Here they are, in the order that I finished them:

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot

“Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart

“Eating the Dinosaur” by Chuck Klosterman

“The Blind Side” by Michael Lewis

“American Fried” by Calvin Trillin

“Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” by Chuck Klosterman

“Unfamiliar Fishes” by Sarah Vowell

“Friday Night Lights” by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger

“The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World” by Eric Weiner

“The Lost City of Z” by David Grann

“Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer

“Lost in Shangri-La” by Mitchell Zuckoff

“A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan

“Berlin Blues” by Sven Regener

“Eleven” by Mark Watson

“Boomerang” by Michael Lewis

“The Pirates of Somalia: Inside their Hidden World” by Jay Bahadur

Two issues of “Granta: The Magazine of New Writing”

One-third to two-thirds of each issue of “The New Yorker”

The Switzer Neighborhood Farm-Westside Communtiy Gardens at 20th and West Pennway in Kansas City, Mo.

I grew up in a house sandwiched between waving fields and a muddy creek bed. I spent my childhood traipsing up and down paths walled off from cows by barbed-wire fence. I carved out my own right-of-ways through the land, ones that could only make sense to a nine year-old’s brain.

The environment I was raised in during my early childhood was rural but my family had nothing to do with agriculture. The world of farms and fields sat outside our front doorstep but we did not inhabit it. It was more of a piece of the world to be viewed from a car window as we traveled the gravel road into town.

The idea that a farm or garden could be urban wouldn’t have really made much sense to me back then. So, there was a sense of magic that came with attending the 2011 Kansas City Urban Farms and Garden Tour on Saturday.

What I found during trips to just six of the nearly 40 sites on the tour was more than I had even imagined, despite my knowing about the growing attention these sorts of farms and gardens are getting.

Just yards away from the hum of interstate traffic in Kansas City, Kansas, there’s a tucked away urban farm that produces 25,000 pounds of organic produce each year. Miles away in another part of KCK, a neighborhood garden not only produces food but has brought together people of different church denominations and ethnicities to work it. Further north in an area called Armourdale, a nonprofit group has transformed a vacant lot into a source for its food pantry.

Travel across the state line into Midtown KCMO and you’ll find the cutting-edge design of DST 18Broadway, a sloping “agricultural garden.” It has been built with a system of rain gardens and bio filtration to redirect runoff into producing food. The growing plants here tend to be arranged with beauty in mind, with reddish-hued lettuce adding splashes of color.

Several blocks to the west, behind a razor-wire topped fence, you’ll find urban chickens milling about in the shadow of a long-abandoned school building. The raised-bed gardens flourishing in the Switzer Neighborhood and Westside Community Gardens represent a rebirth for this reclaimed industrial property.

The striking thing to me was how each of the food-producing sites I visited represented something different to the community, despite a similar core purpose. In an environment where there is no shortage of concrete, these urban farms and gardens represent something healthful, useful and beautiful.

After decades of having agriculture increasingly become something that we viewed from afar, these sites remind us how food doesn’t just appear magically on a supermarket shelf. It comes from the land, conjured up from rain, water, soil, sun, and through the work of dirt-caked hands.

Our sustenance is created through work and nurtured by good fortune, a blessing that shouldn’t solely be represented in far-off fields and pastures. That some of it should grow close to us, tucked within the overpasses and sidewalks of the cities and suburbs most of us call home, seems only natural, too.

I’ve also authored several blogs in recent months for KLC’s website. One blog looks at the importance of the important leadership intervention of speaking to loss through the example of college basketball. Another asks “how would you intervene to resolve a neighborhood conflict?”

It’s been exciting to see my work become increasingly visible in recent months. I’m hopeful that what I’ve been doing will ultimately have a positive effect on civic leadership development the state of Kansas for years to come.

It used to be that we conferred journalistic legitimacy based on professional orientation.  If you reported for The New York Times, The Kansas City Star or some other news gathering business, you were a journalist.  If you didn’t, you probably weren’t.

These days, the power of the press belongs to just about anybody with about a laptop and an interest in reporting about something.  Blogs run by just a handful of people reach millions around the world and some of the best reporting I’ve seen recently is being done by nonprofit outfits like ProPublica.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that journalism isn’t a profession or title so much as it is an activity, something that can come from many different sources or outlets, if you’re paying attention.  But if you can’t discern whether someone is a journalist based on their title, the publication they write for, or who they’re credentialed by, it’s a much bigger challenge to determine what reporting to take seriously.

The eight terms outlined by Rosen offer a good start to identifying exactly what to pay attention to.  In his view, journalism occurs with: (1) veracity; (2) accuracy; (3) transparency; (4) intellectual honesty; (5) currency; (6) inquiry; (7) utility; and (8) polyphonicity (seeking out a plurality of voices).  I’d highly recommend reading his blog post for the full definition of these terms (Note: This blog is from March but I learned about it recently from Rosen’s Twitter feed).

