The kings are dead, but their castles remain. They hover above us, not in stone fortresses but in glass towers and on distant servers, humming with the lifeblood of the modern world: data. We do not till the soil anymore. We do not bend our backs in the fields. Instead, we generate. We click. We

Where people micro volunteer for charities, causes and each other. Rewards for paying the kindness forward. Be kind. Trade time. Feel good.

I think that most of life’s disappointments can be traced back to someone saying one thing, meaning another, and doing precisely nothing. Maybe a friend promises to help you move but suddenly remembers they have to reorganize their spice rack. Or, a boss praises your “innovative thinking” and then quickly files it away in the

HUMN | Currency for Humankind. This is a step in the right direction. I would make a lot of changes to it, but it's as close to an interesting project as I have seen lately. Someday, with adequate funding, KommunityKoin will become even better than HUMN.

There was a time when the answer to nearly every human problem was money. Need a roof? Pay someone. Need food? Pay someone. Need to feel less lonely? Well, you might pay for dinner, a subscription, or a vacation to convince yourself that companionship is still available for purchase. But as it turns out, money

A Modern Kula Ring for Communities When I first heard about the Kula Ring, it sounded like the sort of invention that would only make sense if people had too much free time on their hands. In the Trobriand Islands, men would sail hundreds of miles to exchange shell necklaces that traveled clockwise and shell

We are currently working to build relationships with organizations, clinics, and providers in a collaborative effort to address the needs of individuals and families with limited or no access to healthcare. Our goal is to remove financial barriers for those who lack the resources or insurance to get the care that they need. This site is the future home of a healthcare clearinghouse where local providers offer free or discounted services and the public will be able to search for the care that they need for a price that they can afford.

Dajleh Timebank: a community where people exchange hours of help instead of money. Learn how it works and how to join.

There are books that enter the public square with a quiet nudge, and there are books that kick the door wide open. G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island does the latter; swaggering into the conversation like a conspiracy theorist at a dinner party and somehow managing to keep everyone listening long after dessert.

Step outside on a spring afternoon and crouch beside a crack in the sidewalk. Watch long enough and you’ll witness a miracle of coordination; an ant colony in action. No manager. No paycheck. No HR department. Just a seamless ballet of movement. Each ant hauls a crumb, tends to a larva, guards the nest. And

There was a time when I thought gold-digging was a simple, well-defined sport, like tennis or synchronized swimming. You could spot the players easily: usually a young woman with an alarming number of designer handbags and a much older man who seemed perpetually jet-lagged, even while standing still. I assumed their arrangement was transactional and

By now, most of us have accepted the quiet absurdity of our days: we speak to glowing rectangles, sleep beside them, wake to their alarms, carry them like talismans. A moment of silence in a grocery line or at a red light and out comes the phone; not to call anyone, rarely to connect, but

There is a room in the mind where silence waits. It is not a library. It is not a church. It is not the glowing blue rectangle that pulses in your palm. It is the old place. The deep room. The inner room. You might not know how to get there anymore. We live in

The other day I was having coffee with a friend who wears socks with sandals and still somehow pulls it off. One of those people whose spiritual insight comes casually between sips of lukewarm Earl Grey and commentary on the unfortunate state of American mayonnaise. He leaned back, looked off into the distance like he