By Mark C. Taylor

A response to a public conversation series held Spring 2012. 

How many different items does the average American grocery store stock?  (45,000)  How many Starbucks are there in Manhattan? (187 and counting) In the world? (17,244)  How many channels are there on your TV?  (You don’t know.)  We have become obsessed with choice — the more choices the better.  Or at least so it seems.  Why?  Why is there so much emphasis on choice and the supposed freedom of choice?

While the freedom of choice has long been one of the most important values for democratic societies, something has changed in the past several decades. What might best be described as an ideology of choice has emerged among the partisans of neo-liberal economists and neo-conservative politicians.  This development is symptomatic of the latest stage of capitalism.

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By Michele Lent Hirsch

A response to a public conversation with Allison Macfarlane on March 28, 2012. 

Listening last week to Allison Macfarlane, Harvard-affiliated member of the White House’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future and author of Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste, one got the impression that if anyone could explicate the quagmire that is nuclear-waste safety, it’d be this woman. An MIT-trained geologist who went on to study nuclear reactors and their radioactive byproducts, she has a dazzlingly thorough knowledge of both nuclear power and the geological constraints on underground waste disposal.

And so when she said our grasp of nuclear safety is a joke, I didn’t find myself laughing.

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By Carlos Blanco

A response to a public conversation with John Feinblatt on February 29, 2012.

For the past decade, John Feinblatt, chief policy advisor to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has led New York City’s effort to rid its streets of illegal guns. At a recent event at Columbia, he emphasized the need to get guns “out of the wrong hands,” by which he meant reducing gun violence by reducing gun availability.

Feinblatt has been instrumental in involving Mayor Bloomberg in the coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which seeks “stop criminals from getting guns while also protecting the rights of citizens to freely own them.” As Feinblatt pointed out, no federal legislation prevents guns from being manufactured in other states and shipped to New York, whose gun-control laws are, in fact, relatively strict. Most illegal guns in New York City are actually imported—85% of guns recovered in crimes are originally sold out of state. Without a federal law stemming this flow, illegal guns will continue to litter large urban cities like New York.

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By Charity Hanley 

A response to a public conversation with Charles Best on February 15, 2012. 

Since 2000, Donorschoose.org has raised more than $100 million to fund classroom projects in public schools across the country, reaching more than 6 million students. On its site, teachers post projects like trips to an aquarium or requests for dictionaries, construction paper, even iPads to make classroom lessons come to life. Anyone can go online, pick a project, and donate as little as $5 to the project that interests them most.

CEO and founder Charles Best believes the nonprofit’s success has been fueled by the “pent-up innovation” of teachers and donors. Donorschoose.org, he said, gives teachers an unparalleled platform to develop new and creative solutions to the challenges they confront in their classrooms.  And donors see exactly where their money is going. As with other peer-to-peer philanthropy sites like Kiva or even Kickstarter, they connect to the donation on a personal level, giving to their hometown, their favorite sport, or the class reading their favorite book from 7th grade.

But too much choice can be a problem, Best admitted. In some cases, donors found it too difficult to choose a project, and after looking through three or four web pages, they left without donating. Identifying a passion, said Best, “wasn’t in their muscle memory.” I am not so sure.

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