1.	Now that I live in the east I still go for my afternoon walk. But instead of walking around the rainy hills outside Silicon Valley, I walk in a frozen western suburb of Boston. I still bring my walkman, but now it's an all solid-state device that can play MP3s. It's an FM radio, and can record speech through a built-in microphone. It's a marvel of technology, a product one could only dream about a few years back. And a few years from now it will seem utterly baroque, having been replaced by something that speaks 802.11b, and connects up to the worldwide network and plays music and commentary that I chose on my laptop back home, which could be a mile or ten thousand miles away.
2.	Today I brought two great teachers with me on my walk: Larry Lessig, law professor at Stanford, and Jay Rosen, chairman of the journalism department at NYU. I listened to Lessig first. He was interviewed by Chris Lydon in December, just after Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean. He talked about weblogs and the campaign of 2004. Then I listened to Rosen talk about the power of amateur journalism; he was also interviewed by Lydon, in October, as the Dean campaign was ascending. Both interviews are highly recommended if you want to understand the transformation that was taking place in politics, journalism and culture.
3.	At the same time, this afternoon, we're in a unique little space in the political-journalism-culture spectrum. The campaign for New Hampshire is over, the voting is happening right now, we're waiting for the returns, which will come in just a few more hours. It's an easy but uneasy day. After the shakeup of Iowa, we're trying to prepare for another shakeup, and if one should happen, we don't know what it is yet.
4.	But then I realized that there's nothing to wait for. Something big had already happened, and in all the excitement of one of the first great elections in several decades (I'm sure many more are coming), we missed something important had already happened. It's just these moments that this column is here for. A thought in time, a thought that won't wait, something exciting and interesting.