Solstice celebration, auction, and staff breakfast. Somewhere in all that I caught a cold and it's wonderful to be home dully staring at the christmas tree. If there were more books like Revenge of the Tipping Point I would read them one after the other until my brain exploded. Citing the example of the change of opinion on gay marriage, he shows how a percentage of support creeps up until it hits the magic third or the magic quarter when 25 or 30 percent of people change their minds and then boom, the tipping point is reached and the "overstory" changes to general acceptance. Some people attributed that to the one on one, door to door work done by activists; Gladwell says that the overstory was changed by television, by eleven seasons of Will and Grace which started in 1998 when most people watched the same thing, network television.
People never see the tipping point coming. Nothing happens, then everything happens. I think we could be close to a tipping point on single payer healthcare, Medicare For All. And I'm watching democratic socialist candidates win elections in red districts.

...the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”

Maybe a tiny house condo? No, it's how the Amish ship a load of ice huts.

The Penobscot Bay Singers performance of the Vivaldi Gloria in a Belfast church was lovely and satisfying and their conductor has the kind of energy that turns regional choirs into stars. Driving home in the dark was fine; the roads were clear and my car has good headlights. We shouldn't be such weiners about it.

Interesting to chat with the Piotti's at intermission. John was the person who started economic development and community building in Unity twenty years ago. He is the model I follow; from him I learned the practice of matching income streams with projects, the efficiency of a director with a governance board rather than a working board, the reality that financial investment and volunteerism go together to build community, the beauty of risk. He designed the building that houses the library.

Six of us in a room for two hours decided what our group would read in 2026. Here it is. We don't just read pretty novels, and we like diving in on current political topics.