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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 1/17/14

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Nicole

Seattle artist Andrew Waits’ project Boondock is a photographic narrative of Americans who have turned the traditional concept of home on its head and, for reasons ranging from the economic collapse to sustainability, are living out of vehicles. Most images are accompanied by an audio piece and short narrative. I found it beautiful, interesting, and humane.

Clark

The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review likes The Happy City, by Vancouver writer and urbanist Charles Montgomery.  It’s now on my reading list!

Serena

I guess it was no longer enough for them to be everyone’s favorite, adorable marine creature. Behold: sea otters, the Pacific Northwest’s surprisingly powerful little climate change fighters. How do they do it? An insatiable appetite for sea urchins, apparently. See more background on the project here, and note local diver-photographer-videographer Laura James in the credits!

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Eric

On the occasion of the epic NFC championship matchup this weekend, by far the most important writing in Cascadia recently was about Seattle’s longstanding inferiority complex to San Francisco. Danny Westneat’s exploration will be referenced for years to come, and Knute Berger’s contribution is a must-read too. It’s weird how football can be about so much more than sports. It’s also weird how much I loathe the 49ers, as all good locals do.

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Weekend Reading 1/3/14

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Alan

Bill McKibben has taken to the pages of Rolling Stone again. This time, he’s assessing President Obama, and the conclusions are disturbing:

If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.

The netflixing of books has arrived: subscription-based access to a library of e-books. The most interesting thing about the service is what they reveal about readers’ actual behavior. People finish books of erotica, for example, but they only read one chapter of books on yoga.

Clark

An analyst for investment website Fool.com makes a case against investing in US coal companies—largely because of the industry’s false steps with Northwest coal exports!

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Weekend Reading 12/20/13

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Eric

This Wall Street Journal article on the decline of coal in Kentucky is worth absorbing, especially when paired with an account of the boom in the Bakken oil fields, like this one in the Spokane Spokesman-Review. They are a good reminder that there’s a powerful story of human immiseration and desperation that the fossil fuel economy solves. It may ultimately be a short term and destructive “solution,” but the jobs are real and they support real lives and families. In some ways, I think this is the greatest challenge facing those of us in pursuit of a climate-stable future.

I’m late coming to it, but I was absolutely bowled over by Peter Gary’s essay, The Play Deficit. He explores what scientific research tells us about the consequences of children today playing less frequently than we used to in unstructured and unsupervised environments:

According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called ‘creative elaboration’, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average elaboration score on the TTCT, for every grade from kindergarten onwards, fell by more than one standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85 per cent of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. If education ‘reformers’ get their way, it will decline further still as children are deprived even more of play. Other research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and colleagues at the Torrance Creativity Center at the University of Georgia, shows that scores on the TTCT are the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world achievements. They are better predictors than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

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Weekend Reading 12/13/13

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Clark

Here’s a fascinating look at the number of jobs in the public and private sectors under the last 5 presidents. The upshot: when you strip out recessions, and possibly the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks, there’s less difference than you might expect in growth in private sector jobs. But what’s truly anomalous about the last five years is the shrinkage in public sector jobs. The four prior presidents, including Reagan, presided over a substantial growth in public sector jobs. But public sector jobs have shrunk pretty substantially in the last few years. Most of the shrinkage has been at the state and local level…but still, the reality offers a sharp contrast to the oft-floated idea that we’re living through an unusual expansion in the public sector.

Alan

Cascadia has its own language, and I’m not talking about Chinook Jargon.

My Going Postal 2013 post generated a lot of discussion of the future of the US Postal Service. This article from Esquire is particularly illuminating.

There’s a surprisingly profound message about technology and art in this short article about a nomadic iPhone nature photographer. (Nice video, too.)

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Weekend Reading 12/6/13

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Eric

On the occasion of Nelson Mandela’s passing, I suggest reading his lengthy obituary in the New York Times. I often recommend his autobiography, “The Long Walk To Freedom,” which moved me greatly as I read it during a visit to South Africa.

Contrary to many Americans’ assumptions (and somewhat glossed over in his own accounts) Mandela was not a Gandhi or MLK-like figure of nonviolent resistance:

In 1961, with the patience of the liberation movement stretched to the snapping point by the police killing of 69 peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville township the previous year, Mr. Mandela led the African National Congress onto a new road of armed insurrection.  It was an abrupt shift for a man who, not many weeks earlier, had proclaimed nonviolence an inviolable principle of the A.N.C. He later explained that forswearing violence “was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”

Anna

What would happen if we exchanged less of our time for money? Here’s another look at the 30-hour work week, with an interesting take on the environmental impact of working less:

Long hours affect more than us individually. They affect the planet. Martin Pullinger, an ecological economist at the University of Edinburgh, said that reducing the hours of full-time workers by 20 per cent—essentially cutting back to a four-day week—would reduce the carbon footprint of all working age households by 4.2 per cent in the United Kingdom and 6.4 per cent in the Netherlands, the nations studied. Yet he notes that in all the discussions of working hours and labour policy, environmental goals are rarely mentioned or even considered.

Another good one from Chris Mooney: 7 evolutionary reasons it’s easier for our brains to believe in God than in, um, evolution. In other words, science shows that we’re naturally pre-disposed against science.

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Weekend Reading 11/22/13

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Eric

It sounds strange to say, but I was absolutely riveted by these colorized historical photos.

And don’t miss these shocking pics of Hollywood cougars.

Anna

Scary climate impacts you never would have anticipated, No. 173: Drought stricken town taken over by hungry emus.

