Donate Newsletters

Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 6/19/15

by

Clark

I found this story both sad and familiar: Australian aboriginal communities are opposing a massive coal mine development that they consider a threat to their way of life, so they sent representatives trekking all the way to New York to discourage international financiers from backing the project.  To me, it sounds eerily similar to what’s going on in our part of the world, where Native American tribes are facing coal mine and port terminal developments that will affect their cultures and livelihoods—and have petitioned Wall Street financiers to stop the flow of money that keeps these projects alive.

Serena

“Can we fix the climate like it’s a leaky faucet? Should we? Discuss.” That’s the premise of a couple of upcoming “Think & Drink” events hosted by Humanities Washington. KUOW environment reporter Ashley Ahearn will moderate a discussion between Lauren Hartzell Nichols, environmental specialist and professor of philosophy, and Thomas Ackerman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. Catch the convo over beers June 23 at Naked City Brewery or June 30 at the Royal Room. Timing and additional details are available on Humanities Washington’s website.

Eric

Oil Check NW on one of the more curious features of watching a Mariner’s home game: the “BNSF Blast” ad that plays on the diamond vision whenever the M’s hit a homer. Given that you could probably stand on the upper decks of the stadium and hit a passing oil train with a rock, it’s actually a little disturbing.

Read more

Weekend Reading 6/12/15

by

Serena

In case you missed this in Tuesday’s Sightline Daily news picks (which you can get delivered fresh to your inbox each morning if you like!), check out this fascinating article on what makes an environmentalist. Chris Mooney writes up the top factors, which include having an “open” personality, having high levels of empathy, and—according to newly published research—spending more time with your neighbors. “The implications of the research, the authors conclude, is that we shouldn’t just be targeting people individually to get them to change their environmental or energy-related behaviors. Rather, we should be targeting their social interactions.”

Alan

Agriculture uses more than 60 percent of California’s water, and recent immigrants don’t tend to have big, irrigated lawns; swimming pools; or golf club memberships. So blaming recent immigrants for California’s drought is a bit like blaming transit riders, rather than oil companies, for climate change. But a California group is doing it anyway. Facepalm.

Eric

At Whatcom Watch, Michael Riordan crunches the numbers on coal ship “deck washing” and concludes that the terminal planned for Cherry Point would result in “90 to 100 tons of coal flushed into our waters every year.”

Read more

Weekend Reading 6/5/15

by

Alan

Remember parking reform? Yeah, it’s still just about the most important—and least attended—issue of urban sustainability and affordability.

And remember when I alienated untold readers by arguing that urban greens’ biggest blind spot is their opposition to taller buildings? Yeah, it still is, as Sightline friend Erica Barnett illustrates in a distressingly true description of a mob of neighborhood density opponents commenting at a Seattle city council meeting on a modest proposal to slightly limit an otherwise overreaching antidevelopment zoning rule. Like most Cascadian cities, Seattle keeps promising ever grander climate accomplishments while drastically constraining the growth of the dense, walkable, European-style neighborhoods that are the best alternative to internal combustion. As I’ve been arguing for almost two decades.

Better news: Honest Elections Seattle—the innovative money-in-politics initiative that Sightline helped to design—is heading to the ballot, thanks to a robust signature-gathering campaign that delivered 32,000 signatures to city hall on Monday. Crosscut had the best coverage.

Kristin

Everyone has implicit racial bias. The bias may be very specific (“black people have guns”) rather than general (“black people are bad”). Police officers—including and possibly even more true for minority police officers—have a “shooter bias” that associates blacks with weapons, leading to officers being quicker to shoot a black person (because they might be armed) than a white person. Seems like it might be easier to uproot a specific implicit bias; but it is still hard. However, there is one solution that is, if not exactly easy, certainly straightforward: reduce officer discretion and replace it with prescriptive guidance. Instead of saying, “hey, pull over whoever you feel looks suspicious and let your implicit bias guide your way,” tell officers “pull over only people who are doing one of these six things that we know are correlated to these crimes.” It works. When NY let officers pull over whoever they felt like, officers pulled over a lot of innocent people, especially black innocent people. When directed to six specific behavioral tells, officers pulled over only one quarter the number of people, but quadrupled their contraband finds. Whoa. Less work, more payoff, less opportunity for implicit bias to do harm, fewer innocent citizens hassled. Let’s do that.

Read more

Weekend Reading 5/29/15

by

Alan

Politico has an epic treatment of coal’s decline in the United States and the meticulous, truth-telling Sierra Club volunteers and staffers who have helped accelerate it.

Serena

One more reason the Northwest beats California: we haven’t had to consider this just yet.

“[The rents] do not go down, that’s one thing that’s a safe bet in the trailer park world. Our rents do not go down.” That’s Frank Rolfe, founder of Mobile Home University, a company that trains investors on making bank off of trailer park ownership. Twenty million Americans—six percent of us—live in them, and high-profile investors from Sam Zell to Warren Buffett have sizeable stakes in them. Mobile Home University’s number one rule? “Don’t make fun of the residents.” (But apparently it’s cool to raise rents to the point of forcing some of them to homelessness.)

Listicles: Not, in fact, an invention of the Snake People.

Clark

A federal court has ruled that Wisconsin’s transportation department used specious traffic projections to justify a $146 million highway-widening project. The agency made unjustifiable traffic forecasts—but the judge found that those projections didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Read more

Weekend Reading 5/22/15

by

Kristin

As if we needed more evidence that poverty is really, really bad: it impairs your mind. Great. Now you can’t pay your bills or put food on the table and you are dumber, to boot. Hey, I have a good idea: let’s give everyone in the richest country on earth a basic income, which will save money on all the band-aids we currently use to plaster over the simple problem that we don’t distribute wealth very efficiently, will raise many people’s IQs by 14 points, and then free people up to do meaningful, innovative work that they want to do, instead of enforced drudgery. Wouldn’t that be cool?!

