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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 8/28/15

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Serena

Following up on one of the big cultural questions that phenomena like the Amazon company can pose to America…. Like, “Could cheaper goods actually be bad for consumers?” Authors United argued just that recently in a complaint to the US DOJ—one which likely goes over the heads of most Amazonians—that the company’s monopoly and monopsony on the book market deprives consumers of diversity and quality in what they can read.

Salad greens, people—they’re overrated. (And the logical conclusion is that it’s time to switch my salad for a sundae. Can do!)

Been to a diversity training lately? Me, too. Here’s a valuable take on them you might have missed.

A new study, fueled by a tool so delectably called a “Hedonometer,” gathered some interesting trends in how the masses communicate about climate change—via Twitter.

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Weekend Reading 8/21/15

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Kristin

Sometimes I read things that are going around Facebook. They almost always make me sad, like Cecil the Lion. So I write about it, and feel a tiny bit better.

What’s the best thing a doctor can prescribe to a poor person? Money. That’s why these physicians support a Basic Income Guarantee.

Imagine a world where people with average middle-class jobs could afford to have kids, have health care, take 10 months off work to be with your babies, then put them in good quality day care, and not worry every minute about falling behind and slipping into poverty. Oh, wait—that’s how most civilized countries work. Just not the US. But it sounds so so so nice!

Speaking of the challenges of living in America… So many Americans are ashamed. The economy isn’t creating jobs for them, yet the culture still tells them they are worthless without a job. There is no way for them to support their family without a job, so they are ashamed. And angry. And they want to vote for Trump. Because Trump has no shame and he tells them he can fix it for them, give them back their jobs and their dignity. By firing all the Mexicans. And putting all the women in their place.

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Weekend Reading 8/14/15

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Serena

Well, this is rad: startups to reduce food waste, largely founded by Millennials. My favorite one profiled here is Baltimore’s Hungry Harvest, which “recovers surplus produce from farms and wholesalers, and sells it in CSA-style boxes at a steep discount to what non-cosmetically-challenged produce would cost. For each box sold, a healthy meal is donated to someone in need.”

A more sustainable way to die? Yes! Magazine explains. (And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Urban Death Project as well.)

A can’t-miss overview of environmentalism’s racist history.

Anna

Thank you, Pramila Jayapal, for helping me better understand the ways I kept twisting myself up in different knots after Bernie Sanders failed to speak at his Seattle rally when Black Lives Matter activists took the stage. (Pramila was also excellent on this on All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC.)

What I realize is that all those knots are here to stay. And mine are nothing compared to those of the women on that stage. Things need to change. (See, as just one example: Police killings since Ferguson in one map). So, I say thanks also to an old friend, who is white but whose husband and children are black, for sending this: White Person’s Guide to Activism: How to be an interrupter.

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Weekend Reading 8/7/15

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Alan

Rent control, like parking quotas, is as politically enticing as it is economically unattractive.

Anna

You hear a lot of talk about how to fix our education system, in particular, how to provide the same basic standards of quality and learning opportunities to African American kids that most white kids get in today’s public schools. And you mostly hear about failed attempts. But as Nikole Hannah-Jones explains in the latest episode of This American Life, The Problem We All Live With, there’s something nobody tries anymore, despite a slew of evidence that it is the one thing that actually works: desegregation. She chronicles an accidental desegregation program in the school district from which Michael Brown had graduated—against so many brutal, unconscionable odds—just three weeks before he was shot and killed by police in Ferguson. I found the data and stories in this account to be utterly chilling and eye-opening. Everybody should listen to it.

And, speaking of systems that are broken, New Yorker’s Amy Davidson gives us a snapshot of democracy totally derailed by big money (in case you needed any extra evidence that we sorely, sorely need election reform in this country). We know this is how it works, but still it’s just unfathomable to me:

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Weekend Reading 7/31/15

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Alan

If you want to understand what is happening right now in Seattle’s housing controversy—the HALA-baloo—read this article carefully. What the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda committee has done is to offer a plan that would lead the city out of the trap it is falling into and which San Francisco is already deeply ensnared in. (Vancouver, BC, too is ensnared, though the trap is not identical.) HALA sketched a fragile, new political coalition, too. The old, anti-development political coalition that has long united the far left with the city’s neighborhood preservationists is now pushing back hard. Seattle can and must engage in a long and thorough debate about exactly how to embrace growth and bend it toward inclusion—exactly what rules should be implemented for building what, where—but if we continue to err on the side of impeding housing, we will become San Francisco: a place only for millionaires and subsidiaries.

