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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 1/30/15

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Serena

As a former Girl Scout—of the uber-lite variety… as in, whose only camping experience consisted of a night in a heated cabin with bathrooms—I am wholeheartedly inspired by this new scouting group, the Radical Brownies. If young women, and especially young women of color, aren’t going to learn important parts of American history from our public schools and if our culture is primarily going to give them the Disney-princess version of beauty, then it’s about time they get a different, richer space to learn and grow together.

I am always interested in media that scrutinize our (messed-up, wasteful) fashion economy. A new Norwegian reality show sends a few local teens, one of of them a fashion blogger, to work in the Cambodian sweatshops where much of their clothing is made. Unfortunately, the clips in the article are mostly not subtitled, but you can certainly get the gist of their experience. If you’re really interested, you can check out an interview with the series’ producer from WNYC’s program Q earlier this week.

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Weekend Reading 1/16/15

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Serena

Teju Cole nails it again. He had an excellent piece in the New Yorker on the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He describes how it is far easier to mourn the freedom-representing victims of a few unhinged individuals—and even easier if the killers are Muslim—than it is to name and challenge the violence against free speech and action carried out every day by our own Western governments.

I love Aziz Ansari. I love him even more when he lambastes Rupert Murdoch for his Islamophobic comments after Charlie Hebdo.

Bad day? I once boosted my mood with a binge session of Sesame Street celebrity musical performances… yes, really. Here’s a new one, with “Mucklemore” performing a “Thrift Shop” parody.

Anna

This routine is all too familiar: Woman coworker comes up with a great new idea in a meeting. Male colleague cuts her off and/or runs with her idea and winds up taking—and getting—all the credit for it. (Woman keeps quiet.)

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Weekend Reading 1/9/15

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Alan

Putting a freeway through your city to improve transportation is like putting a hole through your heart to improve circulation, I wrote years ago. See for yourself in these before-and-after slider photos of three heavily freewayed US cities.

Eric

A standing ovation for our friends down south. This week a judge struck down a state permit for a coal export terminal on the lower Mississippi. It was a big win for the locals and for advocates protecting Louisiana’s coastal marshlands, and it was a another big hit to the coal industry.

Closer to home, the city of Vancouver, Washington, could prove to be Tesoro’s Waterloo. Locals just launched a new political action committee targeting the port commissioners who have tried to approve the firm’s giant oil-by-rail terminal plans for the city.

People there are very concerned about the scheme—and rightly so—for a range of reasons. This week added one more reason to worry when oil storage tanks in North Dakota caught fire, releasing billowing clouds of black smoke and, presumably, hazardous and toxic gases.

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Weekend Reading 1/2/15

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Alan

The ever-hilarious Oatmeal writes an actually important analysis of self-driving cars, which also happens to be funny: “I’m ready for our army of Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots.”

In the Northwest, or at least in Washington, white people are whiter—and so are black people, according to a big new genetic study of African, European, and Native American ancestry. South Carolina, though? The homeland of truculent racists like Strom Thurmond is the place where self-identified white people have the most African ancestry. All in all, the study shows, whatever we may think about our race, most of us are beautiful mixtures.

“Outside there is a storm and inside there are mice”… plus other mock-inspirational quotes from Werner Herzog.

Artist Dan Miller of Portland (a childhood friend of mine) built one of the first modern tiny houses in Cascadia, and he built it by hand for less than $4,000. It’s mostly clay and dirt from the backyard where it stands. The beautiful little structure will be open for a tour on January 10—Dan’s last showing of the home before he moves on to life’s next adventure. (Description, photos, and how to RSVP here.)

One must always read Rebecca Solnit: “If I’m exhilarated this year that I’ve read more rape trial transcripts, victims’ testimonies, accounts of murders, beatings and threats and rape tweets and misogynist comments than in probably all my other years put together, it’s because violence against women is now a public issue. At last.”

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Weekend Reading 12/19/14

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Ted

Have you wondered why the cast, promos, and maybe even the audiences for the new hit movie “Wild” (based on the 2012 memoir by Cheryl Strayed) include so few nonwhite faces? African-American writer Brandon Harris did; his essay “Why is Camping a White Thing?” poses a question that lingers like the proverbial pebble in the boot. Could Forest Schools offer affordable early learning in settings intended to connect the next generation to nature? Already popular in the U.K. and beginning to appear in the U.S., nature-centered preschools may offer one way to break down that racial divide in relating to the wild.

Meaghan

Earlier this week I stumbled across this essay on gender socialization and the sharing economy, specifically in regard to home-sharing: Women: Claim Your Share of the Sharing Economy.

It’s a personal essay by a woman, Erica Karnes, reflecting on her experiences as an Airbnb host in Seattle. She eloquently offers up several observations, including what she has come to identify as the “spatial tension” that she finds male guests bring to her home:

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Weekend Reading 12/12/14

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Alicia

Need something new to read on your bus ride? Poetry on Busses is a Seattle-based community art project that features the poetry of your fellow bus riders. The project began in 1992 with the display of poems from the local community on placards above bus seats. This year, they launched an online poetry portal, so that you can browse the poetry while you ride. This year’s featured poems were selected by a group of esteemed Seattle poets, from a pool of submissions that were collected in the spring. Poetry on Busses is the third project in a series of four digital artworks, commissioned by 4Culture with Metro Transit in order to enhance the RapidRide experience. Read more about the projects here!

