the work began. First, I cut the leaf lard into smaller pieces, and rendered it.

Rendered lard isn’t exactly the most attractive smelling item in the kitchen, as it turned out, but an open window helped. Then I strained the mixture. Humans got the rendered lard; Mingus the Super Dog got a pretty good snack of “cracklins” later that day.

Here’s what leaf lard looks like (phew!) after it’s been refrigerated. It’s a short step to a ball of piecrust dough.

I’ve been using Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything for most of my gastronomical explorations, and apple pie is no exception, so  following Mark’s advice I peeled, sliced and cored,  and added in all the tasty stuff.

With that, it was time to get this puppy into the oven!  Bake, dammit!

A little while later, THE PIE miraculously appeared out of the oven. 

I was worried, though. Would my relatives  like my leaf lard pie?

Was this. . .

Or this . . .

Or this . . .

. . . to be my pie-making destiny?

NO! It was not!

It was thumbs up all around!

My leaf lard apple pie was a little slice of heaven!

It was so good, it drove folks nuts!

I was pretty proud of my leaf lard apple pie.

I sure was.

Thanks Jenny!

(With thanks to son Noah, niece-in-law Sierra, and nephew-in-law Mo for the facial gestures)

]]> http://maimonidesladder.com/2011/12/28/477/feed/ 0 Steve Ferry Terminal exterior Prather Ranch Golden Gate Meats Leaf Lard in a bag On the ferry Almost home Rendering Draining Refrigerated Dough ball Bittman's bible Apple parings Fruit Can't wait! The Pie Uh oh Uh oh 2 Uh oh 3 Thumbs up! Heaven! Drives me nuts! Proud baker http://maimonidesladder.com/2011/06/03/419/ http://maimonidesladder.com/2011/06/03/419/#comments Sat, 04 Jun 2011 01:56:22 +0000 stevenkatz http://maimonidesladder.com/?p=419 ]]> Here’s a question that came up for me at the Media that Matters gathering at Hollyhock a couple of weeks ago. I’m no expert on things Canadian, so if it’s totally off the mark, toss it.

We got to Hollyhock just after Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won majority control over the national government in Ottawa, so it wasn’t all that surprising that in the 4 days we were together, a lot of people were still trying to figure out what that victory signified. It triggered some anxious questioning for people who had spent much of their professional lives in an environment supported by public funding, and who had mastered the art of obtaining it.  

Am I imagining all this, or is this a new situation for filmmakers and other Canadian content creators who’ve relied on institutions like the National Film Board of Canada? I have no idea.

But is the Harper government a first for Canada: a ruling party that will do everything it can to eliminate public funding for the arts (and everything else) -  and what they can’t get rid of, privatize? If it is true, then I think it’s important to recognize that the Harper threat goes much deeper than a debate over the level of public subsidy.

Ah, to be an American: we’ve got plenty of experience living without much in the way of public support for the arts – easily a generation, probably longer. Sure you can still get federal money from the National Endowment for the Arts, but good luck with that (a measly $88 million budget this year, compared to $181 million for the Canada Council for the Arts in 2010). And  if it’s the least bit controversial, forget it (no way would something like this get NEA money behind it). Same with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (2011 federal subsidy: $430 million) compared to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (2010 federal subsidy: $1.1 billion). (By the way: your population of about 34 million? A tenth of ours. Do the math in terms of arts and culture funding per person.)

You get Norman McLaren. We get Baseball.

Truth is, I’ve lived most of my adult life dealing with a deep, vicious and well-financed assault on the very notion of “the public.” I’m talking about a fundamental, ideological attack on the very notion of the American “commonwealth.”

You wouldn’t know it these days, but there are deep roots for an American tradition based in notions of community and commonwealth – very different from the ideology of individualism and the dominion of the private over all facets of life in American culture these days.  The small town barn raising, the New England town commons, the traditional urban neighborhood – these were real, lived pieces of American life. Sometimes they intersected with an authentically radical concept of democracy as well as a subversive culture of anti-authoritarianism. Leaven all that with waves of immigrant driven cultures of solidarity and communitarianism, combine it with socialists and populists both agrarian and urban, fire it in the heat of the African-American, Latino, and Asian-American struggle for justice, and shape it with the women’s movement, and the environmental movement.  There are deep roots here.

