ub.

“You have never clarified, Derek,” one of his Shabbat friends wrote to him. “You’ve never said, ‘Hey all, this is what I do believe and this is what I don’t.’ It’s not the job of someone who’s potentially scared/intimidated by someone else to approach that person to see if they are in fact scary/intimidating.”

Since the attacks of 9/11, the banner of national security has led to intense monitoring of the politics of Muslim and Arab Americans. Young people from these communities have come of age in a time when the question of political engagement is both urgent and fraught. In The 9/11 Generation, Sunaina Marr Maira uses extensive ethnography to understand the meaning of political subjecthood and mobilization for Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American youth. Maira explores how young people from communities targeted in the War on Terror engage with the “political,” forging coalitions based on new racial and ethnic categories, even while they are under constant scrutiny and surveillance, and organizing around notions of civil rights and human rights. The 9/11 Generation explores the possibilities and pitfalls of rights-based organizing at a moment when the vocabulary of rights and democracy has been used to justify imperial interventions, such as the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maira further reconsiders political solidarity in cross-racial and interfaith alliances at a time when U.S. nationalism is understood as not just multicultural but also post-racial. Throughout, she weaves stories of post-9/11 youth activism through key debates about neoliberal democracy, the “radicalization” of Muslim youth, gender, and humanitarianism.

But at the White House, one former staffer explained to the Washington Post, women started using a simple rhetorical technique to stop interruptions and reinforce points made by other women. When a woman made a good point, another woman would repeat it, and give credit to the originator. This made the idea harder to ignore, or to steal. The women called the technique “amplification.” “We just started doing it, and made a purpose of doing it,” one of president Barack Obama’s former aides told the Post. “It was an everyday thing.” She said that Obama noticed and began calling on women more often.

But for us, those questions can’t be limited to digital experiences. We’ve been working on those for 30 years, and our hunch is that they’ve reached a “peak design” moment. That’s not to suggest that digital experiences are unimportant or can’t get any better, but simply that they’ve become commoditized at this point. It’s time to apply our collective design practice to greater challenges, namely: 1. Serving the needs of the global poor 2. Designing new approaches to health, including aging and the end of life 3. Designing healthy and profitable food systems that can serve the needs of all 4. Designing citizen-centered government services 5. Designing the future of our urban communities 6. Anticipating the opportunities and challenges of over-the-horizon technologies 7. Designing the future of work and the corporation itself Those are the edges of design and it’s where we feel a gravitational pull. Organizations and systems must be redrawn so that they are able to make use of today’s technological capacity in ways that help humans, not hurt them. The sci-fi specter of A.I. that outsmarts us or an Internet of Things that controls us can only come true if human-centered design is not present at the drafting table. Bringing others to the party who feel the same way just makes us faster, stronger, and able to build things of which today, we can only dream.

“I’m much better when I actually have a job to do, rather than trying to get the job, you know?’’ she said at the town hall.

Of course, no matter how many great alternatives judges can provide instead of jail time, if a defendant fails to come to court, he or she won’t be able to hear about them. Courts must be as accessible as possible, and that starts with allowing children to accompany their parents. One of the revelations in the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson was that children weren’t allowed in municipal court, which explains why many defendants were unable to appear. Several courts in Texas limit or don’t allow parents bringing their children, even though kids don’t present a problem in my court — maybe because we provide coloring books and toys for them to play with while their parents take care of their cases.

One of the first things Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says to job candidates during interviews is, "Tell me your story." He wants to know: How much of your success came down to luck, and how well do you appreciate that factor? Butterfield attributes 98 percent of his own success to luck, and prefers candidates who cite a similarly high percentage in their answers. He says he has known people who weren't professionally successful despite their talents, character, and other merits. "It's difficult for me to think that there was something wrong with them," he said Monday during the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

“When I talk to college students or anyone who’s thinking about entrepreneurship or targeting global poverty, the gadget is where 99 percent of people start thinking,” said Nicholas Fusso, the director of D-Prize (its slogan: “Distribution is development”).  “That’s important — but the biggest problems in the poverty world aren’t a lack of gadgets or new products. It’s figuring out how people can have access to them.” So D-Prize gives seed money, in chunks of $10,000 to $20,000, to tiny new organizations that have good ideas for how to distribute useful things.

Slack engineer and diversity advocate Erica Baker talks about the message conveyed to underrepresented people of color when a company or investor says they’ll focus their diversity efforts on women first. As she dubs it, “colorless diversity” sends a message to be patient, wait quietly, and maybe they’ll get around to you.

If the neighborhood is immune to gentrification, the vaccine is permanently affordable housing. Long time Tenderloin activist Randy Shaw explains that: “more than 25 percent of the neighborhood's housing stock is either in nonprofit hands or has rents subsidized by the government. It's hard to gentrify a neighborhood when a major portion of its land isn't available to speculators.” So, even if the neighborhood is overrun by luxury housing and upscale restaurants, the residents of these affordable units will not be displaced.

This impact is ultimately why I really just can’t give a shit if Serial or Making A Murderer are biased or even emotionally manipulative. Frankly, maybe we need to be emotionally manipulated to bring us back to a state of rationality, sanity and empathy. After all, we’ve already been manipulated into believing police officers are saints who can do no wrong, that any harm caused by someone with a badge is either a mistake, somehow justified or the work of a bad apple. We’ve been indoctrinated into believing that with rare exceptions, the justice system works, that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, and that every citizen’s right to a fair trial, regardless of their innocence or guilt, is one that is respected and attended to by those empowered to do so.