Three Tabs

Here are a couple of things I found in recent days that I recommend. They never made it into tabs, but I'm putting them in the Too Many Tabs category because they were open windows on my phone. 

You are with resistance politics or you are against resistance politics: Opposing fascism isn't going to make you feel cool. Get over it. From Bad Faith Times by LunchCounterPunch. "This arrangement of words – 'woke became too cringe' – is an insult, not an idea; a facile fabrication of a commentariat that is all hedge masquerading as edge. There’s not even a lie here. It’s nonsense as a first principle."

Purple Air is the place to go when you suddenly see smoke in your local sky. The air quality number that shows up in your weather app is a 12-hour average, so it's pretty much useless when things are changing quickly. Purple Air, on the other hand, is a map that lets you zoom to your location and shows you the most recent 10 minutes of data from nearby air quality monitors. A handy thing to know about these days.

We don’t have a culture of convenience in North America. We have a CULT of convenience.
And you can tell the difference by what happens when you question it. By Cody Littlefield on Medium. "Watch what actually draws anger, because it isn’t lawbreaking. Speeding is a crime, and it is completely unremarkable. Every one of us has done it this month. People are rarely shouted at from a truck window for doing it. Cycling is entirely legal, and it is enraging to the believer."   

Some Mural!

I've had this tab open for a long time. It briefly tells the story of a mural in Lyon, France, created in 1987 by the artist collective CitéCréation, and updated several times since then:

This is what the wall looked like before:

It's really still there. Here it is in Google Streetview at 31 Boulevard des Canuts. 

The mural collective's website — with its tagline "monumental mural design" — includes a large number of other examples of their work over the past 40 years. 

Well worth checking out and exercising your French along the way. 
 

Line Goes Straight Up

George Pearkes, a finance guy who makes a lot of interesting graphs, posted this to BlueSky yesterday:

Absolutely insane numbers on data center buildout. I haven’t vetted these but they’re about right based on memory/back of the envelope:

Be sure to click to enlarge and read the labels on those variously colored lines.*

Sure, the 2026 dotted line is planned data centers, but even the 2025 line — which represents stuff that is already built — is bananas. And that's just about money spent, not about who the AI run through the data centers will benefit. 

In response in Pearkes's thread, a guy named Marc Maxmeister spoke for me with this: 

Interesting to recognize the Marshall Plan as being so big, so fast, and so effective. US rebuilt Western Europe in half a decade and we haven't seen any regional wars there since then. The prosperity influx demilitarized a region. That's success.

Here are a couple of other related pieces:

An article I've been saving for way too long in an open tab: We suspected data centers were creating an energy crisis for Virginia. Now it’s official. If you haven't been to Northern Virginia, particularly the part west of Dulles Airport, in the past 10 years or so… it's dominated by huge data centers. They know whereof they speak.

From MinnPost just this week: Minnesota Democrats (and a few Republicans) are fighting to ban non-disclosure agreements between local officials and big corporations that want to build data centers. Yes, that's right, elected county and city officials — who are subject to open-meeting laws and the Freedom of Information Act — have been signing non-disclosure agreements with big "anonymous" companies developing mystery projects that somehow always turn out to be data centers. Which none of the residents of the counties and cities want. Go figure!

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* The point of this post is to talk about the travesty of data center construction compared to infrastructure investments like the Marshall Plan, the railroads, or the interstate system — much as I might have problems with some of those. But I can't help noting I find myself pretty shocked that the F-35 fighter jet program cost substantially more than the Apollo program. 

Superlative Tabs

There's a category on this blog called Too Many Tabs, which I haven't used in a while. It doesn't mean I don't have a lot of tabs sitting open: I do. Many, many tabs. I just don't have time to do a post to write them up.

I have a new bad habit, on top of my bad tab habit: opening new windows in my phone's browser, because I want to write a post about them. These are also essentially tabs. So instead of waiting for the never-never day when I write those articles, I'm going to do a Too Many Tabs post about that handful of recent windows.

These are [insert your favorite superlative] articles, which is why I wanted to write an individual post about each one of them, but time is going by and I'm afraid I will forget about them. So here goes.

Darrell Owens, How Urban Renewal Ruined Everything. I'll be thinking about this for a long time. Racist urban renewal devastated our cities — we all know that. But what is unacknowledged is that we have to get past that to loosen the process of building things in this country. Keeping with the status quo inherently promotes climate change and green house gas use. That has to change. 

