Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Author: Nathan

  • Opening Doors

    Everyone is talking about Donald Trump. I can’t bring myself to do it. As we choose our apocalypse from among the presidential candidates, I’m starting to think that the best hope this election season may come from state-level initiatives, which in turn could open doors for the rest of the United States. This week, I…

  • Pope Francis vs. the United States of America

    The existence of a pope has never squared well with how we do business in the United States. In The Nation this week, as the United States anticipates and dreads the arrival of Pope Francis, I offer a report on the economics of the so-called radical pope. I draw from my decade-plus experience in the…

  • Slow Computing

    For about a decade now, I’ve been undertaking a gradual and ever-escalating experiment in using free and open-source software for my everyday needs. It has come to feel like an integral part of my work as a writer and thinker; the computer, after all, is often the chief companion of my day. This has become…

  • Be the Bank You Want to See in the World

    If you could make a new economy from the ground up, what would it look like? Enric Duran has tried—twice. In 2008 he became famous after borrowing half a million dollars from Spain’s banks and refusing to give it back. He then masterminded the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a network of independent workers that may just…

  • Owning Is the New Sharing

    What if we owned the Internet? Would we get paid for our likes and comments? What privacy policies would we write for ourselves? Last month, the Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched me to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. The folks at Shareable recognized that,…

  • A Generation of Hackers

    Hackers are fascinating—the good ones, the bad ones, the ones in between. From corporate elites like Bill Gates to fugitives like Edward Snowden, we look to hackers to provide for us, to excite us, to liberate us. But why? This is the question that took hold of me in the midst of my summer’s journey…

  • Wisdom Hacking

    Starting this Thursday, October 9, tune your radios and podcast machines to On Being, Krista Tippett’s extraordinary, nationally syndicated public radio show about the meanings of life—I will be the guest. Krista interviewed me this summer at the Chautauqua Institution about my books, God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy, as well as my recent…

  • From Occupation to Reconstruction

    Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not…

  • Happy birthday, Catholic Worker

    To celebrate the Catholic Worker movement’s 81st birthday today, I snuck Dorothy Day into two articles in the space of a week. Today, at Al Jazeera America, “What’s Left of May Day?”: On May 1, 1933, the Catholic journalist and activist Dorothy Day went to New York’s Union Square to distribute copies of the first…

  • Code Your Own Utopia

    My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it’s the hype: Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional…