Sharing Good Hues for 2020

Quit the doom scrolling. Let’s spend quality time with a big idea.

We want to refresh our capacity to see the big picture, to exercise our brain. With Good Hues, we’re collecting recommendations of any media that has helped you take a deep look at an important idea or question this year.

Let’s make it a little easier to quit the doomscrolling that went with checking election results and court decisions. We’re building a list of recommendations to share so we can all spend time with a question or story that’s worth our attention.

“In color theory, a hue refers to a pure pigment— one without tint or shade… Hues are first processed in the brain.”

—”What is Hue?” by One Minute Design

The Antidote for Neverending Newsfeed

We have all endured a presidential election where stories were updated one batch of votes at a time. Numbers nudged up in one state and down in another. Lawsuits were filed in one state while others were dismissed in another.

We have all been stuck in this sharknado of micro-news. We need a remedy and we hope sharing Good Hues will help.

In the long days before the election, a friend reached out to say she would definitely attend an upcoming seminar. She shared that she really wanted to spend serious time with a big question. The seminar would help her escape the never-ending updates on Twitter. I had recently had this same feeling. I found myself ditching my short daily news podcasts so I could listen to a longer discussion of a particular book or specific public question. I discovered a couple of new voices and added titles to my reading list.

I didn’t want to catch up on the news. I wanted to think. That’s when I started thinking about collecting Good Hues. I’ll share those discoveries and collect your recommendations too. When our newsletter lands on Thanksgiving weekend, it will feature a long list of recommended titles that the Politicolor community shared.

What Good Hues Can You Recommend?

We’re taking recommendations for books, podcasts, movies, longform journalism, online seminars, and music. The format doesn’t matter as much as the fact that, once you discovered it, you thought, “Wow! That’s really smart.” 

Scroll back through your own social media shares. Check the shelf for books you’ve read. Ask your friends what podcast or book they thought you might never stop talking about during those Zoom happy hours.

 

Add Your Big Idea to the List of Good Hues

Share your find. We’ll send you our list just in time for the long Thanksgiving weekend. We’ll save you the time of looking for something new and help you have something worth a deep dive.

We’re collecting recommendations of any media that has helped you take a deep look at an important idea or question this year. 

Good Hues 2020 Start Here

These titles may not win awards as the feel-good story of the year. They are not the kinds of stories that have a volunteer firefighter rescuing a kitten from a burning tree outside an orphanage. They will, however, give you something to think about. Good Hues will help you see a question in a new way, understand a perspective less familiar than your own, and make a new inquiry of a public problem that you might have thought was solved. 

NYT Interactive Feature: This Election Map Will Be Everywhere. Don’t Let It Fool You.

Passed along with a note that said “Color Maps!!!!!” This feature doesn’t just take issue with the red and blue electoral map that we all know, but it also shows how our perception of that map might change if we simply changed the colors.

Neal Katyal’s TED Talk: How to win an argument (at the U.S. Supreme Court, or anywhere)

One of the country’s lawyers who has stood in front of the Supreme Court more times than most, talks about those wins. More interestingly, he talks about losing and why that matters too.