Clark

Courtesy of Chuck Marohn’s essay on complexity in cities, I present to you the ”High 5” interchange just outside of Dallas: a five-decker tangle of highway lanes as tall as a 12-story building. Marvel of engineering? Urban Blight? Both? You decide! Marohn takes the interchange as a quintessential example of mistaking complicated systems for complex ones. A Swiss watch is complicated but precise. A city is complex and messy. When we treat a city as a complicated system, we build massive freeways to move cars through them as quickly as possible. When we treat a city as complex system, we create interesting, versatile, interconnected spaces where people actually want to spend their time.

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Weekend Reading 11/21/14

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Clark

A new report from Frontier Group and TransitCenter makes a provocative (and almost certainly true) point: federal tax policy subsidizes traffic congestion. The IRS lets employers offer their employees a tax-free parking subsidy of up to $250 per month—which, by the report’s estimate, boosts national rush-hour traffic by roughly 820,000 vehicles per day. Worse, the tax subsidy for parking focuses the benefits on upper-income Americans—the very people who need the subsidies the least.

Serena

Emily Badger has an excellent write-up of a compelling case that crosses questions of food access, gentrification, justice, and marketing that no doubt resonate in Northwest communities, too: Whole Foods is opening a store in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhood. In Englewood, one in four adults is unemployed, one in three households lives below the poverty line, and crime rates are among the city’s highest. But Whole Foods has never closed a store, and they don’t expect the Englewood site to be the first. The conversation around the project on the ground, though, is a testy one:

After the groundbreaking over the summer, the Chicago Tribune called the Whole Foods a “socioeconomic experiment,” a phrase that made Mayor Rahm Emanuel and another local alderman, JoAnn Thompson, bristle.

“This is not an experiment. African American people are not an experiment,” Thompson says. “People need to stop thinking like that, that we cannot afford the things that people in other communities have.”

Anna

Sonny Sixkiller, the legendary Cherokee quarterback, is considered one of the University of Washington’s greatest of all time. What would happen if the former NFL player and Seattle resident, who has been outspoken about the Washington Redskins’s offensive name, bought the team himself? That’s the story told in Lummi tribe member Darrell Hillaire’s political satire, “Sonny Sixkiller Buys the Redskins.” In the play, Sixkiller keeps the name as is, but assigns new names to the players instead.

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Weekend Reading 11/14/14

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Alan

You probably don’t think you want to read a six-page account of the Washington State budget, with charts and tables and citations, and if you’re not a resident of the state, you’re probably right. But if you are resident, you’re mistaken. State Representative Ross Hunter has written a compelling and understandable article about this year’s budgetary imponderables that illuminates and makes real the Abrahamic choices facing the legislature. It’s full of concrete, understated, revealing sentences like this: “The Supreme Court says that we can’t keep mentally ill people in shackles in emergency room hallways.” Read it.

Patton Oswalt and Werner Herzog act out regulatory capture and 19 other short films that amusingly distill key economic issues. It’s We The Economy, a project of Paul Allen’s movie production company.

Know how I hate junk mail? Here’s the latest killer app (literally) for paper spam.

I like to read about brain science. It makes me feel like I’m in a fun house hall of mirrors: infinite loop. Our brains studying themselves, gazing ever deeper, still mystified but making out ever smaller replicas. Here’s one from the NYT.

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Weekend Reading 11/7/14

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Clark

A nifty idea: you can reduce your carbon footprint, at least a wee bit, by reducing how much data you store in the cloud.  One simple option for Gmail users is to use this free service to tidy up your old email messages. I have no idea what the privacy implications are, but it’s certainly an easy way to clear a bunch of useless junk from your email archives.

Alan

A devastating portrait of our disgracefully broken mental health care system, told through the story of one family.

Pam

Citizen cartographers are helping fight the spread of ebola, just as they helped save lives in the 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2013 Philippines typhoon. Using free mapping software, people are improving maps for West Africa so that aid workers can identify locations for possible clinics and the routes by which the virus can spread. You, too, can help.

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Weekend Reading 10/31/14

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Ted

In case you missed it, Brentin Mock has a (heartbreaking) tribute in Grist about 15-year-old George Carter III, killed recently in New Orleans. George was deeply involved with a remarkable student-driven group called The Rethinkers. He spoke of the power of gardens, real food, and nature to make a difference in kids’ lives under the toughest circumstances; there is some lasting power and resonance in his story that deserves to be shared. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has more on Carter here.

Alan

I mentioned that the City of Yakima is pushing a proposed homeless shelter into a warehouse district. An update: the city has passed an emergency moratorium on shelters to stop a local nonprofit from using an old convenience store as one. The council had previously used emergency moratoria only for pot shops, porn shops, and bikini baristas.

What is heroism? The answer came to me this week from a good friend of Sightline, who shared with me the following note, which he had received from a doctor friend of his. The doctor recently retired to Colorado from twenty-plus years fighting AIDS in Uganda and training African doctors.

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