Ideas

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.

Apple is far less ubiquitous than you might think. It has plenty of room to grow

Sometime in 2000, my colleague Verlyn started bringing his Mac laptop to our New York Times editorial board meetings. The rest of us would hover around the sleek white machine with the cool lighting radiating from it, wondering if Verlyn Klinkenborg could possibly be serious. Some of us had used Apples in college, sure, but everyone does crazy things in college.

Was an Apple really fit for a workplace? Verlyn assured us that it was no toy, and that his Mac could do all the things ours could—the mix of surfing, emailing, and pontificating that the gig entailed—without crashing as frequently as our PCs. Verlyn claimed that his Apple was not susceptible to those nasty viruses that plagued our land of “WinTel,” and I wanted to believe him. I too bought a Mac, and instantly felt cooler as a result.

Fast forward to 2015, when the novelty would be for someone at a meeting to take out a laptop that isn’t an Apple. And, somehow, the caché remains. Apple has walked the tightrope between ubiquity and coolness, attaining one without sacrificing the other.

The company just announced the most profitable quarter in U.S. corporate history, a three-month period in which it sold almost 75 million iPhones and 5.5 million Macs. Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’ down-to-earth successor as CEO, couldn’t help himself on the earnings call, describing the quarter as “historic” and his company’s performance—selling on average 34,000 iPhones an hour, 24/7—as “hard to comprehend.” Apple is now the world’s most valuable company, with a stock market valuation of some $700 billion, and nearly $180 billion in cash on hand. The company’s online iTunes store counts a staggering 800 million active users.

What’s most astonishing, given those numbers, is that Apple is far less ubiquitous than you might think. It has plenty of room to grow. Indeed, it may only be getting started.

If you look at its existing product lines, Apple only dominates the tablet market. The competing Android operating system runs more than two-thirds of the world’s smartphones. Apple ranks fifth worldwide in the number of computers sold, and third in the U.S. There is plenty of market share left for Apple to steal from others.

Apple’s growth strategy is impressively disciplined. The company doesn’t slash prices or create subpar products to meet less affluent consumers in emerging markets halfway. Apple instead holds out its meticulously designed, pricier products as coveted trophies for new middle-class consumers.

Apple is only starting to wade into an array of markets that it will likely revolutionize, and dominate, in short order. Apple Pay, its bid to become your all-encompassing cashless wallet, is off to a strong start. Fledgling Apple ventures like HomeKit, CarPlay, Apple Watch and iBeacon provide clues to Apple’s unstated, ultimate goal: providing you with one portal, or operating system, that links your Apple devices, your car, and your home.

Apple is hardly being a trailblazing pioneer in this. There are plenty of “smart watches” and digital wallet surrogates already out there, but Apple has a way of bidding its time, learning from others’ mistakes, and introducing a tweaked product that will go mainstream, in part because it fits in so well within the broader Apple ecosystem.

No other company is anywhere near being able to match Apple in providing us with such seamless curation of our lives. The Italian novelist Umberto Eco famously said in the 1990s that Apple was like Catholicism, in that its followers had to adhere to one way of doing things, while Microsoft (you could say Google nowadays) was more akin to Protestantism, which gave followers more latitude to reach their own conclusions and organize themselves accordingly. Apple is unique among Internet giants in getting consumers to pay top dollar for its goods and services, while companies like Facebook and Google rely instead primarily on an advertising model to subsidize their interactions with consumers.

And so Apple’s prospects appear brighter than ever. Its own success would seem to be the only threat to a company that has billed itself as the scrappy underdog that promised to help us “think different.” Therein lies the company’s existential challenge: Can Apple remain cool if its products become the one indispensable means of controlling your life and communicating with others? Can it remain an aspirational brand once it’s within everyone’s reach? How distinctive can the world’s largest company, no matter what it does, ever be?

I reached out to Verlyn, who now teaches at Yale, to ask whether he’s still inhabiting the Apple ecosystem. He is, and his disgust at his pre-2000 Windows experience sounds as raw as it did when he first started proselytizing for the Mac. But he draws a line at the coming Apple Watch: “I’ve never worn a watch, and I can’t imagine starting now.”

Andrés Martinez is editorial director of Zocalo Public Square, for which he writes the Trade Winds column.

