Lauren Sinreich

Movies

2021-01-04T00:00:00Z

Movies that "never get old, stay relevant over the years, uncover more depth each time you watch them, and that are notable in general."

The Biggest Little Farm
Arrival
Uncle Frank
The Matrix
Soul
Garden State
Little Miss Sunshine
Val

Retrospective and Direction Setting

2021-01-04T00:00:00Z

People pursue goals differently -- some achieve them directly, others find a path through striving, and some follow life opportunistically. Regardless of approach, year-end reflection and intentional planning hold real value.

Retrospective / Review

Review calendars, journals, and posts. Key questions include:

What happened this year? (key activities, connections, courses, projects)
Am I reaching my potential? How am I? How am I not? (inspired by Aminatou Sow)
What were the "gravity points" that brought energy, momentum, and meaning? (inspired by Jedidiah Jenkins)
Year Compass also offers useful prompts

Planning, Goals and Intention Setting

Over-emphasis on goals can mislead -- reaching them sometimes feels hollow. Three pillars balance aspiration with meaning:

Core Desired Feelings (Danielle LaPorte)

Use the 5 Whys to uncover what you truly want to feel -- moving past surface goals like "success" toward specific feelings like presence or playfulness.

Goals

Dream big. Vision boards help. Eckhart Tolle suggests asking: "What does life want from me?"

Systems and Actions

Chris Guillebeau: "We overestimate what we can achieve in a day, and we underestimate what we can achieve in a year." Goals need SMART criteria and concrete systems -- resources include Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Shaping Culture in Online Spaces

2015-04-08T00:00:00Z

I've been puzzled by the hostility dominating online spaces. Society normally creates parameters for interaction, yet those guardrails are largely absent online.

Monica Lewinsky's return to public life -- specifically her March 2015 TED talk, The Price of Shame -- serves as a case study. Rather than engaging with Lewinsky's anti-bullying message, commenters relitigated old scandals. TED's social media editor Nadia Goodman described the response as exposing "a side of humanity that felt so vicious, unfeeling and unrelenting."

Some commenters even justified the attacks, claiming shaming is how culture gets shaped. This raises a direct challenge:

Is shaming really how we shape our culture? And if it is, is it the most constructive, productive, or effective way to socialize and compel people to adhere to social norms?

Goodman's intervention -- amplifying positive comments while removing brutal ones -- shifted the tone measurably. This leads to a central argument:

Leading by example is a significant factor in setting culture.

This extends to media figures, who carry elevated responsibility. Those who speak from genuine vulnerability often face the harshest criticism -- yet that courage is precisely what qualifies them.

Online spaces can remain free and open and still hold people accountable for their digital conduct.

Community Lessons from the Public Sector: Culture is More Important Than Strategy

2015-03-16T00:00:00Z

Originally published on Community.is -- second in a three-part series on civic innovation lessons for companies.

When considering cultures of innovation, the public sector rarely comes to mind. Yet budget pressures have pushed many public offices toward nontraditional approaches, giving rise to civic innovation -- where government collaborates across sectors and with its community to improve services.

Tactical urbanism -- creating small-scale, often temporary community-driven solutions to improve urban environments -- stands as one of the most prolific examples. Informal cities like those in Rio, Mumbai, and Lagos have long grown this way, developing resilience through community resourcefulness.

Parking Day exemplifies this: starting in 2005 as a playful reclaiming of parking spaces as temporary parks, it expanded to 160 countries across six continents by 2014, even inspiring San Francisco's official "parklets" program.

Melbourne illustrates the stakes clearly. By embracing community expression -- through laneway art programs and events like St. Jerome's Laneway Festival -- it topped livability rankings for years. Other cities criminalize such activities, effectively discarding their most valuable asset.

These community-led efforts require environments where people feel safe contributing. The same applies to companies. Beyond rare examples like Google's 20% time, few firms actively cultivate collective input.

By prioritizing proactive listening, building psychological safety, and rewarding new ideas, companies can unlock innovation from employees, customers, and even competitors. No strategy can match a genuine culture of openness.

Community Lessons from the Public Sector: Collaboration, Not Competition

2015-03-16T00:00:00Z

Originally posted on Community.is -- first of a three-part series on civic innovation lessons for companies.

The public sector is leading the way in community-centered innovation. Civic innovation is typically viewed as government adopting business technologies to improve efficiency, but in offices that have fully embraced collaboration, it has grown into something far more transformative -- blending business, government, and community into new hybrid models.

Tight budgets have pushed the public sector to expand its definition of community beyond internal stakeholders to include the people it actually serves. Examples include:

Technology and Innovation Task Force -- intra-sector collaboration among US Mayors
Code for America -- part nonprofit, part consultancy, part civic tech accelerator
Mind Lab (Denmark) -- neutral spaces for citizen-driven public sector innovation
Civic hackathons and tech meetups -- fostering ongoing cross-sector exchanges

This engagement deepens citizens' sense of belonging, making them more invested long-term. Similarly, businesses that genuinely improve lives earn deeper customer loyalty.

Key takeaway: Real innovation emerges from answering needs in entirely new ways. Your community isn't just your customer base -- it includes competitors too.

Community Lessons from the Public Sector: Engagement Drives Innovation, Not Visa Versa

2015-03-16T00:00:00Z

Originally published on Community.is -- third in a series on civic innovation lessons for companies.