Kristin

Ah, Margaret Atwood. I love you, but your science fiction writing and your this-sounds-like-science-fiction-but-it-is-real! writing about climate change terrifies me and makes me think maybe I should buy some guns. No, I’m not going to buy guns. But maybe I should… and dog food.

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Weekend Reading 7/24/15

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Alan

Entrepreneurs? They mostly come from money.

It’s been a couple weeks of strong words and big feelings about the Seattle housing proposals I helped craft. About it all, the Seattle Times editorial board hollered “slow down!” Which was, well, ironic, considering the ed board’s 2013 “hurry up!”

Kristin

Last year I voted against Oregon’s GMO-labeling ballot initiative (gasp! My environmentalist friends are shocked and appalled about this). I voted no because the arguments didn’t make sense: there is no evidence of health threats, and if you are worried about pesticides, then worry about pesticides—the main problem there is mono crop farming, not GMOs per se. It also seemed like a way to make low-income people feel bad about something they have no control over: yuppy yoga moms could feel good buying their non-GMO produce at Whole Foods, but pretty much everything else has GMOs in it, so other people are just reminded every time they buy food that they may be doing something vaguely unhealthy. Clear costs + no clear benefits = no vote. But I did not go one step further—as this Slate article does—and consider:

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Weekend Reading 7/17/15

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Eric

Here’s a good lead for enterprising reporters. Strategies 360, the lobbying and PR firm behind many of the Northwest’s biggest coal and oil projects, was just hit with a legal judgment for their work opposing the Cedar Grove composting facility in Marysville, Washington. It wasn’t because Strategies fomented a smear campaign against the firm (although they did that too), but that they illegally circumvented disclosure laws in order to deceive the public.

Bloomberg on the latest sign that coal is getting killed: bond-holders are in revolt, and for good reason.

Tesoro wants to build the continent’s biggest oil train terminal on the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington. As Sightline has shown, their track record is awful. And this week, we learned that California regulators are hitting the firm with more than $1 million in fines for breaking state laws about gasoline formulations.

Keiko

Our friend at Washington Environmental Council, Mark Powell, may become the first person to swim the entire 85-mile-long Duwamish River—Seattle’s only river, and an active Superfund site. Since all the pollution in the Duwamish flows into Puget Sound, Powell hopes to raise awareness around restoring this important watershed. Watch some rad underwater videos and follow his journey here.

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Weekend Reading 7/3/15

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Alan

Little known fact about me: my first publishing venture was not Sightline. It was an alternative newspaper I ran with a friend in junior high school. My co-publisher was Clark Cohen, who went on to have an astonishing career as an entrepreneur in aviation and aeronautics. He recently published a piece for the space-research community that has tucked within it one of the most lucid and insightful arguments for reforming Congress through ranked choice voting in multi-winner districts that I’ve seen (aside, of course, from the superb work of Sightline’s own Kristin Eberhard).

If you want to see what climate change could look like in Cascadia, just read Cliff Mass’s weather blog from this past week, such as Sunday, June 28. The temperature maps look like they came from the Persian Gulf.

In a staff discussion this week, I recounted something I read years ago: that more American households own guns than own bicycles. That appears not to be true anymore, if it ever was. Gun ownership has declined from half of households in the 1970s to 34 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, about 45 percent of American households owned bicycles in 2001, according to this paper. (Reader challenge: find more recent data and assemble time trends for both. Canada? Cascadia-specific data? I wonder which direction the bicycle trend has gone since then: up or down? What year did the lines cross, if they did?)

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Weekend Reading 6/26/15

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Kristin

Two of may favorite things recently came together: Tim Urban of WaitButWhy and Elon Musk, of, you know, the future of humanity. Tim has now written about Musk, and Tesla (warning, this article is seriously a small book), solar energy, and hyperloop. HYPERLOOP!

A moment for Hyperloop vs. High Speed Rail… CA plans to build a train that:

  • If it is finished as projected in 2029 (because large projects like this always finish on time), will be slower than trains other countries built years ago
  • If it finishes on budget (because …) it will still be more expensive than flying
  • It will be orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying
  • Will not save much energy relative to flying and could possibly require more energy per person than driving

Why? Why aim for inferiority? Why not aim for this?

Serena

Last Saturday, the Seattle Times looked at top CEO pay across the Northwest. They forgot to note one specific trait that all ten of these multi-million-dollar-a-year folks share. Fear not—one of my favorite blogs, Seattlish, helped ’em out.

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