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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 10/5/12

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Clark:

A father and son send a toy train into space.

Are half of all the facts you know wrong?  Maybe so, says journalist and author Ronald Bailey.  As it turns out, very little peer reviewed research is ever replicated; and as science advances, many “truths” from decades-old research later turn out to be questionable or outright wrong. And that means that much of what you learned in grade school may be false—so all those half-remembered 6th grade social studies lessons may be real impediments to understanding how the world actually works. So what’s the reality-based community to do? One suggestion: just give up, and outsource your memory to the cloud.  I’m not sure I agree, but the article is worth a read anyway.

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Weekend Reading 9/21/12

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Alan:

The best article I’ve read on the US economy recently is, of all places, in the New York Review of Books. It’s a review of books by two Nobel laureates, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, by two younger academics whose book Winner-Take-All Politics is one of the best things I’ve read this year so far. Their review blends their own incisive structural understanding of how messed up US government is—how corrupted by money and filibusters and related deep flaws and the way all these things feed on and reinforce widening economic inequality—with the brilliant economic analysis of Krugman and Stiglitz.

The article is surprisingly easy to read but you may want to read it twice to let the implications sink in. If this article were a piece of music, it would be Brahms, not Beyonce: a deeply important and lasting work, but not an instant hit.

And a wonk’s fantasy of how a carbon tax might come to be in the United States.

Eric dP:

Charles Marohn—a small-town fiscal conservative against sprawl—got me thinking at different angles about land use policy. (Thanks, Brice.)

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Weekend Reading 9/14/12

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Clark:

Charts of the day: by this reckoning, the US housing bubble has more or less deflated. Prices have fallen back to roughly where they “should” be, based long-term on inflation and housing cost trends. That doesn’t mean that housing prices won’t go down further, or that there aren’t local bubbles somewhere. But at this point, US home prices are about what you might have expected, if you’d lived from 1970 through about 2000 and slept through the bubble years.

Heard of Zipcar?  Now there’s…Zipcarp!!

According to Gallup, the war on smoking is working. And CDC says the same thing.  The trends might be slower than I’d like, but at least they’re moving in the right direction.

Alan:

Cascadia has a big, untapped reforestation opportunity: offshore kelp forests remain depleted compared to their historic size and extent. And kelp beds turn out to hold a lot of carbon, according to a new study covered by the San Jose Mercury News. To restore our offshore “forests,” we need to restore sea otter populations. Otters control the sea urchins that otherwise kill the kelp.

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Weekend Reading 9/7/12

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Clark:

Clearing off my desktop, I ran across a fascinating article comparing public resistance to three major scientific paradigm shifts: Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and global warming. What fascinates me about all three episodes was that so many people took their opinions about scientific matters from their political leaders. This quote, from a scientist who found an empirical confirmation of the theory of relativity, seems particularly apropos to today’s global warming debate:

“This world is a strange madhouse.  Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct.  Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.”…Instead of quelling the debate, the confirmation of the theory and acclaim for its author had sparked an organized opposition dedicated to discrediting both theory and author.

To me, the episode could have been ripped out of today’s headlines—substituting “relativity theory” with “climate change.”

Bloomberg reports that young people are driving less, and many are giving up on cars altogether. According to an auto industry consultant, many Millenials would rather have the internet than a car. “A vehicle is really a discretionary purchase and a secondary need versus an iPhone, mobile phone or personal computer.”

Anna:

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Weekend Reading 8/31/12

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Eric dP:

If by chance you’re disgusted by the mendacity on display at the Republican convention, take a moment of bipartisanship to be appalled by this radio ad Obama is running in Ohio.

Yep, Obama is running on an aggressively pro-coal and (apparently) pro-fracking platform. He even goes so far as to attack then-governor Mitt Romney for correctly saying that pollution from coal plants kills people. I especially love that the spot ends with this chin-scratcher: “Who’s been honest and who’s playing politics?”

Do you really want an answer to that, President Obama?

I thought David Pogue nailed it in his enumeration of five ways Hollywood can stop digging its own grave. I’m particularly galled by #2 for just the reasons he mentions.

I also liked Knute Berger’s argument that cities need less grid. He focuses on Olmsted-style boulevards, but I’ve long believed that the greatest urban places are the ones with chaotic and messy streets.

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Weekend Reading 8/24/12

by

Clark:

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, news of a new trend in Portland: housing without parking.  It’s a major boon for affordability: according to one developer, the cost of providing parking makes “the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos.”

And in more awesome news from the Rose City, the Oregon legislature has moved to allow Portland to create a network of slow streets – or “neighborhood byways” – with 20 mph speed limits.  You’d think that letting cities reduce speeds in residential neighborhoods would be a no brainer, but a similar measure died in the Washington Senate last year, despite passing unanimously in the House.

To sum up: Portland does all the things Seattle won’t.

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Weekend Reading 8/17/12

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Eric dP:

I marveled at the New York Times infographic showing how decisively Usain Bolt would have beaten each Olympic medalist in the history of the modern games.

With a growing sense of unease, I followed Anthony Hecht’s advice and read the first-person accounts of Mat Honan and James Fallows getting hacked through their online accounts and losing a huge share of their electronic files.

I enjoyed Matt Yglesias on why a wrap costs more than a tortilla, even though they are exactly the same thing.

Plus, I have two promising items to add to my reading list:

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Weekend Reading 8/3/12

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Anna:

I enjoyed David Remnick’s profile of Springsteen (at age sixty-two) in the New Yorker. It’s a look back and a snapshot of where Bruce is today. Here’s Bruce’s explanation of why his exuberant live performances are still critical:

For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.

Anybody who’s seen Springsteen in concert knows what he’s talking about.

Did you know that the more paper waste a country generates, the richer it’s likely to be? To find out more fascinating facts about trash as an economic indicator—and to see how American garbage compares to that of other countries—check out Mother Jones’ maps and charts.

A junk food attitude toward place?

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Weekend Reading 7/20/12

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Anna:

For depressing but necessary reading, check Bill McKibbon’s latest in Rolling Stone. He calls it the most important thing he’s written since The End of Nature, way back in 1989. McKibbon does the math and it’s ugly. The fossil fuel that the oil and coal industries are planning on burning—the untapped reserves that companies are banking on—is five times higher than the “carbon budget” that would keep warming around the high-end limit of 2 degrees Celsius.

Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

McKibbon concludes that the fossil-fuel industry should be considered Public Enemy Number One.

Do foodies care about workers? We ask if the chicken is free-range and organic. But there are questions we may not ask, like “Does the poultry worker who killed the chicken get paid sick days?”

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Weekend Reading 7/13/12

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Eric dP:

I was pleased to see economist Art Laffer and Republican former congressman Bob Inglis make the conservative case for a carbon tax shift.

At The American Prospect, Jason Mark has a first-rate treatment of the coal exports debate.

The small town of Brainerd, Minnesota is moving ahead with a super-smart energy strategy, tapping the waste heat from city sewers and re-using it (the heat, not the sewage).

Finally, an essay by E. B. White. It is in part a homage to summer, but I think it’s more about the way that the passage of time dislocates you. Which is how I’ve been feeling.

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