Ladies & Gents, we have an Unexotic 1st: our entire Radar this month is devoted to 1 pick -- The story of Frederick Hutson and his prison-launched startup, Pigeonly. Pigeonly Frederick Hutson Congrats, man, and wishing you and your team every success. unexoticventures.com/radar#radar-st…

A Midsummer break and a review of our Unexotic Winners thus far... Congrats to: Venture For America The Paris Review's JJ Sullivan and his Pulphead Christy Turlington Burns's Every Mother Counts The New Yorker's George Packer and his Unwinding Frederick Hutson's Pigeonly. unexoticventures.com/radar

Congratulations to this month's picks: - Phenomenal reporting by Dan Sagalyn, Nick Schifrin & hari sreenivasan of PBS News on the struggle for Veterans just to breathe - Gritty, unflinching chronicles from the Midwest by The Globe and Mail's award-winning Sarah Kendzior unexoticventures.com/radar

Our latest picks: - The launch of Ashton Applewhite' groundbreaking Old School - The valuable work of The First 72+ in guiding newly-released prisoners - A death & a lawsuit against Cedars-Sinai to benefit new mothers + Congrats to winner Sarah Kendzior... unexoticventures.com/radar

Congrats & thanks to: - Coworker.org, a mammoth online forum helping workers to improve their workplace - Timothy Shenk, Editor of Dissent Magazine, for his prescient piece in The Nation on Democracy's Revenge - Veterati prodividing career mentorship to current and former soldiers

Congrats & thanks to: - @RuralSourcing, which trains tech talent rurally, and gets American companies to outsource their IT work to local American teams - Sarah Kendzior, best-selling author of The View From Flyover - Service to School an innovative startup serving Veteran scholars

Congrats to our winners & nominees: - @MosiSecret's poetic tribute to The Magnificent Seven & elite Black schooling, - Malcolm Gladwell's chronicle of educational dysfunction in his Revisionist History podcast - MIT startup nadia re-enabling a trip down memory lane for the aged

Congrats to this year's winners & nominees: - John Jeremiah Sullivan, Author & Editor at The Paris Review and his gorgeously-written Pulphead - Krista Tippett's Civil Conversations from The On Being Project - Startup @GetMahmee creating an online community for expectant and new mothers

Congrats to our winners & nominees: - Frederick Hutson's bold, disruptive prison-focused startup Pigeonly - The Johnson Family, @TheJudgeHatchett & a groundbreaking lawsuit against Cedars-Sinai highlighting maternal mortality - Jerry Z. Muller's gripping book The Tyranny of Metrics

Congrats to this year's winners & nominees: - Chike Aguh's ambitious venture Everyone’s Even On Monday to bring high-speed low-cost Internet to rural US communities - The The New Yorker's George Packer and his epic Unwinding - Financial Times's Hannah Kuchler on How Silicon Valley Discovered the Rest of America

Congrats to this year's winners & nominees: - Dan Sagalyn & his team at *NewsHour for a moving, urgent report on Veterans Struggling for a Diagnosis - Ear Hustle Podcast's intimate look at life behind bars - CoGenerate (Formerly Encore.org) and its $100K Encore Prize, recognizing entrepreneurs over 50

Congrats to this year's winners & nominees: - CONBODY for pioneering a prison-inspired fitness movement - Christy Turlington Burns's Every Mother Counts for its rigorous focus on improvin maternal health - David Roth & Associates' clever dating campaign for Jdate featuring coding grandmas

Congrats to this year's winners & nominees: - Amy Goldstein's Janesville, a chronicle of a collapsing Wisconsin town. Winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey & Company Business Book of the Year Award - @ClevelandHustles by King James & B. Bonin Bough: a TV show spotlighting entrepreneurs in the Midwest

Congrats to this year's winners & nominees: - Acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas, formerly of the The New York Times, whose output was unexotic avant la lettre. - Entrepreneur, founder, & future US President Andrew Yang, CEO of Venture For America

Congratulations to our past winners and nominees for their phenomenal work in bringing attention to issues *unexotic* -- under-the-radar, underfunded, under-reported, unglamorous: - Anti-Ageism activist Ashton Applewhite, founder of Ashton Applewhite & OldSchool.Info

To all those striving to lift up without putting down, you're in a tough-ass business. We have titanic respect for your work, and wish you mammoth success in fulfilling it. If we were able to help in any way, we're humbled by the opportunity... Best to all for the coming year.

We excited more passion, and attention, and money, in bashing the powerful than in uplifting the weak. Bashing is necessary, but it's not our preferred line of business. The article had plenty of bile : ), but the venture was focused on betterment and that's a different labor.

Lovely people, It's been quite a year. Our Unexotic Adventure ends here... Thank you to all the fine folks we've met on this trip. Our top Lesson -- and it was a totally unexpected one -- was this:

MUST READ piece by Michael R. Strain of American Enterprise Institute on business and "skills gaps": 1. Invest in training of lower paid workers 2. Hire based on skills, not pedigree (cites Opportunity@Work ) 3. Raise wages #MarketSolutions Nails it. cc: Bloomberg bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is American renewal. Not just as a graduating class, but as a generation,” says Commencement speaker Anne-Marie Slaughter🇺🇦. #WashU18