Joe Duarte

Sixteen years ago, one man stood alone on a grassy hill at a music festival in Washington State, USA, and started dancing by himself. People glanced over and looked away. Some laughed. His roommate leaned in and warned him people were filming him. He did not stop. Then one stranger got up and joined him. Then another. Then the hillside tipped. Within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting from across the field to be part of something that, thirty seconds earlier, had been one man being laughed at in a field. Someone filming from higher up the hill said quietly: "See what one man can do. One man can change the world." The clip spread across the internet in 2009. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers played it at a TED conference to explain how movements actually begin. Not with the first person brave enough to start, he argued, but with the first person willing to join them. Collin Wynter, the man dancing alone, later said he had no idea he had done anything special. He was just tired of watching everyone sit still.

Sixteen years ago, one man stood alone on a grassy hill at a music festival in Washington State, USA, and started dancing by himself. People glanced over and looked away. Some laughed. His roommate leaned in and warned him people were filming him. He did not stop. Then one stranger got up and joined him. Then another. Then the hillside tipped. Within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting from across the field to be part of something that, thirty seconds earlier, had been one man being laughed at in a field. Someone filming from higher up the hill said quietly: "See what one man can do. One man can change the world." The clip spread across the internet in 2009. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers played it at a TED conference to explain how movements actually begin. Not with the first person brave enough to start, he argued, but with the first person willing to join them. Collin Wynter, the man dancing alone, later said he had no idea he had done anything special. He was just tired of watching everyone sit still.

Yup, they’ve got us on the ropes

When I went to grad school at UNC I played intramural flag football. All the other players were undergrads, mostly 18-19. This was 2007-08, when texting was new and more siloed with teens, not common with most adults yet. It was a brief period when teens seemed to have built their own language. (Also, they were mostly using number pads, since the iPhone had just come out – it was a few years before smartphones became standard.) When the team coordinator (a freshman) texted me or even sent emails, where he used his texting dialect, I literally could not understand what he was saying. I even told him I didn't understand him, and he translated it to English for me... That special Lord of the Flies language went away. Now teens just use bad grammar. But there were a couple of years when we were almost overthrown by teens using their own language.

Last night, after she’d gone to bed, my 16 y/o daughter receives a text from a friend. (We keep electronics in our room at night). I know my daughter isn’t gonna see it for a while and I know the answer to the girl’s dance-class-related question. So I just pick up the phone and answer it really quick as if I’m my daughter and leave it at that. Tonight, I see her giggling over her phone. I ask what’s up. Apparently, the other girl’s mother had just wanted to get an answer to the question really quick, so she picked up HER daughter’s phone and texted mine as if she were her daughter. (basically both of us were too lazy to go through the rigmarole of explaining, “hi, this is Mrs. So-and-so, and here’s why I’m texting you on your friend’s phone…” But the funny part was how the two girls figured this out. Because the first one was so appalled at seeing her mother‘s perfectly punctuated and capitalized sentences, that she felt she needed to come clean that it was her mom lest my daughter think she is that conscientious. And my daughter, likewise, didn’t want her friend to think that SHE uses correct grammar when texting either. So what I learned today is that it is apparently humiliating to be caught correctly formulating sentences via text.

This is not said often enough

Kathy Hochul making a weak plea for wealthy people who have left New York (to red states like Florida) to come back to pay their high taxes to fund failing (unaccountable) social programs: “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we have in our state. Some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Ok! Cut the me the checks. But if you want to supportive, maybe the first step should be go down to palm beach and see who you can bring back home

“was INTENDING to TRY TO recover from the devastation of its nuclear infrastructure.” The IAEA assesses the enriched uranium at Natanz is sealed shut. American blood shed over an intention to try to recover devastated nuclear facilities.