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Announcing Prairie Voice: Where Yesterday’s Wisdom Meets Tomorrow’s Questions

Prairie Voice launches today, not because the world needs another website, but because the present has become incomprehensible without the past. We live in an age of unprecedented change, facing questions that feel entirely new: How do we maintain human connection through screens? What does work mean when we produce nothing tangible? How do we raise children when childhood itself has been digitized? These questions aren’t new. They’re variations on themes our ancestors knew intimately. Prairie Voice exists to excavate that buried wisdom and translate it for contemporary crisis.

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On Winning the 1975 Pinewood Derby

If you’re a Cub Scout, there’s a yearly reckoning waiting for you — the Pinewood Derby — where you get to build your own race car out of wood and plastic and nails and race it down a track to see how fast your mind and hands are in the creation of something separate and spectacular that you cannot control. You build it and let it run away from you.  I had some success with the Pinewood Derby, as I share here:

As a Cub Scout in Lincoln, Nebraska David Boles entered, and won the Pinewood Derby. In 1973, igniting the fighting Fireball , he came in second place. In 1974, riding The Phantom, he did not place, likely due to the air-sucking quality of the jaw-like bat mouth. In 1975 — flying the Spirit of ’76 — he won First Place as the Grand Champion, even though race officials drilled out an ounce of golden lead weight from his undercarriage! Here are the requisite beauty shots of those historic racing fascinations.

Continue reading → On Winning the 1975 Pinewood Derby