After being resurrected from its ashes, Nau hesitated to make the same mistakes again—letting ambition take the reigns before the brand had legs enough to stand on. But opening up a one-month pop-up shop in New York City's Soho neighborhood proved a great way to test the market and expose local clientele to the brand without the risk of long-term investment.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) proposes a set of new rules that builds community by supporting humanly scaled politics and economics. The rules call for:

• Decisions made by those impacted
• Communities accepting responsibility for the welfare of their members and the next generation
• Households and communities possessing or owning sufficient productive capacity to generate real wealth

In this age of online shopping and payWave readers, paying with paper currency seems a bit anachronistic. Who has the time to visit a physical store, "fumble for cash" (as Visa phrases it) and count every individual bill one by one? Especially when credit and debit cards provide the luxury of convenience and the illusion of endless funds.

And yet, paying in cash provides a crisp finality to a transaction that plastic never will. You're left knowing exactly how much remains in your wallet and merchants pocket what would otherwise be credit card service fees.

My partner and I have an ongoing debate about identity, and the possibility of being aware enough of how we’ve constructed our own identity to be able to change it. This gets particularly messy when we talk (oh so calmly) about “types” and what it means to be a member of a group or to identify as certain sort of person. He thinks it’s as impossible for us to stop being a “type” as it is for a table to stop being a table, or something like that.