Tiny touches, collectively colossal

I've long puzzled over why powerful organizations aren’t more salient to me as threats or blessings (e.g., Significant but hard to discern). In part it’s because their impact is individually light, but collectively vast; being conduits for content may also play a role.

Myth’s anthropomorphic heel

My post Heroes not ogregores lamented that a top-tier newspaper’s coverage of Detroit focused on celebrities rather than systems—aka individuals not ogregores. However, a mythological approach also veers perilously close to personalization.

Heroes not ogregores: WSJ coverage of Detroit Beats the Doom Loop

I had hoped that Ben Cohen’s recent WSJ story on the revitalization of Detroit would help me think about whether a city is an ogregore. Instead, as usual, it focused on people rather than institutions, and one person in particular. I imagine it’s easier to write a newspaper piece on deadline if you only have to interview a couple of people rather than digging into the subtle dynamics and complicated history of a complex system.