Michael Muhammad Knight is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Students are asking the school to remove troubling vestiges of its Confederate past

In 1913, during the dedication of a Confederate soldiers’ memorial at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, industrialist Julian Carr praised the monument as a tribute to those UNC alumni who had died in defense of the “Anglo Saxon race.” Boasting of his own participation in that effort, he proudly recalled having “horse-whipped a Negro wench” just 100 yards from where the memorial had been erected.

Last Friday, as over 500 members of the UNC community assembled in front of that memorial to demand that UNC correct the racism of its landmarks, several African American women repeated Carr’s words in unison: “Negro wench.” One of those women, rally organizer Omololu Babatunde, then answered Carr’s 1913 dedication speech with a devastating address of her own. “These are the words and hateful sentiments that fall on my body and other Black bodies,” she told the crowd, referring to the numerous sites honoring the university’s white supremacist past that still litter the UNC campus. Now, a rising student-led movement is demanding that the university properly confront and contextualize its history, making changes to the campus map to more fully represent UNC’s community as it exists in 2015.

As a geography major at UNC, Babatunde regularly works in Saunders Hall. It was for William L. Saunders’s efforts gathering historical records that the university named the building after him in 1922. In addition to his contributions as an archivist, however, Saunders was also a leading figure in local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. “As I cross the threshold of this building in all my Black womanhood,” Babatunde told the gathering, “I am struck with a wave of mind-numbing fury.” The fury, she explained, is directed less at the historical person of Saunders himself than at a university administration that continues to honor him, thus preserving the Klan’s legacy of racially motivated terrorism.

For decades, members of the UNC community have sought to rename buildings such as Saunders Hall and to contextualize the Confederate soldiers’ memorial. These efforts have not yet been successful, even despite reports of African American students becoming physically ill when having to enter Saunders. As a PhD candidate in the university’s Religious Studies department, I also work in Saunders Hall, and have repeatedly observed the shock and disgust on undergraduates’ faces when they first learn this history. So many of these students take tremendous pride in representing the Carolina blue, and students coming from within the state especially treat UNC as embodying North Carolina itself. Though it may not be surprising that an institution founded over two centuries ago possesses a complex history, they are stunned and shamed by the university’s continued indifference towards that history. Many are heartbroken by the university’s willingness to honor a KKK leader at the expense of living members of its community: the students, faculty, and staff who are institutionally coerced into recognizing Klan violence when they work at Saunders Hall.

The organizers of Friday’s “Kick out the KKK” rally have made three demands that they describe as the “bare minimum.” First, Saunders Hall must be renamed Hurston Hall, after anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, who secretly studied at UNC prior to integration. In addition, the university’s Confederate memorial must bear a plaque that confronts its history. Finally, the organizers have demanded that UNC design a curriculum that contextualizes its racial history as part of orientation for incoming students.

In a statement, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt responded that the Board of Trustees would be “taking a close look” at what has been a grievance of UNC students for decades. Board of Trustee Chair Lowry Caudill additionally expressed concern over responding to the protests without “imposing today’s social norms on the past and ignoring our history, either good or bad.” Unfortunately, the Board has been less concerned with imposing yesterday’s world on UNC’s present. And if there is any danger of ignoring UNC’s history, it is on the side of a university administration that has allowed these troublesome legacies to go uncorrected.

Building on the momentum from Friday’s event, the demonstrations continue. Monday, students of color assembled in front of Saunders Hall wearing nooses around their necks, bearing signs that read, “This is what Saunders would do to me.” The group also distributed reproductions of documents from the university’s historical collections at Wilson Library, confirming Saunders’s KKK affiliation. Later this week, emphasis will turn from the horror of the Klan and Confederacy to what Babatunde calls a gathering of “joy, performance, and love” in honor of Zora Neale Hurston. The transformation from Saunders Hall to Hurston Hall does not simply attempt to erase the university’s memory of racism, violence, and exclusion; it celebrates the history of those who have struggled against all odds to make UNC a more inclusive place. As a student at UNC before her admission could have been a legal possibility, Hurston personifies that history.

