I try to keep both my physical and my e-mail inboxes clear. Nothing should stay there longer than a day or two without being dealt with, filed on a to-do list, or trashed. As diligent and organized as that may sound, though, there is one area where my process consistently fails: answering messages from friends.

Back before I started trying to practice GTD, I would leave personal messages in my inbox. The idea was that having them stare me in the face every time I opened my mail program would serve as a reminder to answer them. This worked; I would see them, remember that I hadn’t answered them, feel a twinge of guilt that they had sat there for too long…and then fail to do anything about it. My brain seems to prefer a small daily guilt trip to the one-time, slightly-less-small mental effort of composing a reply, even though the aggregate guilt of messages that go unanswered for years far outweighs the momentary effort of dealing with the problem.

Brains talk a good game, but in fact they’re quite stupid.

So, my first goal for this month is to clear my e-mail backlog. My to-do list shows that I owe messages to eighteen people. Write one message a day, first thing, and I should be done with days to spare. Stay tuned for the results.

Some friends and I have been trying our hands at podcasting. We call our show Sanity Plea Radio, a name chosen in honor of a cartoon strip we made and posted online several years ago. That effort died after three strips, but SPR breaks that record today with the posting a fourth episode.

If there’s room in your podcast rotation for a “group of guys talking” show, maybe you’d like to give it a listen.

For a few months now I’ve been running an experiment in “low-noise community news selection” called Pick One Thing. I’m closing the site today.

I think the project was a success in that the stories submitted matched the theme and tone I was aiming for. This is arguably due to the community consisting of my friends — that is, relatively like-minded people who know and respect each other, but I think it could have worked even with strangers.

As my friend Ben pointed out, however, Pick One could only bring order and calm to a small section of one’s information diet. Even if the site became popular and published dozens of submissions every day, no one would treat it as her sole source of news and ideas. The need to filter one’s information intake and exercise discipline and moderation would not go away.

Just about every story submitted matched my “inform, don’t persuade” guideline. Reading about ideas and current events that I would not have discovered on my own was my favorite part of the project. Furthermore, the site didn’t become a platform for punditry. It easily could have, given that my friends have different politics (often different from mine, anyway) and are the sorts of people who care about issues and want to persuade others. However, I didn’t want Pick One to turn into an op-ed battleground. A real contest of ideas and values requires more than merely trading hyperlinks. Since that is the only form of communication the site offered, it could never facilitate such a contest. Submissions that primarily push opinions and judgements would only have made readers cheer, groan, sigh, or some combination thereof; they would have changed no one’s mind.

This was the root of my “inform, don’t persuade” guideline. It’s not that opinions or value judgements would have been unwelcome. But, submissions were only useful if they were primarily concerned with ideas, facts, or events that could be interesting and/or enjoyable to *any* reader regardless of her values.

This guideline was imprecise and sometimes difficult to apply. Consider an imaginary article titled, “Glenn Beck is an extremist demagogue,” versus one titled, “What the success of Glenn Beck says about our media culture.” (Assume the title of each accurately reflects its tone and content.) The former will change no one’s mind about Beck; it could only do so as part of a deeper conversation that Pick One does not support, as there are no comments. The latter article will contain plenty of opinion, judgement, selective presentation of facts, and so on; but any reader, regardless of what he thinks about Beck, can take an interest in the ideas that form the core of the article, even if he disagrees with them.

As a real example, take this article about Fox News and Glenn Beck’s treatment of George Soros. The submitter of this story later said that he thought it was wrong for the site. It’s hard to read such a story in any context other than a “Red versus Blue” political struggle, either real or imagined. It seems at a glance to offer little to the reader other than the notion that Team Red are lying jerks. On the other hand, the article is informative on top of being opinionated — it presents a factual rebuttal to a series of Beck/Fox claims. A charitable reader might see it as an article informing him about George Soros, the integrity of Fox News, and perhaps by implication our political culture at large.

You can see how the “inform, don’t persuade” guideline can be difficult to apply.

On balance, I agree with the submitter that this article didn’t meet my criterion. At best, it informs the reader about the behavior of a particular pundit and a particular news channel. It doesn’t give much attention to the broader picture, so it’s not of general interest; it’s only potentially interesting to those who watch (or are thinking about watching) Beck’s show — or, more likely, those who enjoy getting worked up over the perceived misdeeds of pundits of opposing politics.