That’s why I don’t think today’s hegemony of the private is by any means permanent, even for this most individualistic of nations. But we have done such a terrible job of articulating the alternative definition of the “American experience” that the commons is almost invisible these days. Here in the States, we’ve really lost that ideological battle, at least for the time being.

I think that’s a lesson worth drawing from our experience here in the States. And a situation worth avoiding in the Canadian context.

So if it’s actually true that (regardless of how unexpected, even accidental, his majority win) the Harper government is about to embark on a fundamental attack on the Canadian commonweal, then the response needs to be commensurate to that threat. It’s not just (or even mainly) about the money. It’s a battle about what it means to be a Canadian, how a nation’s history, culture, sense of self is seen and understood, and what “the public” means today.

That’s a fight that extends way beyond how to finance the next movie. It binds artists, media makers, and creative types together with a whole range of other Canadians whose lives depend on a healthy, robust public sphere, a true commonwealth.

So maybe this is what will define media that really matters in Canada for the next few years. And maybe that’s what Media that Matters should think about for next year’s gathering, too.

Soon after starting, the IRS told the organization that it would probably qualify as a non profit tax exempt charitable organization, which it confirmed in a May, 1980, letter. The organization felt it had no reason to worry when it learned, in the waning days of the Carter administration (March, 1980), that  the San Francisco office of the IRS was conducting a “routine” field audit of Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

That changed with the election of Ronald Reagan in late 1980. In the spring of 1981, the IRS told Mother Jones that it had decided to revoke the non profit status of the Foundation for National Progress, because it had decided that its main activity – publication of Mother Jones – was a commercial profit making operation, hence inconsistent with the charitable and eduational goals of the FNP. And a year after that, in August 1982, the IRS responded to MoJo’s challenge to its initial determination, by shifting emphasis: the FNP, it wrote to the organization, was a tax exempt organization and could keep its 501c3 status, but Mother Jones magazine was a purely commercial enterprise and therefore not permitted to function under the FNP’s non profit umbrella.

The IRS figured that MoJo owed the feds about $390,000 in back taxes; the way the books looked on the MoJo side of things, the magazine had been operating at a loss from day one – to the tune of as much as $500,000 a year. The IRS decision, if upheld, pretty much guaranteed that Mother Jones would have to close down. As then executive editor Deidre English put it in a January 1982 article in the magazine, “In today’s economy, it is almost impossible for non-commercial magazines to exist unless they have non-profit status.” (I suppose it’s some measure of how things have changed that these days that’s true for non-commercial AND commercial magazines….)

And plenty of people were asking why Mother Jones was being singled out for this punitive action. After all, there were lots of other magazines that functioned as non profits – National Geographic, Harpers, Smithsonian, Commentary, and National Review. How come they weren’t being audited? “With mounting dismay,” editor English wrote, “we watched the once-innocuous audit become increasingly repressive under the Reagan administration.” Suspicions were that this was part of a larger campaign to “defund the Left,” especially since other left magazines, like NACLA’s Report on the Americas, Big Mama Rag out of Denver, Oakland’s People’s Translation Service, and The [New York] Guardian, were also targets of IRS action around the same time.

Okay, granted, when you publish articles with titles like “Investigating Reagan’s Brain and Other Dark Regions of the Right,” chances are if someone’s looking for a target, you’ll probably show up on their screen. But the other thing going on at the time was that the courts had pretty thoroughly undermined the legal reasoning the IRS used to figure out what qualified as “educational” and what did not. In 1980, the D.C. Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling, ruled in favor of Big Mama Rag, a feminist monthly, and found the IRS’ definition of ‘educational’ “unconstitutionally vague” and “in violation of the First Amendment.”  The IRS, said the court, was making its evaluation “solely on the basis of one’s subjective notion of what is ‘controversial.’”

At worst, that left the IRS open to manipulation by Reagan-era political operatives; at best, it left the decision as to which organization would be considered tax exempt and which not up to IRS field staff, who clearly had no idea what they were dealing with.