Exploring conversations about UNC’s troubled landmarks throughout social media, I repeatedly encountered remarks suggesting that if people don’t like the university’s Confederate memorial statue, affectionately nicknamed “Silent Sam,” then they should leave. Sadly, this was the precise message of the statue itself: in 1913, Silent Sam marked the UNC campus as a site of white supremacy, making it clear to people of color that they were not welcome. A century after the statue’s dedication, Silent Sam continues to send that message: if you don’t like white supremacy, this is not the place for you. The UNC community has demanded that the university confront and correct the meanings that have been inscribed on its memorials and buildings, creating a campus that more completely welcomes all.

Matthew Mugo Fields is the Founder of GiftedandTalented.com.

Intelligence should be seen as the end goal, not the starting point

In America, we place great value on natural talent. We idolize the sheer genius of Albert Einstein and the creative brilliance of Steve Jobs—framing their success within the idea that geniuses like these are born, not created.

We have a surprisingly antiquated and misguided idea of how real talent comes to be, and this mistaken belief is holding our country back. There is no place where this myth is more destructive than in education.

Since the inception of “Gifted and Talented” programs, we have operated based on the idea that children are either born with rare and exceptional intellectual capacity, or they are not. In other words, being gifted is exactly that—a gift, having little or nothing to do with a child’s effort and everything to do with his or her natural ability.

This pushes parents of bright young children to become hyper focused on proving their child’s giftedness at a young age. And for good reason: the gifted label is a golden ticket in our education system. Once a child has earned it, typically by claiming a spot in the top 10 percent in a given skill or subject area, most often based on standardized test scores, the doors to gifted and talented education programs and resources swing open. These programs offer the accelerated curricula and greater learning resources that propel a small subset of students into top colleges and elite careers.

All of this sounds fine until you consider who we’re leaving out and what’s at stake. We need more innovators, problem solvers, and highly skilled people to tackle the monumental challenges of the 21^st century. Unfortunately, in the current education system, exceptional ability is too often an entry point, not a destination. The onus is on parents to prove that their child has extraordinary talent before they can access the most effective learning resources. But a large and growing body of research shows that this may be limiting the quality and quantity of the next generation of thinkers.

More than three decades of research from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and others support the idea that when students believe they can develop their potential—rather than believing it’s limited by natural intelligence or ability—they begin to approach difficult problems differently. Instead of seeing impossible and frustrating tasks, they see challenges that need to be sweated over and solved. Research shows that these moments of struggle with difficult tasks are critical to higher learning. These struggles build stronger, deeper neural connections and help children become more determined, resilient, and confident when facing challenges.

In this way, intelligence is not fixed. Intellectual capacity expands or contracts based on how we use our brains. The most advanced learners understand this, and they seek out challenges that help them expand their intellectual capacity. On the flip side, misguided belief in fixed intelligence can lead to a variety of negative learning patterns. For example, children labeled “gifted” early on often reach the conclusion that needing to work hard is a sign of low intelligence. They shy away from challenges, fearing that failure or struggle will expose intellectual weakness.

So why, then, is our entire system for gifted and talented education predicated on the notion that intelligence is a fixed trait that can be measured at a young age? Our fixation on giftedness as a threshold for access to superior education is harming our most promising children—both those identified as the smartest of the smart, and those who may have been overlooked.

In my own life, I was very nearly a victim of this broken system. When I moved in fifth grade from Barbados to a working-class neighborhood in the suburbs of Philadelphia, my school didn’t know what to make of me. I was young, black, and new to this country, so they stuck me in vocational track classes assuming I had neither the interest in nor the potential for college. It took a major intervention from two extraordinary educators to guide me off this predestined path, on to a top college, and eventually to Harvard for graduate school. These women tutored me, mentored me, and taught me that the only limit to my potential was how far I was willing to push myself.

I tell this story to illustrate an important point: we need to change the way we think about developing our smartest kids. Yes, each child is born with his or her own propensity for learning within the traditional classroom. But we need to think about “gifted and talented” as the goal, not the starting point. Unlike Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, I was not initially identified as naturally gifted, but I was able to develop my natural intellect into high levels of academic and real-world success. What all three of us have in common is that our natural abilities were honed and developed into success through hard work, mentorship, and access to the right tools and resources.

