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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 10/11/13

by

Alan

I spent last weekend in a blind in Central Washington looking for wolves. A new pack has moved into the Teanaway River Valley, but the howlers never showed themselves to us. Still, I did get to read Bill McKibben’s latest book Oil and Honey. The setting—beautiful, semi-wild, and quiet but for the occasional honk of a bull elk—was perfect for reading the book, which is a braided discussion of Bill’s frenetic life leading 350.org and his apprenticeship to a slow-and-steady beekeeper in his home state of Vermont.

It may not be his greatest book, but everything Bill writes is worth reading. What’s flabbergasting to me is that he somehow found time to write it at all while maintaining the most grueling travel and speaking schedule imaginable. (However much you’re doing for our collective future, you’ll feel inspired to do more by the example he sets.) Here’s a taste:

Every time I went to D.C., I felt like I was visiting the cashier at the front of the store. That’s the obvious place to start when you’ve got a problem—maybe she can solve it for you. But if not, going to her for help year after year is just perverse; at a certain point you’ve got to take your problem to the manager in the backroom and demand what you need. Congress is the cashier. ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers, and Peabody Energy are the big boys. That’s who we were gearing up to go after now.

Not much for pet-blogging, I nonetheless found myself weirdly intrigued by this post on “predator-friendly ranching.” It covers the finer points of dispatching dogs to guard sheep from coyotes.

Nicole

From Paul Constant’s must-read article in this week’s issue of The Stranger, a teaser:

Of course, shutdowns can’t last forever. Maybe even now, as you’re reading this sentence, the shutdown is over. When it ends, cable’s talking heads will distribute “points” to each “side” based on public perception. Polls will be taken. Wrists will be slapped. Victory speeches will be given. But the shutdown isn’t even the real story. The truth is so much worse.

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Weekend Reading 10/4/13

by

Alan

If you want to see US cycling with brand new eyes, watch this video made by a man from the Netherlands.

Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All is well worth seeing. It’s a surprisingly entertaining romp through the trends, causes, and consequences of widening class disparities in the United States. Almost stealing the show is Cascadia’s own (and Sightline friend) Nick Hanauer. I was also taken by the charts. Really. The charts were almost a co-star.

Oops. Much social science turns out to be wrong, based on tests conducted on wildly unrepresentative samples. This piece from Pacific Standard is about some University of British Columbia profs, who have been running standard experimental tests from psychology and economics among non-Westerners. What they’ve found is that the universal truths of these disciplines are just reflections of Western culture. Some 96 percent of the subjects of all experiments in psychology and economics have been from Western nations, and 70 percent of them have been Americans. The whole piece will fascinate you, but here’s one taste.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?”… It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

If you want to see, in one short article, all the racism and classism that I wrote about in my book Unlocking Home, just check out this story in the Seattle Times about houses in Bellevue where groups of roommates are living.

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Weekend Reading 9/27/13

by

Clark

Remember when we wrote about 26 ways to store your bike?  Well, here’s a 27th.

Alan

My old friend Jewel James, master carver of the Lummi Nation, continues his inspired art and activism, accompanying a new totem pole along the route of the coal trains. He was in Olympia earlier this week, and the Olympian did a good job of writing it up.

From the “this is what sustainability looks like” department: Seattle’s market for housing in compact neighborhoods is absolutely scorching right now, with an unprecedented number of apartments opening or in development, vacancy rates scraping the floor, and rents still rising, because demand continues to outstrip supply. The whole metro area is in the midst of the biggest surge in apartment construction since the late 1980s, and almost half of the new apartments opened in the entire metro area in the last 12 months have been situated in Seattle’s densest, most walkable district, the area between the stadiums and ship canal.

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Weekend Reading 9/20/13

by

Alan

The National Weather Service actually used the term “biblical” to describe how much rain was falling on Colorado last weekend. The storms over the Rocky Mountains are profoundly disconcerting to me. No individual event can be tied to climate change definitively, but extreme weather like this is what climate change models predict. It fills me with dread—and with rage at the fossil fuel industry and its apologists, flaks, and hired political hands.

