Our Next Chapter

We have news! I’ve been offered an amazing position as head of digital for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland, and we’ve decided to move as a family. It feels like a tremendous luxury to be able to do the kind of work I love for a mission I support so completely (as anyone who’s discussed my “I heart habeas corpus” bumper sticker with me can attest).

This means selling our Seattle house and our cars. We are keeping our cabin because we love it and it’s relatively cheap (stay tuned for more about our cabin soon). But we are going to be selling and donating at least half of our possessions. This is more than partly the point.

Thinking about leaving Seattle has us up at night–both with sadness about what we’re leaving behind and excitement about what lies ahead. But the job is also giving me nine weeks’ vacation to facilitate visits every three months for our open adoption, which certainly feels like another winning part of this life we’re aiming to design.

I will be able to spend two full months each year in the company of Amelia, and Therese will get to stay home with her, figuring out the world of Swiss bureaucracy, reading while Amelia is in bilingual preschool, and SUPing on Lake Geneva. We’re trading stuff for travel and experience, which is the ideal we want to model for Amelia.

Here’s a photo tour of our next chapter. We will arrive in Geneva in mid-May. We are already grateful for friends who have put us in contact with their friends living in our new city.

To start with, the actual Alps, from the roof of the WHO building. Everyone wanted to point out Mont Blanc to me, sort of as a selling point. It was sweet.

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Shopping trolleys lined up in the grocery store, ready to board the tram to take goodies home by train.

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Grocery store chocolate. Will they make us buy the Tourist brand?

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A patisserie in Geneva. As a family rule, we are suckers for Euro-stripes.

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The old town in Nyon, which is an option for where we might get an apartment.

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Also Nyon, with Lake Geneva in the background

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THE SUMMER DAY

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
–Mary Oliver

1989

I recently finished Eleanor & Park, a YA book I had somehow gleaned enough information about to believe it might be good. It was. I’ve never read a book before that exactly captured what it was like to grow up in the late 80s. 

The author gets it so right that for the first time, I’ve felt totally returned to a time about a time 25 years past. I went right back to being this person as I read the book:

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The year after this photo was taken, when I was 16, I got a job at the Record Bar at the Berkshire Mall. I think I thought it would be cool, like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink:

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This was the reality:

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Eleanor & Park completely captured the 80s I lived—when the post-New Wave/Smiths/Fishbone/Camper Van Beethoven 80s were miles and oceans apart from the Robert Palmer 80s, and you knew which side you were on.

It made me dig out my old mix tape playlists, or recreate them as best I could from cassette singles (!) long since thrown away. 

P.S. Also, obligatory high school graduation photo. So. Many. Perms.

Photo essay: What's growing in West Virginia's urban ruins?

This is my favorite longford story of the week, and a great reminder to always challenge your own assumptions and biases (including that “fair trade” is a well-known concept):

Two days each week, a flatbed truck pulls up to one of the high-rise apartment buildings in downtown Wheeling. The sides fold down and buckets filled with corn, cucumbers, peppers, onions, potatoes, melons and cabbage spill onto the sidewalk.

The set-up is one of Grow Ohio Valley’s outreach efforts — another chance to bring fresh produce to more neighborhoods downtown. But some seniors who live in buildings like Montani Towers are still trying to figure out this “group of hippies.” One woman saw the words “Fair Trade” on a poster advertising some of the imported items sold at Grow Ohio Valley’s mobile market and tried to barter her folding chairs for sweet corn.

Museums See Different Virtues in Virtual Worlds

I love the honesty and soul-searching in this profile of the Met and Brooklyn Museum’s social media work.

On the tagging game, the museum found that fully 52 percent of its players were museum professionals, and a clear majority of those were on the Brooklyn Museum staff. (emphasis mine)

Ms. Bernstein said that this data shook up her team. For her, the whole idea of these tools was to break the old pattern of museums catering too much to an educated elite. But the digital sphere was, in her museum’s case, simply replicating (if not amplifying) the elitism of physical visit patterns. “The farther away you were, the less deeply engaged you were in scale and scope,” she said. “The closer you are, the more engaged you were. It has caused us as an institution to completely rethink what we do in terms of digital engagement.”

As part of that rethinking, the museum has publicly shuttered many of its digital platforms in recent months: Flickr, History Pin, iTunesU, its branded Foursquare page and its tagging games. Mr. Sreenivasan said the closings got the whole museum world talking, and wondering about their own online presences.

A recent blog post by Ms. Bernstein explained the changes: “As part of a social media strategic plan, we are changing gears a bit to deploy an engagement strategy which focuses on our in-building audience.”

The lesson Ms. Bernstein takes away from the pivot is this: “Not letting the tech community drive what you’re doing, because it may not be right.” Digital “is not the holy grail,” she contends. “It’s a layer.”

Power Couples on Twitter and Instagram

It was fun/surreal to see my work in social media and digital strategy reviewed–sort of–in the Times this morning. I’m also glad they included people who are interested in helping the world, rather than just their own celeb standing.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY The founders of a philanthropic foundation with a $40 billion endowment have leveraged their enormous audience on Twitter and other platforms to transform their image from garden-variety geek zillionaires into issues-first global ambassadors, on the level of a Bono or a George Soros. Theirs is a running dialogue on Twitter, but one remarkably free of the expected tech-world gossip, Instagram selfies from black-tie benefits or spirited plugs for Windows 9. With grave issues like health care, global poverty and education as their focus, the couple’s ample online banter is consistently high-minded, earnest and global in scope — imagine if Dag Hammarskjold had taken to change the world via thumb typing.

I had to look up Dag Hammaskjold though.