For me, access to the right tools and support required two observant teachers to break the mold of educational mislabeling. It’s not realistic to expect this level of intervention for every overlooked student. But the good news is that we finally have the technology to make it possible for every student to get the personal attention they need.

We are no longer solely dependent on the herculean efforts of teachers to make a difference. It’s no longer necessary to make rough approximations of natural potential. Technology can give every student a chance to develop great talent. Both inside and outside the classroom, powerful tools exist that can provide every student with the advanced, personalized instruction that we know characterizes a robust education and a path to success. For example, we now offer courses that mimic the personalized instruction of the best teachers and tutors – technology can adapt to how each student learns best, delivering personalized lessons tailored to each student’s own learning style and pace. What was once reserved for the “gifted and talented” is something that everyone can and should have access to today.

What I propose to educators, parents, and policymakers is this: Let’s rethink gifted and talented altogether and make it possible for more kids to get into the club. Let’s do away with the notion that being gifted should be the price of admission to our country’s most effective and advanced education programs. It’s holding too many of our most promising children back. Instead, let’s use technology and innovation in the classroom and at home to provide all students with the personalized, rigorous, and engaging education that we know creates world-class talent. In this way, not only will we raise the bar in education, we will get more students over it.

It’s time that we stop telling our kids what they can’t do, and start giving them the tools to see what they can do.

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Gayle Forman is the award-winning New York Times best-selling author of the novels: If I Stay, Where She Went and the Just One Day series. Her latest 'dark' book, I Was Here, follows a young woman in the aftermath of her best friend's suicide.

It's time to stop worrying that great YA novels about risky behavior or even death will be a bad influence on kids

When I was 12 years old, I became an avid reader, my bookshelves stuffed with paperbacks like Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives, Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight and Harold Robbins’ Dreams Die First. Much as I loved reading about groupies and spies and Hollywood wives, and drug addicts and murderers, I was not one of them. I hadn’t even French kissed. Though some of the girls at my school were already sexually experienced, in spite of my racy reading, I was not. I wasn’t much into boys, at least not ones who existed off the page of a juicy book.

I think about teen-reader me a lot when I hear about adults bemoaning the dark material in Young Adult books. (Interestingly, I rarely meet these folks; only read about them.) Because the concerns seem partially predicated on this idea that you become what you read. By that logic, I would’ve become a cocaine-snorting groupie years ago, or a lunatic or a murderous Russian. Because by 10^th grade, it was Vonnegut and Dostoyevsky I was obsessed with. Partly because by this time, I’d become a wee bit pretentious. But partly because the kinds of books I would’ve loved to read weren’t being written yet.

The other concern with dark YA seems based on a worry that these intense stories—which sometimes deal with issues like self-harm and addiction and abuse and even death—could irrevocably damage fragile minds.

Huh.

I’m never all that sure what makes a book “dark” in the first place. It seems to vary with seasons, or the trends. Are dark books the ones that allegorically explore serious subject matter, like warfare (The Hunger Games) or the human capacity for destruction (Grasshopper Jungle)? Or at they the ones that reflect our actual world, including the capacity for human cruelty and kindness (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) or the messy stuff of human mortality (The Fault In Our Stars)?

Because if those books are dark, and that’s a problem, I’m confused. Are these not the same subjects young people are encouraged to engage in at school, by reading the newspaper, or canonical texts like The Iliad (warfare) or Macbeth (the capacity for self destruction) or To Kill A Mockingbird (kindness and cruelty) or A Farwell to Arms, all Emily Dickinson poetry (that messy morality business)?

But for a moment, let’s put the question of whether books are dark aside. For a moment, let’s just say that some YA is dark. And….so what?

Literature swims in the murkier waters of the human condition. Conflict and matters of life and death, of freedom and oppression—it is the business of books to explore these themes, and the business of teenagers, too.

New brain mapping research suggests that adolescence is a time when teens are capable of engaging deeply with material, on both an intellectual level as well as an emotional one. Some research suggests that during adolescence, the parts of the brain that processes emotion are even more online with teens than with adults, (something that will come as absolutely no surprise to any parent of a teenager). So, developmentally, teens are hungry for more provocative grist while emotionally they’re thirsty for the catharsis these books offer. Of course teens are drawn to darker, meatier fare. The only surprise about this is that it’s a surprise.