From the beginning, I tried not to over-think this project. I had the idea, and I wrote the code for it in a few hours. I didn’t really think it would take off or become popular, but I was trying to follow Ze Frank’s advice to get ideas out into the world as quickly as possible. I am pleased to have executed an idea quickly and sloppily rather than idly mulling it for days and then dropping it, and I am grateful to my friends who took the time to play along.

I didn’t get into podcasts when they first became “a thing,” but a few have caught and held my interest in the last few months.

The Bike Show

The Bike Show airs on a London radio station and is also available for download. As you might expect, it covers all manner of topic related to cycling. Even if you’re not into bicycles, the show is well done and has a charming host, so you might find it worth listening to anyway.

The Bike Show is currently on a break, but new episodes should appear this spring or summer. In the meantime, there’s a large back catalogue to sample. One of my favorite installments is the one covering the 2004 Dunwich Dynamo, an annual 120 mile nighttime ride held in the United Kingdom.

You Look Nice Today

You Look Nice Today is difficult to explain. The format is “some guys sitting around talking,” which is not uncommon and which some mates and I have tried ourselves. Unlike much of that genre, however, YLNT doesn’t make me want to throttle the hosts. I might sum it up as “understated deadpan improvisational comedy.” It might not make you laugh out loud time after time, but it’s smart and good-natured, and it ought to make you smile.

YLNT’s weakness is its irregular update schedule. They’ve released no episodes yet this year, and there were only three in 2010. There’s a substantial back catalogue, though. I recommend sampling “Sacks-Minelli Disease” or “Expressed as a Vest.”

In Our Time

Raising the brow significantly is In Our Time. Host Melvyn Bragg takes a topic, which could be anything from the human nervous system to “the history of the city” to the Delphic Oracle, and spends forty minutes or so discussing it with three experts, usually university professors. The discussions don’t always follow a clear start-to-finish arc, and you won’t necessarily come away feeling like you’ve had a comprehensive tutorial. But, the show is smart and interesting and offers a wide variety of topics.

Several weeks ago, I started an experiment called Pick One. One could argue that the Web doesn’t need another community-edited news aggregator. That said, I think I’ve done something different by aiming for a relatively focused theme for submitted content. I also designed Pick One to discourage visitors from browsing endlessly and aimlessly. Moreover, there is no reputation, scoring, or social networking system, making it a haven for refugees from applications like Digg and Farmville.

I invite you, Gentle Reader, to have a look. I threw it together pretty quickly, and it’s fairly rough. If you’d like to comment or report a problem, please write to me.

About four years ago, I passed through the gates of the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire headquarters in Abidjan.

One of the many things that struck me during my visit was how, less than one year prior, the headquarters compound had been damaged in riots. I remembered seeing a picture of UN soldiers facing down an angry mob across these same gates.

Over the past several days, I have watched and read a similar story unfold. Now, as then, incumbent—make that former—president Laurent Gbagbo is using violence and propaganda to resist political reform and a peaceful, democratic transition of power.

Fellow ex-Williamsburger Joanna offered her first-hand account of election day.

What follows is my letter to my senators following the release of the Pentagon’s report on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Dear Senator [Brown|Voinovich]:

The Pentagon’s recently-released report on gay and lesbian soldiers confirms what twenty-five other nations have already learned first-hand: allowing all men and women to serve with honesty and integrity regardless of their sexuality poses no threat to morale, recruiting, or effectiveness. For more information on other nations’ experiences, I direct your attention to a report by the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara:

http://www.palmcenter.org/publications/dadt/gays_foreign_militaries_2010

That report also notes that the opposition to gay and lesbian service members reported by polls of troops in Canada and the United Kingdom did not translate into resignations of soldiers or drops in recruiting once open service was permitted. Whatever discomfort the objecting troops claimed to feel did not survive contact with reality.

When we look past the shrill rhetoric of the “culture war” and examine the facts, it becomes clear that continued opposition to gay and lesbian soldiers rests only on prejudice. This sentiment must no longer enjoy our elected government’s imprimatur. Please vote to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Respectfully yours,
William Watson Cline
North Canton

Update: The Pentagon report (PDF, 7.6 MiB) lists thirty-five NATO and ISAF nations with integrated militaries. (p. 89)

In the future, airline passengers will hand over all luggage and clothing. They will then don hospital gowns. Before takeoff, airplane cabins will be flooded with knockout gas.