A bookbinder in a Midwestern library who remembered an obscure episode of Nazi concentration camp history appears to have unearthed the true cause of death of Chris McCandless, the young back-to-the-lander who perished in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 and was immortalized by Jon Krakauer in his bestseller Into the Wild.

The Washington Post jumps ahead to what I’ll cover at the end of my parking series, with a brilliant romp through parking-dom on the Potomac.

Serena

Biblical indeed, Alan. This photo collection from The Atlantic‘s InFocus was both jaw-dropping and heartbreaking.

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Weekend Reading 9/13/13

by

Alan

A Portland massage therapist reveals what people really look like undressed.

Each of us is a “we,” as Michael Pollen wrote recently: collections of millions of living organisms that cooperate to keep the whole personal ecosystem going. The latest discovery that illustrates this theme: gut bacteria from thin people make mice thin; gut bacteria from fat people make mice fat. Watch for fecal transplants at weight-loss clinics soon, probably too soon, say researchers.

The whole political saga of the Keystone XL, told as only the New Yorker can. Superb journalism.

Eric

In 1999, I dropped out from a PhD program in philosophy. It was a decision I’ve never regretted and that was provoked, in part, by that discipline’s astonishing (and tragic) insulation from the real world. In that vein, I was fascinated to follow the recent dust-up over academic philosophy’s Frauenfrage. See the New York Times and Jezebel.

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Weekend Reading 9/6/13

by

Anna

Don’t miss (my hero) Naomi Klein on why unions need to join the climate fight.

More young people are using birth control. And guess what? Teen births are at a record low.

Attention middle school teachers: Check out these free lesson plans on climate science from the Environmental Protection Agency.

And, a Center for American Progress study seems to indicate that a healthy middle class actually can help lift all boats. In other words, they found that if you’re born low-income, you have a better chance of growing up to be richer than your parents if there are lots of middle class families in the city or town you call home. “Count this as one more reason to be depressed about the hollowing out of our economic middle,” writes Jordan Weissmann in the Atlantic. Or, count it as one more reason economic policy should first and foremost support the middle rather than continually propping up only those at the top.

Clark

Apparently, wind turbines don’t reduce nearby property values—at least, not in a way that the statisticians can discern. From the horse’s mouth:

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Weekend Reading 8/30/13

by

Migee

An interesting article on the trend of living alone. Since we’ve been writing so much about housing, it seemed like a good piece to include this week. It will be interesting to see how long this “housing mismatch” continues or alternatively, how living arrangements change.

Nicole

Two stories on the Tactical Urbanism Facebook page caught my eye. First off, a video about the Detroit Bus Company, started by a frustrated 25-year old entrepreneur after Detroit’s long-anticipated light rail project was canned (but is now back on).

Second is an anonymously spraypainted  guerilla crosswalk in New Haven, CT which has gone legit, complete with city-sponsored street improvements like curb bumps, trees, and outdoor seating areas. Closer to home, don’t forget that Park(ing) Day is just around the corner, on September 20th!

More about tactical urbanism here.

Clark

Worth a look: a fascinating visualization of national transit ridership trends in the US from 2002 through 2012, courtesy of Seattle-based Schema Design.

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Weekend Reading 8/23/13

by

Nicole

Ever gotten hassled for riding outside of the bike lane? If so, this 2011 video by a New York cyclist is for you. I also came across some helmet-cam videos pointing out tricky intersections and traffic situations in West Seattle. As a life-long bicyclist intimidated by Seattle riding, I’d love to see more of these.

Anna

Center for American Progress and Elle Magazine teamed up to survey men and women about “leaning in”—balancing work and family life, discrimination in hiring, pay, and in day to day workplace dynamics, asking for raises, paid leave, flex time, moving up the ladder, and other issues that can be lopsided by a worker’s gender.

