Welcome to Good Hues!

This is our remedy for the doom scrolling that accompanied the following of election results and court challenges. With that political moment behind us (mostly), it’s time to turn our attention to complex questions again.

As I struggled with writing this newsletter while also following election results, I had a brief exchange with a civic-minded friend. We were both looking for ways to spend more time with big questions. We had spent weeks exchanging headlines about election shenanigans and COVID cases. We wanted to refresh our capacity to think through complex ideas again.

Good Hues is also a way to follow the lead of a couple of great minds that have always been important to understanding my own thinking:

1. Albert Einstein

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

To build our list of Good Hues, we asked the Politicolor community to recommend media that helped them spend time with a problem or to see a familiar problem in a new light.

2. Gary Gnu

“No gnews is good gnews with Gary Gnu”

I might have to apologize for this one later. I’m often on the verge of blurting out this line from The Great Space Coaster, a children’s show from the ‘80s. I might never fully understand how Gary Gnu shaped how I think, but this guy has been in my head for a very long time.

He might be the reason why I have always appreciated thinking through a problem in unexpected ways. The silly fun of Gary Gnu’s gnews program always included relationships between the random acts of faux news. Thinking doesn’t always have to be a serious business.

That’s how I put together this list of recommendations. Not all the Good Hues are good (g-)news, but they have been selected to direct your attention to good questions.

Our civic-minded colleagues recommended published work and programming that made them think, “Wow! That was really smart!”

If you’re lucky enough to have peace of mind and some extra time over the holidays, these recommendations promise to be worth your time and attention.

Enjoy the Good Hues. Please share the list and turn one of these recommendations into a conversation with someone you enjoy thinking with.

Let’s keep thinking together,

Shellee

Three Themes for Good Hues 2020

Learning from We the People— Past, Present and Future

Appreciating that Democracy has Always been a Struggle

Getting to Know the President-Elect, Again

The 2020 list of Good Hues includes recoonemdnations for “longread journalism,” podcasts, and YouTube videos. We aren’t posting the list here but would be glad to send it to your inbox. Sign up for our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter using one of the sign up boxes on this page and we’ll send you the latest Good Hues. 

Sign up here. We’ll send you a copy of this innaugural issuae of Good Hues and make sure you get the next issue of our Questions of Civic Proportions Newsletter too. We’ll help you make civic questions, big ideas, and good work part of your week with a new issue every-other Sunday.