Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich (also NPR Science Correspondent and Special Correspondent for ABC News) was asked to give the commencement speech at California Institute of Technology in 2008. When the science journalist addressed the graduates of science-related programs, he chose to speak to them not about science, exactly, but about the value of storytellng.

While Krulwich specifically talks about the reasons scientists need to tell their stories well—they must compete with anti-Science proponents—his lessons can be broadly applied. Good ideas can fail because they are poorly explained, while bad ideas can win because they their explanation is convincingly told.

The process of reforming health care has been a decades-long undertaking. Recently we’ve come very close to passage of some legislation. The various plans that have been floated contain ideas pulled from years of discussion and thinking from across the political landscape. But still, the conversation at times seems to be more abstract than the reality of the reforms. Without examples that are easy for people to understand, it is difficult for people to see the benefits of the reforms and it introduces an opportunity for manipulation.

Making Good is a project that is in its very early stages. I have been pulling it together and preparing the content for a while now, but I did not plan to release it so soon. Notebooks full of ideas and dozens of article outlines are all waiting to be fleshed out and illustrated, not quite ready to be let out into the sunlight yet. I was prompted to launch ahead of schedule because I felt it was the right context to share my ideas about the potential of the Health Insurance Exchange. After all, it fit perfectly into one of the themes I’ll be talking about, “A Visible Future”A Visible Future
Communicating a vision of a possible and preferable future provides both a map and destination to people weighing the costs and benefits of change..

So there is a lot more to come, in terms of content. Most of the themes have been defined. I’ll be adding the ones that haven’t, as well as a whole batch of articles and examples that build upon those themes. Please stay tuned and stay in touch.

Recently reading through an old book of Kahlil Gibran, I read a passage that really felt like it was out of a different era, which of course it was. Gibran was taking about the differences between city and rural life: “We are wealthier than the villagers in silver or gold, but they are richer in spirit. What we sow we reap not; they reap what they sow.”

What caught my attention was not a pastoral yearning for the simple life of the countryside that was never really that simple. It was not a life-lesson set among country folk or the familiar aphorism “You reap what you sow.” What struck me was the idea that at one point not too long ago people lived by a simple system in which the work put in had a direct and measurable correlation to the benefits received from that labor.