On housing innovation in New Orleans

Though a bit too focused on Brad Pitt, The Atlantic had a spot on housing in New Orleans this week. Check it out!

"If you look at the way ants behave when they’re gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing you’ve ever seen—they’re zigzagging all over the place, they’re bumping into other ants. You think, ‘What a mess! This is never going to amount to anything,’” says Michael Mehaffy, the head of the Sustasis Foundation, which studies urban life and sustainability and has worked with neighborhood organizations here. “So it’s easy to look at New Orleans at the grassroots level and wonder, What’s going on here?’ But if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it’s the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process.”

Actually, sounds a lot like how I spent my last two years.

Louisiana in the Economist

Two of my favorite things come together in this cautiously optimistc Economist article about Louisiana. Guess they must be reading my hopeful blog posts.

Hat tip to Dunc, the source of most of my interesting news links.

Today's homework

If you work in international relations, development or health, you probably have written up some glossy report you are convinced no one will ever read. Today, I will dive into that murky world of readerless reports. On the list:

• Asset-Based Approaches to Poverty Reduction in a Global Context (Brookings)
• The Future of Globalization (CG Researcher)
• The Final Report of the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice (The Earth Institute/MacArthur Foundation)
• Cuba's Future (CQ Press)
• Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out (The Annie E. Casey Foundation)
• The United States and Mexico: Towards a Strategic Partnership (The Wilson Center)

Also on the list: catching up on my brother's blog and finishing Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. Not a bad day, I tell you what.

Homework stinks

Rather than researching graduate schools, I spent this morning browsing Holly's photos from Ecuador. Like Vandy at the bottom of the SEC, the two emails inviting me to view Holly's Picasa albums have held up the bottom of my inbox for months. A couple of my (shareable) favorites:

Trying to help Johana with her math homework. Note iPod headphones on the table; for a couple of days, she was able to focus while listening to Bach's cello suites.

One particularly colorful neighborhood in Quito
Isaac Suntaxi Suntagsíg, who referred to me affectionately as gringuito, or "Little White Boy"

"Pilsener - The beer we will never have to drink again" - Dunc

Fun stuff I learned in Manhattan

In New York last week, I attended a social entrepreneurship conference called "The Feast" (for a layman's definition of social entrepreneurship, see below). There were lots of exciting speakers, fancy videos, etc. Some bits that were interesting enough to copy down:

• In deciding what to be and what sort of organizations to build, we can make one slight but game-changing syntactical shift. Instead of trying to be the best ______ in the world, we should strive to be the best ______ for the world. Think for a moment about the difference between a firm being "The best investment bank in the world" and "The best investment bank for the world." (From Uffe Elbaek, the founder of some project in Denmark I don't understand).
  
• Make the smallest investment possible to achieve your goals; make bets that give you room to maneuver; bet big when you're happy with either outcome. In addition to making better poker players, professional poker player Annie Duke suggested applying basic game theory to the rest of life's conundrums: kids, families, jobs, and the like. For example: if you're taking six children to Disney World and one of them is acting up, a threat to cancel the trip will prove wholly ineffective. The kid knows you won't follow through, you know you won't follow through, and you've left yourself little room to maneuver.
• Keep your eye on the periphery. I've been long convinced that tomorrow's solutions to global problems won't come from existing businesses, governments, nonprofits or news agencies but will come from unexpected places. Some guy involved in the health care debate (whose name I didn't catch) put this much more eloquently.
  
• The food debate in the US is as much about social justice as it is about efficiency and competitiveness. Half of today's black and Latino kids will develop diabetes over the course of their lifetime, according to the boss of Slow Food USA. A fifth of our greenhouse gas emissions come from agricultural production. And "if we really wanted to manufacture a system that would lead to a health care crisis with real staying power, we would design something that looks a lot like our school lunch program."
  
• Success in entrepreneurship comes from deep expertise and commitment over time. Yeesh. Guess it's time to get back to school.

One more thought, this from a street musician in Grand Rapids:

"If you're a fan of what works, you become a student of the world pretty quick."

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*Social entrepreneurship, for those of you unfamiliar with or skeptical of the buzzword, is the application of resources designed for entrepreneurs to social ventures: nonprofits, socially minded businesses, etc.

Car conversations

I'm not much for talking on phones. As such, being in Ecuador was a pleasant break from phone conversations. When you pay per-minute, you have lots of had-a-baby-it's-a-boy exchanges.

So I save my phone conversations for the road, and generally very much enjoy catching up with folks while I drive. Some of yesterday's New Orleans-to-Shreveport conversation topics:

• The parable of The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov, which wrestles with the theological problem of evil
  
• U2's new concert tour, which apparently has a fancy rotating stage
• How to Command a Room Like a Man
  
• Graduate programs at the London School of Economics
• The Hound of Rowan, a teen book about a boy whose mirror allows him to access alternate dimensions
• David Vitter's chances of winning the 2010 "Most Miserable Human Being on the Planet" contest. See this morning's Shreveport Times article for a recent example, completely unrelated to the very serious sin of this man "fighting for families in Louisiana"
• The Texas border wall, and the efforts of UT's Rapoport Center to combat it

Dallas, here I come!

Sternutation Inspiration

Looking forward

Jackie from Gramercy, Louisiana, isn't looking back. 'We a post-Katrina couple,' she told me proudly of the man she'll marry this weekend. 'We havin a blue-jean weddin, doin it our way, since we both done the deal before.' Her before was definitive and, in definitive south Louisiana fashion, pronounced something like bufowah. 'My ex-husband, he got some things uh mine there's a court order for me to go git, but I just about don't care anymore (ehnymowah).'

'Lookin forward, sounds like,' I said, 'No use in lookin back.' She gave a start and nodded. 'Yeah, that's right!'

It is now October of 2009, four years after the Gulf Coast was buffeted by the now-proverbial* storms of 2005. Finally - finally - the city feels to me as Jackie sounded: Looking forward. There's a mayoral election around the corner. Groups like 504ward and PlayNOLA are coming up with creative ways to build on the tide of young professionals flowing into the city. There's finally a comprehensive plan and a central office for coastal restoration, even if the funding hasn't come yet. The Saints are winning! And conversations don't all revolve around the storms and how people 'made out' anymore.

But don't for a minute think that all this fancy forward-thinking has anybody forgetting why they stuck around. After having told me all about her wedding, Jackie wheeled the conversation toward Gramercy and their Christmas Eve bonfires. She assured me it'd be every bit as fun as Mardi Gras as long I as I'm 'fine with drunk Cajuns and fireworks. Cause if not, boy, I tell you what...!'

Drunk cajuns, fireworks and a whole region lookin' forward? I could get fine with that.

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*Note: In the original version of this post, I misspelled proverbial as porverbial. Phonetically, I think that's indicative of my generally poor verbiage. My apologies.

La Vida Idealista

So it doesn't really make me famous, but I'm a guest blogger this month on La Vida Idealista, idealist.org's newish Latin America blog. Check it!

(Also, if you're bored and/or interested in community development, see this spot from All Day Buffet a few months ago).