Frank Kogan

I still think our best bet is to pull people into broader social conversations that happen to feature music, the music being the means to the social-convo ends rather than vice versa. The politicos actually aren't all that interested in sociology (they tend to be bad at that as well -- they're good at identifying issues and calling bullshit, but not as good at determining, or even caring, why someone might believe certain things or act certain ways. Nor do I think it's in their best interest necessarily to try to understand, since what they want to influence is policy change by galvanizing friendly readers).

The other alternative, finding everyone in other fields to who happens to enjoy talking about music, will (1) limit the applicant pool significantly and (I'm guessing) (2) tend to attract people based on their tastes rather than their ideas. To have a good conversation about Taylor Swift, I think we need to put Taylor Swift at the center of a broader conversation worth having -- our terms are, if you want to talk about Social Thing X, you have to do it in the context of Taylor.