As someone who does the bulk of my independent writing work for nonprofit groups these days, these eight terms resonate strongly with me as objectives to aspire toward.  I constantly find myself questioning: “Does what I’m doing right now qualify as journalism?”

Journalism would be better off if more aspiring reporters, columnists and bloggers, whether they’re paid for their work or not, questioned themselves and tried to meet criteria such as these.

Please check out some of my pieces this fall and winter.  I’m particularly proud of the blog post about why I try not to use the word “leader.”

Blog post for the Kansas Leadership Center: “What would happen if we banished the word ‘leader’ from our vocabularies?”

Column for KLC’s commentary service in The Wichita Eagle: “Problems persist after the bums are voted out”

Blog post for KLC: “Playing with the new team: The challenge of working across factions”

My appreciation for what the rest of the world calls football grew immensely during the year that I lived in Scotland.  Although the moribund state of the Scottish National Team these days is hardly worth celebrating, there’s still plenty of enthusiasm for the sport there.  I never attended a Rangers-Celtic match but one couldn’t live in Scotland without feeling the heat produced by that sectarian-infused rivalry.

If soccer remains a mystery to my American friends, one can only wonder what they would make the Eurovision Song Contest, another continental institution that I developed a little bit of affection for while living across the pond.  It’s like a jingoistic version of American Idol, where singers represent one of the 39 participating countries rather than themselves.  Only the pop songs are much cheesier and the talent pool feels a little shallower.

But that summary vastly undersells the entertainment value of a competition so weird and wonderful that you just have to watch to appreciate.  I think part of it, as a scholar of international relations, is the benign and relatively predictable geopolitical machinations at play when voters in each country choose their favorite song but can’t vote for their own country’s entry.  I remember sitting in a flat with friends from who’d watched the competition for years and just being amazed by how wrapped up they were in it.  It felt like attending a Super Bowl Party, albeit one where the observed competitors were elaborately costumed, illuminated by disco lights and often covered in glitter.

Thanks goodness there’s this week’s New Yorker article about last May’s competition by Anthony Lane (deadwood edition only) that seeks to translate the madness for us Yanks.  It’s about as snarky of a read as you can find anywhere.  But behind the put-downs are merely there to obfuscate the deep affection — against his taste and better judgment — that the writer has for the Eurovision contest.  Because you can watch the competition online these days, I have hope that someday maybe Americans will catch some of the Eurovision fever, too.

But perhaps this is one contest that Americans don’t actually want to be the best at winning.

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A troubling report from the PBS investigative reporting show Frontline last night called College Inc. left me worried about the future fallout what I’m tempted to call “subprime” college loans.  The show profiles the fast-growing higher education sector of for-profit colleges, such as the University of Phoenix, DeVry University and others you often see advertised on TV.  They tend to “cater to non-traditional students, often confer degrees over the Internet, and, along the way, successfully capture billions of federal financial aid dollars,” Frontline reports.

The idea behind for-profit colleges sounds like it should be a win-win for all involved.  They provide a way for students who might not be able to go to a traditional college to develop job skills and prepare themselves for taking on higher-paying jobs.  These colleges provide an important service to an underserved population and make money in the process.

But some of the firsthand accounts of students interviewed by Frontline showed how badly things can wrong in practice. Some students complain that they were encouraged to take on large federal loan burdens to pay for college degrees that failed to provide anywhere near the career benefits they say they were promised.  There are even accusations that college recruiters have been to encouraged to sign up ever growing lists of students for classes, with little regard for the needs of the student.

Plus, for-profit colleges are a big business and a lot of their profits are being funded upfront by taxpayers. Frontline reports that although they enroll just 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of financial aid. The show goes on to report that according to the Department of Education figures for 2009, 44 percent of the students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from for-profit schools.

Federal student loans don’t suffer from the same sky-high rates and convoluted structures that made subprime mortgage loans such a time bomb for a number of homeowners.  However, the end result of this situation appears to be that some of the students who can least afford it are being piled under large federal student-loan debt to pay for degrees that fail to markedly bolster their station in life.  It makes me fear that more and more students will be unable to find jobs that can pay off their educations, leaving an increasing number of student-loan defaults in their wake.  But what’s more troubling, perhaps, is that these students struggling to pay their loans could end up being stuck with them for decades of their lives.  Federal student loans are notoriously difficult to get out from under and “cannot be discharged in bankruptcy in most cases,” according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Surely, there must be a place for for-profit colleges in our higher education system.  But last night’s Frontline left me thinking that we need to be thinking a lot harder about what that place is and how to better protect the students to which these institutions cater.

Update: Trailer posted below.