The Mother Jones case became something of a cause celebre. The story got picked up by newspapers around the country – USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Des Moines Register, Hartford Courant, and others. Representative Benjamin Rosenthal convened a congressional inquiry into the matter before the commerce, consumer, and monetary affairs subscommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations (which sadly was cut short by Rosenthal’s death).

Finally, after three and a half years, and some $100,000 in legal expenses, the IRS reversed itself. In a “technical memorandum” in mid-1983, the IRS agreed that Mother Jones was carried out “in a manner consonant with” the Foundation for National Progress’ charitable, tax exempt purpose.

The essential issue, the IRS now said, was “whether the distribution of a journal or a magazine is accomplished in a manner distinguishable from ordinary commercial publishing practices” (for you lawyers out there, this is referring to criteria in IRS Rev. Rule 67-4, 1967-1, C.B. 121). It continues:

Relevant facts would thus include . . . whether the publication was intended to generate a profit, the existence or accumulation of large profits, and whether the materials were published exclusively for sale or not.

“Large profits?” Not happening:

. . . the journal has never made a profit and, in fact, is subsidized by the organization with funds derived from other sources including contributions. .  .incidents involving articles critical of the automobile and cigarette industries with the resulting loss of advertising revenues from two industries that customarily use print media for advertising supports a conclusion that profit is not a prime motivator in publishing the journal.

Got that right.

So, the IRS at long last concluded that “‘commercial’ is not an appropriate description of the organization’s journal but, rather, that its publication is carried out in a manner consonant with the organization’s exempt purpose.”

However, this IRS decision was never published. The IRS instructed its staff and interested attorneys that the decision “may not be used or cited as precedent.” The fact is: the IRS did decide that non profit organizations can earn revenues from advertising and other “commercial” activities – without jeopardizing their non profit tax exempt status.

And that’s a lesson worth remembering as we head into the new era of non profit journalism.

Jazz sings of life. The blues tell the stories of life’s difficulties, and if you will think for a moment, you will realize that they take the harshest realities of life and put them into music only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music. Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition singing the songs of more complicated urban existence.

When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of earth which flow through his instrument…”

Martin Luther King in the forward to the program for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival

(h/t – and the entire text at – Downbeat Magazine, January 2011)

It’s no accident that the Twitter voice of the Quixote Foundation was there and delivering a pretty interesting comment flow for the rest of us. As even a cursory look at their website will tell you, Quixote points its lance at the big questions, pointing its grantmaking at what it believes are the key opportunities for change. Full disclosure: Erik Hanisch, who with his wife Lenore and their great staff run this show, sits on my board of directors; Quixote is a grantmaker for Mother Jones.

And no surprise that a couple of weeks ago Quixote announced that it would be “spending up” its corpus between now and 2017 because they believe it is the “best way for our foundation to have a perpetual impact.” Joe Brown over at Slope Resources blog, Done by People, has a very good discussion of what Erik and Lenore are talking about, and just how unusual it is for a foundation to make this sort of choice. (I haven’t been able to touch base with her, but I wonder if Helen Brunner’s experience with foundation spend-down at the Albert List Foundation some years ago played any role in their decision).

This announcement – and a conversation I had with Erik soon after the foundation went public – got me thinking about the risk-taking DNA of organizations, especially in the non profit sector. One of the big problems for foundations and NGO grantees alike is that over time we tend to become insulated from the information – some would call it market signaling – that tells us it’s time to change. Foundations in particular (but it’s also true of bigger NGOs that sit on top of a fat – or is it phat? – endowment or a steady stream of donations) can really get stuck. And moving them off the dime can be a hard, contentious, aggravating, and often completely misguided exercise.

So how does an organization stay – or become – nimble, attentive, public facing – sensitive to the changes in the habitat in which it operates?

To me, this is one of the most interesting things about Quixote’s decision. Because as Erik explained, Quixote’s willingness to change – in fact, its very name and point of view – was built into the organizational culture by Erik’s father, Stuart. As Erik related to me, his dad made it clear from the beginning that he never wanted this foundation to be a burden for his descendents, but to be a source of excitement and engagement for them. He made sure that the foundation by laws were flexible enough so that the “kids could do what they wanted to do,” as they interpreted the values and goals of this quixotic foundation. And he knew, Erik said, who he was leaving this legacy to: he trusted his son to do the right thing, left the doors open to change.

