Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

I’ve been thinking a lot about questions lately. I recently attended the Breakthrough Institute’s Modernizing Liberalism Conference, and one of the many things that struck me about it was its focus on questions – and not just as means to an end.

The conference took place largely at the level of the question. It was about getting comfortable with questions, exploring them fully, and avoiding the temptation to kill them with answers. Questions begat questions; questions steered the dialogue. When Michael and Ted sent an email to “provide closure” to participants, it too was full of more questions.

I see now why Breakthrough is drawn to the phrase “politics of possibility” – questions are charged with the energy of all their possible answers. That charge can be uncomfortable at times, and a little messy. But answers are, well, a poor answer to this problem of questions. Answers are everywhere, but there’s no guarantee that they’re right. Questions don’t ask to be right – they just ask. In a world where everyone is jockeying for the truth, a rhetoric of uncertainty is refreshing.

At the time of my introduction to Breakthrough in 2008, it felt a bit like we were planning for something that would happen in the future. We were challenging the status quo, swatting at naysayers, trying to build a movement. At the conference, surrounded by dissonance, disagreement, and the unanswerable, all I could think was: this is it. It’s happening right now.

***For some serious, challenging, provocative questions, check out Breakthrough’s newly released Breakthrough Journal.

After months of toils and tears, dreams and heartache, we are proud to present our reel. You + us = some pretty cool work, no?

Underground Ads 2011 you + us reel from underground ads on Vimeo.

Announcing Underground’s Summer 2011 Internship!

At Underground* you won’t be just an “intern” who sits awkwardly in meetings, summarizes next steps and
organizes files on our server. You will be the captain of your own intern ship. A choose-your-own-adventure
set in a downtown do-good creative agency. Do you have what it takes to brave these waters and fight
that good fight alongside us? Apply today. Ship sets sail in July.

a beautiful animation that we had absolutely nothing to do with, except for being tickled by it. {winner of best animation in vimeo’s first festival}.

Surf is such an appropriate word for the way we consume ideas on the Internet. It’s fast and smooth, and it stays on the surface. With a few notable exceptions, what I do on the Internet isn’t reading at all; it’s surfing and it’s skimming, as if meaning could be skimmed off the surface of text like cream from milk.

For a second there, I thought I’d come up with the metaphor of milk and meaning all on my own. But duh — we call it skimming for exactly that reason: we assume that meaning in a text acts like fat in milk, in both cases the best parts rising to the top for easy removal. In the case of skimming a text, you might miss an elegant flourish, a sense of style, and you might not enjoy it as much — but you still get the meaning.

But does meaning really rise to the surface? Can you miss the tone but still get the meaning?

Well, yes — of course you can. I don’t have to suffer through a food blogger’s life story to get her recipe for quick pickles, or read more than an article’s headline to learn that “Taliban Help Hundreds Escape via Prison Tunnel.” The pyramid structure of a newspaper article is designed for skimming: put the important stuff in the first paragraph, because most people won’t stick around for much more.

But after a while, digesting meaning this way makes me physically sick, as if pure ideas, detached from language, were empty calories. A few hours of surfing the Internet and I don’t even want to look at a text. When I read something slowly and carefully, I have a much better time. A good, close read makes me want to talk to people! Write things! Read more! Close reading can’t make us enjoy everything, but it can probably help us enjoy a lot more.

So am I saying that skimming allows you to access meaning, only you don’t enjoy it as much? Well, no, I don’t think I am. Because if you don’t enjoy something, you don’t digest it well, and you probably can’t extract as much meaning from it. Skimming is quick and light — you get ideas without texture. Slow reading lets you feel the grain of language, and, to push the digestion metaphor a little more, to let all your intestinal villi work their magic. If meaning happens where reader and writer touch, you almost have to enjoy a text to understand it. I like that: enjoyment as a mode of understanding.