Nexus

Like many organizations, my museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, struggles with two conflicting goals.
The museum should be for everyone in our community.
But it’s impossible to do a great job being for everyone. We’re more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them.
How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to …

Last year, approximately 365,000 high school students participated in Poetry Out Loud—memorizing and reciting poems in organized competitions held across all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. By almost any standard, Poetry Out Loud constitutes a huge success in a period when cultural success stories seem rare.
In retrospect, successful ventures often seem inevitable. But it …

It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the …

California’s marijuana industry will soon begin its transition from an illicit ecosystem fraught with guns, cash, and cartels into a regulated economic juggernaut.
The stakes of getting it right are high. Not only will the industry produce an expected $1 billion in annual tax dollars for youth drug prevention, restoration of the environment, and enforcement against the black market, but legal marijuana will influence the …

The United States is out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Trump administration says we will burn coal and fossil fuels if we like, and no one will tell us otherwise.
The United States, we are told, will have a burst of economic growth, now that it is unshackled from an agreement that required (suggested is more accurate) our nation to do …

California has had many chroniclers — some critics, some boosters, some cheerleaders, some dour polemicists. It’s only natural that a vast state defined by its extremes—political, geological, economic, and otherwise—would rarely be portrayed from the center.
But one of the paradoxes of the Golden State is that the greatest historian of California, someone who absorbed the writing of previous scholars and scribes, found a way to …

Why would someone who spent much of his career working for a multinational telecommunications company care so much about preserving “net neutrality?”
That someone would be me. I worked for Vodafone, the British telecom giant that serves Asia, Africa, Europe and Oceania, while living in both London and The Hague. I went on to work with young technology companies, then at the U.S. State Department, and …

I am a lifelong Democrat who has been working hard for more than a decade to improve the policies and build the coalitions necessary for the success of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. I believe the ACA didn’t go far enough and that the United States must do more to guarantee universal and affordable health coverage. My preference would be for America to …

In the March 1942 issue of the journal Modern Hospital, Charles F. Neergaard, a prominent New York City hospital design consultant, published a layout for a hospital inpatient department that was so innovative he copyrighted it. The plan held two nursing units—groups of patient rooms overseen by a single nursing staff—in a single building wing. For each unit, a corridor provided access to a row …

Are Americans finally ready to un-rig their Constitutional system?
I’ve spent nearly the past decade traveling the United States and talking with people about the Constitutional system, and I think the answer is yes.
My work on the question started in 2008, with an experiment called the Constitution Café. These were an evolution of the Socrates Café, public gatherings around the globe (from Tokyo to Sydney to …