We imagine ourselves to be citizens of the world but in fact we are drawn to people like us, to familiar experiences and to information that confirms our biases. This is the phenomenon Ethan Zuckerman calls "imaginary cosmopolitanism." We could potentially read the daily news from Lagos, Nigeria on our laptop while we're wearing pajamas. We could follow trending tweets from Turkey. But the imaginary part of the cosmopolitanism is that we don't. Can we build technologies to engineer serendipity when it comes to global news? That is the challenge that my colleague Matt Stempeck and I took on when we decided to build a program to help people discover the places they never read about and the...
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