That says something not just about how to conduct philanthropy. It also says something about the core relationship – here, between father and son – upon which this institution has been built. There is, I guess you could say, love, hope, and humility right there at the center of things.

Is this sort of donor intent essential to a foundation putting itself on a brave and risk-embracing path? Probably not. But it clearly makes it so much easier when the fundamental values of an organization recognize it right from the beginning,

Then you’d notice Meg’s big hazel eyes, that smile beaming at you from her open, round, face.

I’m sitting here trying to reconstruct a life from this poor excuse of mine for a memory. I resent needing to do this. I’m furious at the injustice of her absence.

Meg was always the organizer, and learned it from two of the best – her parents, BC and Simone.  The Charlops didn’t have a ton of money, and in Great Neck in the 60s, that could spell trouble, keeping up, and all that. But if it was an issue for BC and Simone and the kids, I didn’t see it.

At some point, BC decided the basement family room needed a new coat of paint, so he had Meg invite all her friends over for a painting party. They provided the brushes, the paint, and the pizza, and the rest of us sort of painted that room, although I suspect BC had to go back in there the next day and make it all right. Oh well, but it was way too much fun.

BC, for me, was the kind of guy I would’ve loved to have as a father: sweet, funny, thoughtful, and never in a hurry when it came to his kids and their friends. A joyful man, brimming with love. I think he would’ve never chosen the life he led, suiting up each morning and heading into Manhattan, if he felt he had the choice. And while Simone had sharp elbows  and would get impatient with us sometimes, she talked with us about things that mattered, about ideas, about Justice. We felt taken seriously by her.

Whatever might’ve been going on with BC and Simone was invisible to me. Later on, Simone broke out and demanded back her own life, a life of mind, and body, and politics. I didn’t know that BC wasn’t the world’s greatest business guy. I didn’t know how this might’ve shaped who Meg became. What I knew was that Meg’s home was always a place of welcome. And Meg was a true pal.

I can’t remember a time when I would look at her and not think: this is what joy looks like (although as a sulky teenager it sounded more like, how the hell does she stay so damned happy all the time?) Even as a kid, it’s as if she was in love with the intense beauty of the world, and fascinated by the infinite variety of humanity. Why not, she seemed to be saying, experience the joy of building something together, whether that’s a play, or a summer colony, or a family, or a social movement? And we don’t have to wait for someone else: why don’t we just go and do it ourselves right now?

We made it through junior high school and high school together. Meg shone as a core member of the high school theater group. Anyone who’s spent any time around the stage knows that – kind of like cops or firemen – theater people develop their own tight group, with language, common experience, gesture, all their own. A family. But it was more than that, I suspect, for Meg.

There is that experience you get when performing a great role on stage: you become more than yourself, you become the role, you are enlivened by it. And maybe for Meg, there was a way in which she tried to take that moment into her life. Let’s all act in the world, she seemed to be telling us, as if we are far greater than we believe ourselves to be. And by acting in that way, we’ll truly become greater. More fully human. Because what does a good organizer do but call on us to see the greatness in our everyday lives, to seize the day, to act on the stage of history in our families, our communities, our planet?

But Meg was anything but naïve about our frailties and failures. Did that come from watching BC and Simone struggle through their lives together? I don’t know. But what I do know is that Meg had an extraordinary ethical compass that gave the rest of us, flailing our way through our teens, a powerful reference point for what was right, what we needed to do, and how to live. She was anchored in this world, as much as she always saw the bright, joyful possibilities around the next corner. We knew she was one of the leaders, a heart-driven, passionate, loving woman-in-the-making who would mark this world with her own special touch. We knew that. We just didn’t know how that was going to happen.

Would it be pushing it too far to say that she was trying to figure out how to bring joy and justice into alignment?

And we were growing up surrounded by that fucking war. Meg worried about her younger brothers getting drafted. Or her guy friends doing stupid things to avoid the draft. And we wondered, how could this sweet world be so poisoned by this terrible, terrible thing happening around us?  So we fought back against the insanity, against the stupidity of a cold war high school (what do you mean, girls can’t wear pants?), for justice and fun and life.  We were just kids, after all.