There may be another reason for the appeal. Adolescence is a time when teens are statistically more likely to come into harm’s way, and thus more likely to witness harm among their peers. According to the National Institutes for Mental Health, teens between 15 and 19 are about six times more likely to die by injury than people ages 10 to 14. Is it any wonder that they want books to help process what they’re experiencing around them, often for the first time?

That increased death rate, however, is a chilling statistic, particularly if you’re a parent. Seen through that lens—the fear of something terrible befalling a child—the wariness about dark YA begins to make more sense. Because if your child doesn’t read about death, about abuse, about rape, about suicide, then these terrible things won’t happen to him or her.

But that is a form of magical thinking, and no matter how well intentioned, it’s wrong. Because books don’t create behaviors. It’s possible they reinforce existing behaviors, but those behaviors are already present, not created by a novel. A novel won’t turn a bookish drama geek into a promiscuous drug abuser any more than it will turn a promiscuous drug abuser into a bookish drama geek, unless the seeds of those transformations were already planted.

What books can do, however, is reflect an experience and show a way out of difficult, isolating times. It’s why Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak has become such a touchstone, giving young women a voice to speak about sexual abuse, or Sherman Alexie’s Part-Time Indian has been a life raft for young people who can’t see their way out of existences straightjacketed by addiction and deprivation. I don’t believe that books, YA or otherwise, have the power to save lives. That’s a bit too grandiose for my thinking, but seeing your experience, your sometimes difficult experiences, reflected can be a powerful incentive to reach out and get the help that could indeed save a life.

I suspect that most teens who read and love “dark” YA have little in common with the struggling characters they relate to. Whenever I ask teenagers why they’re drawn to books like my novel If I Stay—in which the main character loses her family in a car accident—they overwhelmingly say the appeal is seeing an ordinary teen forced into an extraordinary circumstance. Reading about everyday fictional teens rising to the occasion (and, spoiler alert, in YA books they almost always do) allows actual teens to imagine themselves doing the same, within the lower-stakes conflicts and contexts of their own lives. This is empowering, and hopeful, words that I would use to describe many YA books. Even the dark ones. Especially the dark ones. These “dark” books may seem to be about death, about illness, about pain, but really they are about life. The kids get that, even if the adults sometimes, do not.

Some of my favorite “dark” YA books:

• Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road
• Coe Booth’s Tyrell
• Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park
• Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You The Sun
• Libba Bray’s Going Bovine
• Blake Nelson’s Recovery Road
• Carrie Mesrobian’s Sex & Violence
• Sarah Dessen’s This Lullaby
• Paul Griffin’s Stay With Me
• Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall
• E Lockhart’s We Were Liars
• Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being A Wallflower
• Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly

(Gayle Forman’s best-selling novel If I Stay was made into a motion picture in 2014. Her latest novel, I Was Here was published in January 2015. )

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Maybe it’s time we love our neighbors’ children as well as we love our own

Look, I get that nostalgia is big right now.

We’ve got more 19th century beards, vinyl records, backyard gardens, and banjo music in the United States than at any other time in probably the past 50 years.

It’s a throwback to those halcyon days of previous generations.

But do you know what I’m not nostalgic for?

Measles.

Like not in the least.

I’d be just fine without a new revival of one of the world’s most infectious diseases.

Or any other disease, for that matter, preventable by a readily available vaccine.

Of course, nostalgia, like the decision not to vaccinate one’s children, tends to be primarily an indulgence of the white and wealthy. Parents who refuse vaccines tend to be in both of those demographics. Any time a trend like this, with such clear and dire public health consequences, skews white and wealthy, then we must acknowledge that it’s also a race and class issue.

Some, though, want to frame this as an issue about personal choice. It’s about what individual parents are compelled to do with their own children by the government, some argue.

For Christians, however, this selfish individualistic mentality — the what’s good for me and mine and who cares about anyone else — goes against the core teachings of Jesus. One clear ethic resounding throughout the life of Jesus and his teachings is that we don’t have the luxury of ignoring each other. Instead, we have a responsibility to care for each other.

Vaccines aren’t about individual choices or even individuals. It’s not about you and your children. It’s about us. All of us.