The civic innovation movement isn't merely symbolic democracy. Governments have found that deep community engagement is a proven, low-cost method for generating effective solutions that genuinely improve lives.

Leaders have learned that the most successful innovations arise from understanding based in deep, ongoing engagement focused on people, not the institution. The New Orleans "Before I Die..." project -- an anonymous chalkboard wall inviting personal aspirations -- spread to 500 cities across 70 countries within five years, eventually inspiring a platform used by leading agencies nationwide.

Similarly, citizens are now guiding governments through open-source tools for mapping accessibility resources and reporting infrastructure issues. At the center of meaningful innovation are people, their needs, and the ideas that answer those needs.

Engagement Drives Innovation, Not Visa Versa

Innovation can engage people, but it becomes more substantial when driven by engagement first. Enabling City defines innovation as "a collaborative process through which citizens can be directly involved in shaping" outcomes -- a definition that translates directly to business when "citizens" becomes "customers."

Future R&D will shift toward user-generated innovation, incorporating community input from inception rather than presenting finished products to audiences after the fact.

The principle is straightforward: more meaningful engagement with customers produces better, lower-cost responses to real needs -- so start with the people who know your market best: your community.

Never Again: Thoughts on the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

2015-01-27T00:00:00Z

Seven decades after Auschwitz was liberated, I reflect on the phrase "never again" -- arguing that a modern recurrence would be unrecognizable, just as the original atrocity lacked a clear precedent that might have prompted earlier intervention.

As a grandchild of a concentration camp prisoner who survived Auschwitz (and a number of others), these questions carry particular weight:

Where does "blind delusion" persist today, denying people basic human dignity?
What causes people to avoid deeper thinking and looking honestly at difficult truths?
How might greater human connection and understanding counteract those tendencies?

The BBC drone footage filmed over Auschwitz is haunting -- a stark visual reminder of the scale of what happened there.

"Never again" demands more than remembrance. It demands vigilance, honest self-examination, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about where dignity is still being denied today.

What Is It With Idioms and Ducks? Idioms That Can't Be Translated Literally

2015-01-23T00:00:00Z

Languages offer a window into culture, and idioms are a perfect example. Here are selections from a TED Blog post featuring 40 untranslatable idioms, with two recurring themes: ducks and cats.

Swedish -- Att glida in pa en rakmacka Literally: "To slide in on a shrimp sandwich." Describes someone who achieved success without effort.

Thai -- Two idioms featured:

Snake/hen imagery conveying that two people share knowledge of each other's secrets.
A phrase meaning "never going to happen," compared across languages: English uses "when pigs fly," French invokes toothless hens, Russian imagines a whistling mountain lobster, and Dutch pictures cows dancing on ice.

Latvian -- Pust pilites Literally: "To blow little ducks." Means talking nonsense or lying.

Russian -- Khot' kol na golove teshi Literally: "You can sharpen with an ax on top of this head." Describes extreme stubbornness.

Croatian -- Spinning black wool imagery, meaning someone is the black sheep of the family.

Korean -- Osipbo baekbo Literally: "50 steps are similar to 100 steps." Equivalent to "six of one, half a dozen of the other."

Knockout and New Perspectives on Violence

2015-01-12T00:00:00Z

Note: Originally written in Winter 2014, forgotten about, and published when rediscovered a year later.

If you were assaulted on the street would empathy be your response? Here's why it was mine.

I was blindsided by a punch to the face -- a participant in the so-called "Knockout" game, where teenagers strike unsuspecting strangers attempting a one-hit knockout. Two nearby women helped me into a school bathroom, where I assessed my injuries: torn gums, a bleeding nose, swelling -- but no broken bones.

What followed wasn't simply rage. The anonymity of the attack created an unusual psychological vacuum. Without a face to blame, I found myself in an oddly removed place, watching friends and family deploy words like degenerate -- a label I began to see as more scapegoat than diagnosis.

I reflected on the attacker's likely internal state: someone expressing extreme powerlessness through violence, disconnected from its human consequences. Drawing on my own turbulent adolescence, I found myself unable to simply hate him, arriving instead at a mixture of anger and empathy.

My anger, however, extended far beyond one stranger. Citing Zaid Hassan's observation that "violent conflict is a largely avoidable product of ineffective approaches to social issues," I connect street violence to systemic inequality -- corporate excess, exploitative wages, inadequate policy.

I reframe the word degenerate -- "one degraded from the normal moral standard" -- arguing it better describes those whose institutional power causes widespread harm with zero accountability.

Society must broaden definitions of victim, aggressor, and responsibility to genuinely address violence's root causes, rather than reacting to symptoms alone.

Astronauts for President!

2014-05-01T00:00:00Z

“Astronauts who have seen the Earth from space have often described the ‘overview effect’ as an experience that has transformed their perspective of the planet and mankind’s place upon it, and enabled them to perceive it as our shared home, without boundaries between nations or species," the Planetary Collective explains about its exploration of astronauts' experience of the 'overview effect' in this short film.

Imagine if we were led by people with this kind of awareness.

This is worth the 19 minutes. One of my favorite takeaways is the ancient term Salva Corpus Amanti, which is when "you see things as you see with your eyes but you experience it emotionally and viscerally as with ecstasy and with a sense of total unity and oneness."

Watch the film on Vimeo

via Upworthy

Originally posted on Texture Transcribed.