A new solution to the quintessential Northwest dilemma: biking vs. skiing. Now there’s no need to choose!
What would transit PSAs look like if they were produced by the same people who make trailers for Hollywood action films? Here’s what.
Then, a town in the Netherlands brags, on a road sign, that it is FREE OF TRAFFIC SIGNS. What is that all about? A delightful essay called “Anarchist Calisthenics” in the December Harper’s by James C. Scott explains.
I’m so glad Kevin Drum is around. One of his blog posts this week, “The World’s Easiest Plan to Rescue Social Security,” deserves some kind of award for clarity and good sense. And for those reasons, I suspect his plan will go nowhere fast.
I saw Safety Not Guaranteed last weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Policy note: cuts in family planning services—ostensibly to “save money”—wound up costing Texas hundreds of millions of dollars over the long haul.
I was delighted by this modern-day take on the classic children’s book, Goodnight Moon. Goodnight, alpha parents, everywhere! (Yes, admittedly, it speaks to me on so many levels.)
Also from the New Yorker, a sturdy argument for a carbon tax replacing the payroll tax by Hendrik Hertzberg.
Finally, a friendly reminder (from pollsters themselves) that public opinion polling can never be a perfect measure of attitudes, in part because respondents don’t always know what their attitudes actually are! In this case, a new poll from Public Policy Polling included a bit of a trick. They found that an impressive 39 percent of Americans have an opinion about the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan. But at the same time fully one quarter of Americans also took a stance on the Panetta-Burns plan—a phony, non-existent plan.
Dan Savage’s excerpt from “You Were Never In Chicago,” a memoir by columnist Neil Steinberg, was so good that I want to read the whole book:
Via the good folks at STB, I thought the imagery here was arresting.
One trend I’m fascinated by is the rather alarming divergence in life expectancy among Americans. It’s going up for many, but not all. For lower income people, as well as for a huge swath of the South, life expectancy has either plateaued or is actually falling. It’s interesting too that even the top income earners in the US only live about as long as the average Canadian.
On a more personal lifespan-related note, I was fascinated to read about research indicating that non-human primates also appear to experience a mid-life crisis. As Kevin Drum instructively puts it: “hairless middle-aged apes are still middle-aged apes.” (The underlying LA Times article is well worth reading too.)
This caught my eye on Facebook this week (it made the rounds a while back, maybe you saw it in April): A map that shows how many hours minimum-wage earners would have to work to afford rent on a two-bedroom apartment in all 50 states. Nowhere is a 40 hour work week enough. In fact, in most states, rent requires more than 70 hours of work—if you can find it.
Seattle’s Family Ride blogger has been “messing with the bike counter”—the machine on the Fremont Bridge that counts bike traffic. After testing it by sending a tiny little kid through (bike= 10-inch wheel) and then a bike with a kid’s trailer bike attachment AND a trailer, she concludes that the thing is magical. It passed those tests. It even counted a kid’s wooden bike. Not too shabby!
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research looks at what effect LGBT attitudes had on the 2012 elections. (Spoiler: They call it a “cultural sea change.”)
Check out the official tumblr for the Bureau of Land Management. Beautiful photos and a peek into the lives of the “next generation of BLMers” as they share their experiences on the public lands.
Over at Colorlines, five racial justice leaders make sense of the 2012 elections.
Science communications guru Matthew Nisbet on the Nate Silver Era of election reporting (and news consumption) and how our obsession with polls and models hinders our ability to talk about substantive issues from climate change to inequality.
Density and voting Democratic, the infographic.
Clark: A data geek’s view of Sandy – Eugene mapping firm Moonshadow intersects the hurricane’s path with data from the US Census. Putting a human face on car crashes: a body artist paints 17 models into the form of a crashed car. A nifty YouTube video of the process—and why crashes matter—here. Alan: Two documentaries I’ll … Read more
Chris Mooney takes a stab at just why the presidential debate organizers failed to mention the C-word (you know, that climate thing) even once in the 2012 season.
Good ol’ Bernie Sanders on Romney’s energy policy (Spoiler: He calls it a relic from the 19th C.).
And if, like me, you’ve had enough of vapid horse race election coverage, read Eric Alterman’s critique of the mainstream media’s “trivial pursuit” of political stories:
For despite the participation of tens of thousands of journalists spending tens of millions of dollars using a dizzying array of communications technology devoted to covering the campaign, the system ultimately fails to justify itself in its most essential purpose: to ensure accountability for citizens and their leaders and to offer the kind of information necessary to help voters make an educated choice for the future of their country.
Finally, Jill Lapore in the New Yorker on the future of Planned Parenthood.
Dan Bertolet over at Citytank has one of the best pieces on housing affordability since David Sucher’s enlightened rant from seven years ago.
Cost to prevent all future extinctions: $11 per person. (Can this really be true??)
A recent report on obesity in the US, by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has some scary statistics. Adult obesity rates in 2011 for residents of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho were each approximately 27 percent, ranking those states’ residents a bit slimmer than the median in all US states.
But, in projections for 2030, rates rise to 56 percent, 49 percent, and 53 percent respectively. That corresponds to some big increases in disease rates; health care costs, to the tune of $48-66 billion a year by 2030 for treating preventable obesity-related diseases in the US; and losses in economic productivity, estimated at $390-$580 billion annually by 2030. The report makes a number of policy recommendations, largely centered on food. Disappointingly, only one of their seven recommendations even touches on creating active transportation options.
Among the dozen or so books I devoured this summer, the single best read was the second volume of the classic William Manchester biography of Winston Churchill.
This book recounts Churchill’s decade in political exile during the 1930s. England, like the rest of Western Europe, was deep in pacifist denial about the Nazi threat. Churchill, a ruling-party back bencher in parliament, stubbornly, valiantly, and almost single-handedly waged a campaign for national mobilization and rearmament. For his troubles, his party snubbed him, rebuked him, and ridiculed him. He lived on the edge of bankruptcy, supporting himself and his family entirely from writing books and articles late into the night. Yet at his own expense, he built up a massive personal network of intelligence sources and quiet supporters across the Western world, a network that made him better informed than the leaders of his own country. When events brought the public to his side — events, in this case, meaning German tanks rolling into France — and he became England’s Prime Minister, Churchill was ready to take the reins as few others could have been.
To me, the book reads as an allegory for today’s great struggle against climate change: the denial, the ridicule of us climate hawks, and the need for all of to be as unrelenting and undeterred as was Winston Churchill eight decades ago.