We saw one another from time to time during college. One night in the summer of 1974 standing on the roof of her grandmother’s apartment building on the East Side, we talked, freshly minted college graduates, about what the hell we were going to do next.  What do we do now? What really mattered? I was headed to Europe on a research grant for the coming year or so, and she was struggling with choices about work and community and politics – and nervously excited to be at this point.

Although it wasn’t clear at the time, she was about to commit herself with all her heart to a way forward (I was trying to avoid that as long as possible, as it turned out). I loved this friend of mine, I was beginning to realize, for the courage of her commitments. When Meg and Richie visited Rachelle and me last summer, she talked about that night, and how it affirmed the direction she felt herself headed in, now that her life, she felt, was about to begin.

Meg started doing tenant organizing, first in Hells Kitchen, and then, in 1975-6, up in Morrisania. She’d met this guy, Ramon Rueda, who’d convinced her for reasons simple and complex to come up to the Bronx with him, to organize tenants and try to get the city to help save landlord abandoned buildings in the neighborhood. It wasn’t too long before Meg found the true loves of her life, and her moral center from that point forward: the people of the Bronx, and her future husband, Richie.

By the winter of 1976, I was looking around for something to do – a disastrous attempt at graduate school at the New School was coming to a close. Meg said, hey, you should come up and take a look around in the Bronx, see what we’re doing, it’s pretty cool. So I went up there, looked around, got totally sucked into what they were doing, and started commuting on the #6 train from the loft I rented across the street from Cooper Union up to 163^rd Street and Washington Avenue.  For $85 bucks a week.

Meg spent all her waking hours organizing the landlord abandoned but still occupied apartment buildings around the neighborhood, I worked in the construction trailer outside 1186 Washington Avenue, mostly doing the one thing I’m any good at – writing – and the one thing that’s got to be genetically hardwired into my shmatta-trade family – selling. Except instead of selling ladies house dresses, I was selling an idea. I’d go downtown with Ramon or on my own and talk to foundations or the bureaucrats at the housing department, and sell them on the notion that this gang of dreamers, hustlers, strivers, and misfits could save a neighborhood – when the rest of the world wouldn’t even accept the fact that people still were living there.

That winter was one of the worst in New York history, bitterly cold. It was also the winter I began to understand just who my friend really was becoming. The first week I started I asked Meg if I could go with her to the buildings she was organizing.  We walked into one building – the front door was wide open – and coming down the stairway from the upper floors was a cascade of ice a foot thick: a scavenging crew had ripped out copper piping in an upstairs apartment, but the water service was still turned on. It flowed down the stairs, and froze. The orange extension cord coming in from the light pole on the street was a giveaway that someone was still living there, and Meg climbed up the icy stairs, following the electrical cord, and found an old man bundled against the cold sitting in front of a space heater.

In New York City, the capital of capital.

Meg got the guy relocated into one of the buildings that was in better shape, and got him hooked up with rental support and social services, and did it with a brutal efficiency and smouldering anger – and always, that smiling inviting face – that made it clear: this woman has come into her own. She knows what she’s doing. Do not get in the way.

And she was committed. Richie and Meg moved into an apartment on Valentine Avenue around the corner from our main renovation project. She got pregnant with Sarah. She was deepening her connections, step by step. She was growing into the adult community leader that people in the Bronx came to know and love, and now miss so much. (But “The Mother Teresa of the Bronx”? Spare me.)

By the summer of 1978, our paths began to diverge. While Megan was deepening her roots in the Bronx, I was getting ready to leave again, a pattern I’d stick to for another ten years, until I found my own place in this world. I was, I think, ashamed by my inability to make the kind of commitment to a place that Meg was making – and she made it seem so easy, so organic – she seemed so adult in her mid-20s.

We saw one another a couple of times in the years following, and Meg would send out a letter each winter reporting on the latest configuration of kids and pets and work.

And then, we reconnected last summer. Richie and Meg came out to California and stayed with us for a couple of days. We picked up the conversational thread where we’d left it back then, it seemed without missing a beat. As if we were old friends, just dropped by for a chat.

