I love words. I love what you can do with words. I love playing with words, shaping ideas with them, communicating things that matter to me through them, and affecting the thoughts and feelings of others with them. For all these reasons and more, I love words. But not always. As I’ve said before, I don’t always love words when they come as poems. When words come in poems, they don’t seem to follow the rules, or at least they operate by different rules, rules I haven’t mastered and don’t feel competent at. That’s, in part, why the Saturday poetry post has been important to me. It’s a way to stretch, to push myself to work a...

We are closing in on the climax of another presidential campaign. Tonight we will have the first of three presidential debates and in a little over a month we will vote. Rather than offer opinions on a particular candidate – don’t worry, I have them, but haven’t typically used this space to share them – I’d instead like to take a moment and think about the political process, particularly in this “age of information.” In this TEDTalk, internet-expert Clay Shirky invites us to consider what we can learn from the changes occurring the worlds of technology and science as a result of the new “open-source” culture in which we...