Mort Rosenblum, journalist, author, educator, and eater, has assigned himself the immodest mission of saving the world. Having covered crises on seven continents over four decades, he suspects this is a bit too ambitious for an aging Quixote who knocks off Decembers to harvest his olives. But plenty of like-minded people are at work on the most urgent goals: to rescue "the media"; to reclaim democracy; to halt terracide; to fight poverty and plagues; to curb corporate colonialism; and to set a great but misguided nation back on course.

Rosenblum's cri de coeur, "ESCAPING PLATO'S CAVE: How America's Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival", was published in October 2007. In 2008, with co-editor Gary Knight and publisher Simba Gill, he launched dispatches, a quarterly journal on vital issues that goes beyond the "what?" and "who?" to the more crucial "why?" and "what can be done?"

In PLATO, he notes: "For all the words and images we call 'media,' precious few trained eyes see distant reality up close, and these grow fewer by the year . . . We react to effect and ignore the causes. And then, overwhelmed, we cite that old saw as a path of least resistance: You can't worry about what you can't change. We must turn this around: You can't change what you don't worry about."