It isn’t about how best to love and protect my children.

It’s about how best to love and protect all of our children.

It’s about us as species finally making headway against killer diseases after millions of years of evolution and high child mortality.

It’s about us as a human family, joining hands to protect each other and particularly the vulnerable whose compromised or weakened immune systems can’t handle vaccines.

So maybe it’s time we love our neighbors’ children as well as we love our own.

So, if you are a Christian, and you are wondering whether you should vaccinated your children, look at the teachings of Jesus. That’s right, I think Jesus would have been pro-vaccine. He was a healer, after all. Vaccines have prevented scores of disabling and deadly diseases in children. And had they had vaccines in first-century Galilee, it might have cut down on Jesus’ miracle workload, which he seemed to dislike anyway.

In fact, the vaccines that have prevented polio or the measles might well seem like miracles to people who remember when those diseases ravaged lives, when they could not be stopped by science and vaccines but only prayed against in desperate hope.

So, when you take your children to the doctor, check your privilege as a white, wealthy, or healthy person.

Don’t let your privilege and personal choice harm others or put the vulnerable at risk.

Indulging in nostalgia is fine, really, just so long as you aren’t endangering your neighbor.

So spin your vinyl.

Pluck your banjo.

Grow your beard.

Plant your vegetables.

But love your neighbor.

And vaccinate your children.

David R. Henson is a priest in the Episcopal church.

This article originally appeared on Patheos.

Read more from Patheos:

• Vaccines Have Become a Political Wedge Issue, and There May Be Only One Solution
• Measles, Mainline Protestants, and Fueling “Outrage Culture”
• Is the Anti-Vaccination Movement Taking You for a Ride?

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.

All I wanted was healthy food options and organic fruits and vegetables for my family, my neighbors, and myself

In 2003, long before a warrant was issued for my arrest for the crime of planting vegetables, I remember going to a store in South Central L.A. and picking up some tomatoes. The stickers on them read: “Coated with shellac.” That’s when it really hit me.

There was a complete lack of healthy food in my community. Growing up in South Central L.A., we had restaurants where you could sit down. But some time in the late ’70s or early ’80s, those places shut down and were replaced by fast food joints. Later, when I was raising my kids, I used to drive damn near an hour round-trip to places like Culver City to find fruits and vegetables that hadn’t been grown with pesticides.

I wanted to change all of that. I wanted to rid the streets of trash. And I wanted healthy food options and organic fruits and vegetables for my family, my neighbors, and myself.

So, in 2010, I planted towering sunflowers, kale, and pomegranates in the 10-foot-wide, 150-foot-long parkway in front of my house—the space between the curb and the sidewalk.

That same year, I founded a group with like-minded people who wanted to grow and share their own food and show others how to do it. It’s our responsibility—if we want to change our neighborhoods, it has to come from within.

We started planting gardens around the neighborhood and in peoples’ yards for free. But I learned the drawbacks. When people get something—like food in their garden—without having to do the work themselves, they don’t assign such things the same value. Unfortunately, we found that a lot of the gardens we planted weren’t being maintained.

Then, in May 2011, I got a citation to remove my garden from the city’s Bureau of Street Services—it said that, since the city has jurisdiction over parkways, I had two options: clear the “overgrown vegetation” or purchase a $400 permit. I didn’t do either, of course. The citation turned into a warrant. I got an arrest warrant for beautifying my street—a warrant for planting a carrot!

My first thought was: Bring it. There was no healthy food in the neighborhood—and those parkways were the only land where people could grow food. Plus no one was being cited for the discarded old toilets, couches and used condoms on the street—but I got a citation for bringing nature, beauty, pride, art, and a sense of peace and calm to the neighborhood. It just made no sense.

But the police never came for me. The warrant was suspended. Over the summer, LA Times columnist Steve Lopez got interested and wrote about the garden. There was a petition started in support. Then Councilman Herb Wesson got involved. In 2013, the L.A. City Council voted to change the law—it is now legal to grow food on your parkway in Los Angeles.

There has been a shift in the paradigm. Now the city is encouraging more green spaces and there are plans to utilize its 26 square miles of vacant lots to benefit underserved communities—to turn them into green space and urban farms.