Big banks train their employees to cheat. The author of a recent study concludes: “the apples are good, but the barrel is bad.” Next time we get the chance to make a better barrel, let’s not waste it.

Slightly depressing: men want their wives to be “attractive” and “sweet.” But encouraging: they want their daughters to be strong and smart. And wanting that for their daughters opens them up to all kinds of great things:

Judges who’ve fathered girls may be more sympathetic to gender issues. Having daughters makes legislators more likely to be more supportive of reproductive rights. Parents of daughters were more likely to support policies that address gender equity.

And a dose of outrageous optimism, from my hero, Mr. Money Mustache!

Serena

Coverage of the gruesome biker shootout in Waco is getting some well-earned critique—in short, gang violence sounds a lot different when the perpetrators are white.

Read more

Weekend Reading 5/15/15

by

Eric A ray of hope for the Northwest: oil company Tesoro’s plans can be stopped. The company recently shelved its proposed Uinta Express Pipeline in Utah. Although executives cited “market conditions” as the driving factor, the project had also been staunchly opposed by residents and environmental groups. Closer to home, Tesoro CEO Greg Goff called … Read more

Weekend Reading 5/8/15

by

Eric

If you care about open government and transparency in Washington state, please read this excellent piece by Kim Drury. The state’s Public Disclosure Commission—easily one of the best state sunshine agencies in the country—stands to get hit hard by budget cuts this year. The expected cuts could mean laying off 17 percent of the staff, continuing to rely on aging technology, and struggling to fulfill its critically important mission of letting the public see who pays to play in Washington politics.

New crude-by-rail rules came out last week, just in time for the fifth oil train explosion this year. Toothless as the regs may be (and they are largely toothless), the CEO of the Norfolk Southern railroad complains that they could make oil-by-rail too expensive. In other words, even a very limited attempt to protect communities from incineration may be too much for the profit margins of oil companies and railroads.

Tragically—no, appallingly—the Obama administration’s approach is clearly weighted toward the industry. Over at Forest Ethics, Todd Paglia lays out a blistering case against the rules. As he points out, “That means oil trains hauling up to a million gallons of explosive crude oil in the most dangerous tank cars will keep rolling through a downtown near you FOREVER.”

Yup.

Not only that, but as the Spokane Spokesman-Review points out, quite rightly, the much-ballyhooed new oil train rules will drastically limit public disclosure. They effectively shroud the industry in secrecy. And while the public watches explosion after explosion on the tracks, we’ll just have to trust that these same operators are playing by the rules.

Finally, an answer to the eternal question of what women want: the dad bod. (Right?)

Serena

The best sketch on birth control access I’ve seen in a while, courtesy of Amy Schumer.

Read more

Weekend Reading 5/1/15

by

Nick

A new map from Pembina Institute highlights over 14,000 jobs from clean energy in B.C.​ and allows users to explore 156 renewable energy projects currently in operation or under construction. This first phase of the map specifically examines jobs from clean energy supply; the next phases will examine the bigger clean energy picture, including jobs in energy efficiency, green buildings, and clean transportation.

Serena

“There was a wreck on the highway—and the wreck is our agricultural system.” Remember that truck full of bees that overturned on I-5 in Seattle a few weeks ago? From my ever thoughtful honey provider, Urban Bee Company, a beautifully written, sobering, big-picture call to action on the real bee emergency.

Baltimore is the latest city to rise in answer to state violence and police brutality. From Ta-nehisi Coates, reflections on nonviolence:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

Read more

Weekend Reading 4/24/15

by

Clark

Joe Cortright asks exactly the right question: why can’t The Atlantic and Bloomberg do long division? The same goes for the Boston Globe and a host of other outlets that I won’t bother to link to. They all repeated a claim made by J.D. Power, a marketing firm, that “Gen Y” is buying more cars than “Gen X”—writing stories suggesting that the allegedly car-averse Millennials are actually surpassing the 40-somethings in their love of the auto. But there’s that pesky division problem: by the Powers definition, Gen Y includes 78 million people, while Gen X has just 45 million. And once you adjust for population, GenY’s car purchases trails GenX by 36%.

But even that misses the point. The right question to ask is: how does GenY compare with GenX, back when GenXers were the same age as today’s GenY?  J.D. Power undoubtedly has the answers in its research files. But it doesn’t seem to be sharing them. You have to wonder why.  Maybe because it doesn’t make headlines?

Serena

From weather updates and maps navigation to job searching on Craigslist and networking with fellow travelers, mobile phones have been a game-changer for people experiencing homelessness, especially among the younger generation.

Read more

Weekend Reading 4/17/15

by

Alan

“We increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape. A place literacy is leaving us,” writes Robert Macfarlane in a sumptuous essay in the Guardian on the multitudinous words he’s gathered from across the United Kingdom for features of nature. His project is writerly, of course, but it’s also subversive. By fastening words to visible nature, he hopes to re-particularize our perceptions of landscapes and, from that, know them, love them, and protect them better. My favorite word is “ammil”: the glittering lacquer of ice that coats every twig and blade of grass when a freeze follows a thaw. Just knowing the word for it refills me with wonder for the few times I’ve witnessed it.

In Unlocking Home, I spilled a lot of ink over the discriminatory, exclusionary nature of occupancy limits in housing: they are, pure and simple, a way to keep out people short on money. Well, the impulse is as strong as ever in Bellevue, Washington, where neo-rooming houses are being legislated out of existence in single-family neighborhoods close to a major college. CityLab explains.

Read more

+ More
×