(See also: Five shocking examples of how women have been formally and informally turned into sex objects in their workplaces.)

Alan

Will wolves reach Belgium before they reach the Olympic Peninsula? Last week, I got a rare opportunity to go look for one of Washington’s new wolf packs with a biologist who knows the pack’s habits. We showed up; the wolves didn’t. I hope to try again. It got me wondering, though. Will wolves make it to the Olympics first or Belgium? It’s not such a ridiculous question. Ten packs now live in Washington; others live in Oregon. Alaska, BC, and Idaho all host big populations. One has even traveled into California—the first wolf there in 80 years. So Cascadia is slowly returning to its natural state, wolf-wise. But making it to the peninsula, currently thick with elk and (introduced) mountain goats that might benefit from a top predator, will be hard for them for lack of travel corridors. Meanwhile wolves are repopulating Northwest Europe by the same pattern as our Northwest—migrating down from the north and the east. They have made it across Poland and Germany as far as the Netherlands now. So which will come first: Belgium or the Bogachiel?

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Weekend Reading 8/16/13

by

Anna

It turns out that most of us have the history of reproductive health in America all wrong (thanks in large part to anti-abortion crusaders’ persistent, strategic revisionism). Here’s a great piece from Center for American Progress that sets the record straight, including this surprising information:

Abortion was not just legal—it was a safe, condoned, and practiced procedure in colonial America and common enough to appear in the legal and medical records of the period. Official abortion laws did not appear on the books in the United States until 1821, and abortion before quickening did not become illegal until the 1860s. If a woman living in New England in the 17th or 18th centuries wanted an abortion, no legal, social, or religious force would have stopped her.

If you haven’t already, listen to Thomas Linzey, executive director and chief legal counsel for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, on the backward status quo of US environmental law. He explains how corporate personhood along with the commerce-prioritizing nature of our Constitution—and thus our legal system—more often than not puts the rights of corporations above the rights of people, making it exceedingly difficulty, say, for a community to fight a coal export terminal. Linzey is leading the charge to turn this around, helping communities across the country regain control of their local fates in the face of a long-standing “tradition” of corporate authority. (This first aired a while back, but I just heard it Wednesday night and it’s worth a listen.)

Finally, is the US Tea Party movement starting to brew some green tea?

Alan

If you want to build a temple in praise of your God, you’re legally obligated to devote much more space to parking than to the sanctuary. Notre-Dame de Paris? Illegal in every American city. The latest from parking-infographic-hero Seth Goodman.

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Weekend Reading 8/9/13

by

Anna

This is interesting. Conservative pundits critique the lopsided coverage of recent “revelations” about mothers as breadwinners—and I actually agree with them on several points! (Also, a take on the GOP’s “woman problem.”)

Just when I thought that the middle class was extinct—in terms of both actual, real-life financial security and a die-off of personal identification with the term—here’s an analysis by Anat Shenker-Osorio on why all Americans—rich and poor—still believe they are middle class.

This New Yorker piece about fast food wages briefly touches on an issue that I feel deserves a lot more air time: One of the big problems when you’re talking about low wage work is that in the US we’ve forsaken any kind of genuine “social insurance” or community back-up support systems that would allow people to get by—even fairly comfortably—in low-paid jobs or even on low-end salaries. It’s always boggled my mind that big corporations in America (and small businesses too) aren’t the ones clamoring for universal health care, child care, and other community investments that would prop up their underpaid workforces:

Realistically, then, a higher minimum wage can be only part of the solution. We also need to expand the earned-income tax credit, and strengthen the social-insurance system, including child care and health care (the advent of Obamacare will help in this regard). Fast-food jobs in Germany and the Netherlands aren’t much better-paid than in the U.S., but a stronger safety net makes workers much better off.

Here’s Eric Liu’s take on the fast food workers’ pay question.

Clark

The irony is palpable: a remote territory in Russia, of all places, is putting the kibosh on a coal export terminal because of the objections of local residents.

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