Johanna Blakley

After the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I wondered whether people would remain interested in the War on Terror, or whether we'd see some flagging interest register in the polls that, just last year, placed terrorism in the number three slot of national priorities, right after the economy and jobs.

A shift in public sentiment remains to be seen, but Hollywood seems to have decided to keep mining storylines from the War on Terror. I recently co-authored a report (with Sheena Nahm) on how primetime TV dramas depict the War on Terror. We were surprised to discover that primetime generally avoided the racial and religious stereotypes that we associate with terrorism -- and when we took a look at the War on Drugs, we also discovered depictions that adhered more closely to reality than to preconceptions (for example, most drug abusers in this country are white).

Among the top-rated shows in 2010 we found nine that dealt frequently and substantially with the War on Terror, including the NCIS, Law & Order and CSI franchises. After 24 went off the air in spring of 2010, no other major network show replaced it, and so the sheer volume of hours devoted to the War on Terror in primetime sunk considerably. However, Fox has a new show starting this Fall called Exit Strategy, with Ethan Hawke, about CIA operations gone bad, and Homeland, which is from the producers of 24, just started on Showtime last night.

Scott McGibbon
Scott McGibbon is a Project Specialist at The Norman Lear Center.

Light - plus more water, trees and Starbucks -- at the end of the civic park tunnel

The Lear Center's Grand Intervention project - begun as an effort to open up the design process and involve the public in LA's Grand Avenue Civic Park -- just passed its sixth birthday, which seems like a fine time to revisit it and its impact on the emerging park in downtown Los Angeles.

Grand Intervention, inspired by Lear Center Director Marty Kaplan's July 2005 LA Times Op-Ed, called for transparency in the creation of the new park because the land was public land, owned by the city and county of LA, though intertwined with a for-profit high-rise development adjacent to the park. Early meetings between the developer and the downtown community were not promising, offering little real opportunity for citizen input about the park.

Deborah Cool

Deborah uses her background in journalism and her ten-year involvement with the Coalition for Quality Children's Media, promoting media literacy and evaluating children's films to support the mission of Global Education through "Journeys in Film".

October is National Anti-Bullying Month, reminding us how the scope of the problem has grown in recent times. Earlier generations of school goers had bullies, but the problem was not an epidemic requiring the attention of the Centers for Disease Control. While no one knows exactly why the problem is escalating to epidemic proportions, professionals and parents alike are seeking solutions.

Teachers looking for ways to inoculate classrooms against the spread of bullying can turn to Journeys in Film. Our Discovering India - Like Stars on Earth curriculum guide provides tools to disempower bullies by developing empathy among students who are neither bullies nor victims themselves.

Understanding the Victim
According to StopBullying.gov - "a comprehensive, one-stop-shop" website launched by the White House - those at risk of being bullied are children, teens and young adults who:

• Do not get along well with others
• Are less popular than others
• Have few to no friends
• Have low self esteem
• Are depressed or anxious

Johanna Blakley

I'm certainly not the first to point out the similarities between haute couture - rarefied apparel that no normal person would have an occasion to wear - and haute cuisine - exquisitely prepared food that costs a fortune and simply disappears by evening's end. This last July, the French Ministry of Culture sponsored a posh event at the Palais Royale that celebrated two of France's most respected exports: in justifying the dual focus, organizers argued that

Though the raw materials may be different, artisans in both trades must master techniques, a "savoir-faire" and possess a vision to reach the height of their craft . . .

In Lear Center research on the role that copyright plays in the fashion industry, I came across a few articles mentioning the similarity between recipes - which cannot be copyrighted - and fashion designs, which don't qualify either. I thought it was fascinating that such creative industries managed to innovate and stay fresh even though fashion designers and chefs have no control over the appropriation of their work by others. The same cannot be said of painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, musicians or writers.

So, as a foodie and a fashion lover, I was delighted to be invited to a unique conference in Barcelona, co-sponsored by Telefónica, Spain's most prominent telecommunications company, and the El Bulli Foundation, Ferran Adrià's effort to perform cutting edge research about food and innovation. Gastronomy & Technology Days (check out the Twitter hashtag >#gastrotechdays) brought together an incredibly diverse international group of writers, researchers, software engineers and hard-core food bloggers to discuss the intersection of food and technology.

David Bollier
David Bollier is a Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center.

As the Occupy Wall Street protesters contemplate "what next?" - and as they ponder how to combine a visionary agenda with achieveable, short-term political goals - I have a suggestion. The Occupy forces in hundreds of cities should petition their local governments to acquire a new "top-level Internet domain" for their city, and to manage that patch of cyberspace as a local commons.

Even Internet sophisticates are not really tracking this issue, but the ownership and control of the new city TLDs could provide enormous new opportunities for citizens to transform their local political cultures, economies and everyday life.

Top-level domains, or TLDs, are the suffixes at the end of Internet addresses, as in .com, .org and .edu. The international body that manages TLDs is called ICANN, for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It recently approved a plan that will authorize cities to acquire their own TLDs, as in .nyc, .paris and .berlin. If properly constituted, the city TLDs could serve as "open greenfields for new local governance structures." Unfortunately, the new city TLDs are not likely to serve this role if traditional city governments simply sell off the TLDs to private interests. Transformative governance will occur only if the TLDs are managed as digital commons accountable to city residents. (See my previous blog on this topic.)

We've seen how opportunities to use public assets can be squandered through the kind of backdoor privatization that city governments love to promote (the famous "public/private partnerships"). Just look at Zucotti Park itself, a "privately owned public space" that is mostly controlled by its private owner, and only indirectly by the city - and hardly at all by New Yorkers except through their extraordinary "occupation" of the site. (More on "privately owned public spaces" here.)

Why is it important that the commoners lay claim to the new city TLDs? Because they would assure that local citizens could more readily communicate with each other, participate in their self-governance locally, and help design and transform the physical and social dimensions of their city. The city TLDs could help citizens reclaim their own cities.