And speaking of drought (a climate change impact we’re likely to see more and more of), could dried up crops of the past year be a contributing factor in the great Butterball turkey shortfall of 2013? (Read this and you’ll never want to eat factory turkey again anyway, so the shortfall will not be affecting you.)

Clark

Should be in the dictionary under “irony.”

A Walmart in northeast Ohio is holding a holiday canned food drive — for its own underpaid employees. “Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” a sign reads in the employee lounge of a Canton-area Walmart.

Kory Lundberg, a Walmart spokesman, says the drive is a positive thing. “This is part of the company’s culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships,” he said.

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Weekend Reading 11/15/13

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Anna

How Twitter hijacks your mind (a personal account by Kathryn Schultz that explains a lot I just didn’t get about Twitter).

Turns out “having it all” means something pretty different depending on your gender. That may be part of the problem for women trying to juggle careers and family.

The choice to have a baby is akin to the choice to buy a Porsche? Um, excuse me! (Joan Walsh explains how conservatives are fighting tooth and nail to keep prenatal care and maternity care from being requirements for coverage under the Affordable Care Act.)

E.J. Dionne offers an incisive column on the same topic.

And a voice of reason on Obamacare from Fox News?? Here’s why we should be blaming insurance companies (surprise, surprise) for those wretched plans that a tiny slice of the public now has to give up because they don’t meet the bare, minimum standards for coverage required by the new law. Thanks, Juan Williams. How often do I get to link to Fox News on our site!?

Pam

When you don’t have a compass, just look to the cows. Scientists have found that cows tend to orient themselves along north-south magnetic lines.

Serena

Want.

Alan

Imported herbs and spices in the US may be contaminated with spider parts and the like, but herbal supplements are worse: one third of recently tested bottles didn’t contain even a scintilla of the herb on the label. Herb hawkers: are they stupid or are they liars?

Oh, Sweden. Just staaaaahp. You’re making my policy crush on you unbearable.

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Weekend Reading 11/8/13

by

Alan

This week, I finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s classic book about World War II and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Shorter: They did not have a healthy marriage, but their political partnership was unprecedented in its impacts.  World War II did more for equality of opportunity for women and African Americans, and for civil rights, than you knew. World War II changed the landscape of the United States almost as much as it did the battlefields of Europe and Asia. (This week, by coincidence, DKG also published a new book on Teddy Roosevelt.)

Some Swedish movie theaters are rating films according to a simple test: “When you watch a movie, ask yourself: Does this film contain two or more female characters…who have names…and have a conversation with one another…about something other than a man?” Shockingly many feature films fail the test.

I vote a best-Sightline-blog-title-in-months award to: “Intrauterine Bling.”

Also: new Pomplamoose!

Anna

How to write the worst possible column about Millennials.

Is the American “center” a corporate fantasy (cooked up by insider politicos)?

Bernie Sanders on the shameful gap between the very rich and everyone else. Can we clone this guy, please?

Poverty is way more “mainstream” than you might think. But there is good reason to talk about its prevalence across the population periods. As Mark Rank, professor of social welfare at Washington University and a co-author of the forthcoming book, “Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes our Fortunes,” sums it up: 

The solutions to poverty are to be found in what is important for the health of any family—having a job that pays a decent wage, having the support of good health and child care and having access to a first-rate education. Yet these policies will become a reality only when we begin to truly understand that poverty is an issue of us, rather than an issue of them.

It’s the investments we make in people and communities—not just the safety net but the ladders of opportunity we build together—that matter.

Nicole

Finally! An invisible bike helmet. No, it’s not an article in the Onion; it’s a cool reimagining of biking protection by the Swedish company Hovding, and it could even match your outfit. It’s pricey, but inspiring to see this kind of innovation.

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Weekend Reading 11/1/13

by

Serena

The award-winning documentary “Elemental” is coming to Seattle November 14—that is, if they can sell 49 more tickets by next Thursday, November 7. The film tells the story of three individuals around the globe fighting three different climate and pollution battles. Check out the trailer, and buy your ticket:

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BONUS: Sightline’s own Alan Durning will be introducing the film and moderating a small panel discussion afterward with Bellingham Council Member Cathy Lehman, an inspiring young leader and vocal coal export opponent.

Eric

Roger Annis deserves an audience south of the border. His careful analysis of the Canadian fossil fuel industry is best-in-class. I particularly encourage everyone embroiled in fossil fuel exports to read his recent piece in the Vancouver Observer about oil train derailments and petro-politics north of the 49th parallel.

If you’re in Washington and still deciding how to vote on Initiative 522, check out The Stranger’s excellent depiction of the “yes” and “no” donor lists. What more is there to say about the influence of money in politics?

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Weekend Reading 10/18/13

by

Alan

If the obesity epidemic is caused by sedentary lifestyles and overeating, or by high-fructose corn syrup, or something else about human lifestyles, then why are pets, lab chimps that are kept in unchanging conditions of activity and diet, and even feral rats living among us all getting fatter? Could it be pollution is messing with our metabolisms or microbiology?

Tim Egan expresses well the crush I have on the Pope.

Would you rather see Congress mauled by grizzly bears or set upon by fire ants?

How to dry your hands thoroughly with just one paper towel.

The solution to housing affordability may not be more “affordable housing.” A parable from the Bay Area that applies perfectly to the Northwest.

Clark

Europe’s emissions have fallen 18 percent below 1990 levels—adding to the evidence that putting a price on carbon actually reduces emissions of carbon!

Apparently, kids these days don’t use email. (They also need to get off my lawn!)

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