By the 19th century, it had become a kind of gentleman's club populated mainly by antiquarians, literary men and the nobility.

Well now, recently, the Machine has started to get involved in actual city politics, and they've engineered the election of a former Machine member, a young, pro-business recent graduate to the Tuscaloosa city school board.

And from Alabama to Alaska, a group of women who had always wanted to do something that mattered alongside the best of the best, and to make a difference for their country, answered that call to serve.

Ants have some of the most complex social organization in the animal kingdom, living in structured colonies containing different types of members who perform specific roles.

This is a picture of members of the citizen media network, Global Voices, that I helped to cofound over 10 years ago with my friend, Ethan Zuckerman.

He was part of the Solidarity in Poland, which was a nonviolent movement for social change that was violently suppressed by the government.