Big ideas, new beginnings.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE - Editorial

This special summer issue is packed with progressive ideas for making the world a better place. There is so much here: alternative forms of money and banking, community living for the disabled, new economic ventures for Native Americans, high-speed rail, urban farming, a push to reduce animal cruelty, new models for labor organizing, better ways to approach death and dying, and more.

It was a joy to bring together a slew of progressive visionaries and their prescriptions for a happier, healthier planet.

Speaking of progressive visionaries, we are delighted to announce that we've just hired a new publisher: Norman Stockwell, a longtime friend of this magazine and of the broader progressive movement.

Known to Madisons progressive community simply as Norm, Stockwell has served as operations coordinator and chief caretaker of the widely respected local listener-sponsored community radio station, WORT, for more than three decades. He has mentored scores of young journalists and provided invaluable service to alternative media outlets around the world.

His reports and interviews have appeared on Free Speech Radio News, Democracy Now!, Alternet, The Tico Times, and in many other venues, including The Progressive.

Norm is not the CEO type. With his trademark baseball cap and bushy beard, his low-key manner and his willingness to do everything from making budgets to setting up sound systems to occasional on-call soldering, he lives his egalitarian values. But Norm is as accomplished as they come in the progressive media world.

Associate Editor Bill Lueders recently reviewed the book Norm co-edited, Rebel Reporting, about the great independent journalist John Ross.

Norm has a deep knowledge of journalism, politics, and the left--as well as the history of this magazine.

When we moved out of our...