The last few years have been incredible. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to the world to speak publicly, including a talk I gave in 2013 at a big TED conference that has more than two million views to date.

The message is getting out. People across L.A. (and around the world) are planting gardens at home, in schools and businesses.

These days, I’m focusing on raising funds for the Ron Finley Project, a plan to acquire an acre of land in South Central L.A. behind the city’s oldest operating library and turn it into an urban garden oasis. When it’s done, the Vermont Square library garden will consist of a greenhouse, a café in a shipping container, and a community garden where people can grow, exchange, and sell their food at a bi-weekly food stand. We’ll also offer classes and a program to use the thousands of pounds of fruit from people’s yards that go to waste each year.

Once we’re done transforming South Central L.A., the next move is to transform the world.

Ron Finley, who was raised in South Central, started a horticultural revolution. Ron spends most of his time working on changing an unjust food system by showing people the art of growing their own food. His message is simple: “Change your food, change your life!” He wrote this for Thinking L.A., a partnership of UCLA and Zocalo Public Square.

Bud wasn't wrong to move back to marketing beer as beer, no matter what craft purists say

It’s no surprise two beer companies would find themselves in a pissing match. Which is exactly the state of play between MillerCoors and A-B InBev, maker of Budweiser. MillerCoors, as well as the craft beer community, are foaming at the mouth over an advertisement that Bud ran during the Super Bowl.

No, not that one. I mean the advert in which Bud proudly proclaimed its American, mass-market roots, perhaps trying to steal a march from Chrysler’s brilliant “Imported from Detroit” spot of a couple of years ago.

“Budweiser Proudly a Macro Beer,” the ad proclaimed, while the visuals highlighted Bud’s industrial brewing capacity. “It’s not brewed to be fussed over,” it went on. You could feel that slap all the way from Seattle to Williamsburg. According to AdAge, MillerCoors released and tweeted an ad of its own headlined “We believe all beers should be fussed over.” The supposed crybaby craft beer types, being creative of course, responded with wicked parodies of the Bud ad. Good for them, although if you put a glass of Bud in the middle of a dozen craft-brewed lagers, there’s a very good chance the craft aficionados wouldn’t know the difference.

It’s about time that Bud sold beer. Both MillerCoors and Bud have been dropping market share for more than a decade to the microbrew onslaught. That’s why they’ve purchased a couple of craft companies themselves—MillerCoors has Blue Moon Brewing, for instance and A-B In Bev bought Blue Point. MillerCoors is upset because the company still sees itself as part of a beer community that includes the craft brands and doesn’t want to irritate drinkers who are potential customers. Once upon a time, Coors was a cool brand, at least until it went national. The company must still think it is.

In its Super Bowl spot, Bud was trying to reassert its brand’s relevance as a true and acceptable choice for beer drinkers. This is what advertising is supposed to do, isn’t it? Buy us, not them. An ad that’s says “Drink our beer, it’s good enough—and we make a lot of it” makes more sense to me than one of Bud’s other ads. Yeah, that one, the one with the stupid lost puppy that everyone went gaga over.

Bud’s lost puppy ad is unbelievably good if you are selling puppies—and every pet shop owner in America should go out a buy a case of Bud as a thank you—but it’s completely meaningless if you are selling beer.

And Bud and MillerCoors have been having a hard time doing that. Consider the BudLight tagline, The Perfect Beer for Whatever Happens. Whatever does that mean? It means that the product isn’t good enough to sell on its merits so you’ve got to come up with something else to sell. With light beer, it’s always been about partying and sex or humor, because let’s face it there’s really not much taste to sell.

A bottle of Bud is still great on a hot summer day but I personally prefer craft beers—cask conditioned traditional ales, to be exact—to our mass market brews. Once upon a time Budweiser was a craft beer, too. Every beer in America was. Bud just happened to beat up the competition up over time, including Pabst Blue Ribbon, a trendy former mass brew that somehow gets a pass.

Why did Bud become No. 1? In part, because it was a better brew; and in part because it was marketed and distributed better than everyone else. This is a company that helped create the modern advertising industry. So I’m raising a glass to Bud for getting back to basics, to blocking and tackling. Let the craft crowd mock and whine all they want. Bud needs to pour it on now, or risk become completely irrelevant in a decade.