Her hair had that rich, lustrous glow, and her face was as open and inviting as it had been when she was 13 and we’d just met on the first day of junior high school.

But today is the day Richie and her brothers and BC and her kids and her friends buried her.

Today is not a day for joy, or for justice.

That will have to wait for tomorrow.

And just now, watched David Corn and Kevin Drum do a superb job talking with Bill Moyers, breaking down the story in our current issue on why and how the banking industry has “intellectually (as well as politically) captured Washington pols. A great show. Really feeling tonight all the pride and honor of working with guys like these – and the rest of the MoJo team.

Which brings me to Paul Erdos.

The other day I was listening to a show about “Numbers” from my absolutely all-time favorite podcast, Radiolab. The show featured a story about Paul Erdos and something called Erdos Numbers. (Sidebar: walking Mingus the Super Dog up the hill and down the hill yesterday I was thinking about this post, and it occurred to me that – while they’re quite different – Radiolab’s the aural equivalent of my all-time favorite magazine, the late, lamented, wish-it-was-still-around Whole Earth Review aka Coevolution Quarterly. Why? Because both are rich in sideways thinking, bringing the unexpected together with the everyday in brilliant moments of insight.)

Erdos (pronounced “Eyrdish”) was a Hungarian Jew who, with two mathematicians for parents, lived and breathed numbers pretty much from birth (it was said he could calculate the number of seconds someone had lived, at the age of 3).

The day he was born, his two sisters died of scarlet fever; his mother was so terrified that Paul would get a fatal disease she didn’t let him leave the house til he was 11 – no going to school, no outside friends, nothing much except numbers. With the Nazi takeover of Hungary, Erdos’ father and four of his mother’s siblings were killed by the Nazis. Erdos left Hungary for good, eventually landing a teaching position at Princeton University.

Twenty-seven years old, disconnected from his Hungarian family and social world (and with an unusual relationship to that larger world to begin with), Erdos had no conventional friendships, and a noticeable lack of interest in accumulating worldly possessions. His only meaningful social relationships were through mathematics.

He could have gone completely insane; instead Erdos “turned this inwardness into making mathematics a joyous and social occasion” according to Paul Hoffman, who has written a biography of Erdos. He began traveling, visiting other mathematicians working on interesting projects. “My brain,” Erdos would announce on arrival, “is open.” He couldn’t cook, barely changed his clothes (and didn’t know how to tie his shoes til he was 11), drank copious amounts of coffee.

But people put him up, and put up with him. He was brilliant, generous – and prolific:  Erdos collaborated with more people and wrote more papers (1400 by one count) than any mathematician in history.

Which is what led to the Erdos number. Created by some of his fellow mathematicians to poke fun at Erdos while also honoring him, an “Erdos number” (so says Wikipedia) is “the “collaborative distance” between a person and Erdos, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.

Erdos himself had an Erdos number of 0. If you published a paper with him you were assigned an Erdos number of 1 (there are about 500 of these, including ex-Atlanta Braves slugger Hank Aaron, who autographed the same baseball as Erdos when the two of them were awarded honorary degrees by Emory University). If you published a paper with one of his collaborators, you had an Erdos number of 2 (about 8,000). Erdos number 3: 34,000. Erdos number 4: 84,000. And so on. At this point, it’s estimated that some 200,000 mathematicians have an Erdos number, and that about 90 percent of active mathematicians have an Erdos number of 8 or lower.

Think about that: 200,000 people whose ideas are linked together with one another, and with this one, extraordinary man with Erdos number 0.

Listening to the Radiolab piece on Erdos, I thought to myself, well, all of us have our own Erdos number – rings of relationships built around ideas and passions. Our connections to family, partners, sons and daughters. People we’ve learned from in our work, study, or activism. People we’ve trained and mentored over the years.  And in the digital space, of course, the infinite network that fans out from the connections we know to the viral universe we don’t know.

I don’t know if Erdos knew how big his “Erdos number” community really was, or if he even cared about that. But that’s the point: we can’t really know the scale of repercussions of our own choices and words as they spread out over time and space (whether that’s real or digital). But there’s an ethics there that needs to be paid attention to. It’s not just about the technology.

And that’s my thought for the New Year.