Peter L. Laurence, Jane Jacobs, Cyclist. Just a wonderful article about Jane Jacobs and the role the bike played in her life and the life of her family, as well as her thoughts from her work on bikes. I had no idea she biked for much of her transportation. The article includes multiple photos of her biking, while wearing a dress, without a helmet or anything associated with "cycling." Here's one quote from her near the end: "a city good for cycling is also a city good for walking, strolling, running, playing, window-shopping, and listening for bullfrogs if listening for bullfrogs is your thing."

Hamilton Nolan, Everyone into the Grinder: It is good to require powerful people to participate in public systems and not buy their way out everything. Nolan expresses the radical notion that rich people should not have more choices than everyone else (in schools, health care, what have you): that if rich people have to face the same systems as everyone else, we all would benefit together.  (I thought I had posted at some point about the Finnish school system, which doesn't allow private and religious schools, but I can't find such a post.) We have become a nation of line-cutters, based on the idea of wealth makes right. It does not. "Choice" in this case is a false god.

Bill Pruitt, The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice. Do you remember hearing there was tape in a vault at NBC showing that Trump used the N-word during The Apprentice? Well, this article gives the context of when he said it. It's written by one of the show's producers, who was under a 20-year nondisclosure agreement, which just ended. Not only did Trump say the word, he said it while ruling that Season 1's Black finalist would not be allowed to win (even though everyone else in the room thought he deserved to win) because "would America buy a ** winning?" Which to me is worse than his use of the word itself. On top of that, the article documents multiple instances of Trump sexually harassing women, as well as his mental incapacity to do the job, which is covered up by the show's producers — the same way news producers to this day cover up his incoherencies each time he does an interview or has a rally. Read the whole thing, and tell me: Did you hear about the existence of this story anywhere? This should have been major news, but it was not. 

Rick Perlstein, My Political Depression Problem — and Ours. I am less interested in Perlstein's reason for writing the article (about his political depression with the Left) than I am in the first third of the article, which contains his crystalline analysis of the Right and conservatives. He describes the "authoritarian ratchet," which is based on promising the impossible return to a prelapsarian state (one that never existed), but which is imperative because without the return, civilization itself will collapse. He gives examples of various imperatives conservatives have demanded over the past 150 years (against women voting, against Social Security, against Medicare, and now against "open borders"). Once society continues to exist despite the Right's failure to deliver, they move on to the next dire threat (bathrooms! gas stoves! lab-grown meat!). And even when they win (as with abortion), it's no better — they devolve further. They require, he says, "even more radical panaceas." 

Anger at the designated Others who must have made it happen—for conservatism itself can never be the problem. Conservatism, as I once wrote, never fails. It is only failed.

This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.

Which leads us to Trump's talks of retribution and his Project 2025. In addition to the multi-millions of people they plan to round up and deport (and who knows what "rules" they will use for that), I'm honestly afraid for my own liberty if he is reelected, and I definitely fear for immediate family members. 

I was not afraid before. I had solidarity for many other people in 2016 and I felt some personal fear depending on the outcome in 2020, but now I can visualize them rounding up people who oppose them, including me. 

I don't want to be a person who shuts up to remain safe. I don't want to live in a country where that's something you have to do to stay out of prison. 

This is what we have come to because of the authoritarian ratchet Perlstein describes, and the Republican Party's failure to stop it.

The Remnant Tabs

I haven't made a Too Many Tabs post in a while. That's because the tabs have been so out of control I didn't have the mental energy to wrangle them into a post or a series of posts.

Well, today I threw 50 or 70 links — unread — into bookmark folders (gulp), and now I'm going to share the ones that didn't fit into the folders. I also closed another 20 or 30 outright.

First I'm going to tell you the folder names, so you won't see any articles on these topics today:

• Transportation and Cities
• Climate and Environment
• Privilege and Racism
• Fascism and the Right
• Blog Ideas (that one is vague, but it contains tabs for which I had an idea for single post when I first read it)

Here are the tabs that didn't belong in any of those categories. I have not read these but they look interesting and I want to be able to find them later.

Joel Salatin's Unsustainable Myth from Mother Jones back in November 2020. "His go-it-alone message made him a star of the food movement. Then a young Black farmer dug into what he was really saying."

From Strong Towns: Multigenerational Living Isn't Immigrant Culture, It's Human Culture. "My hope is that by thickening up our cities and making meaningful changes to zoning codes, we can ease many peoples’ financial struggles and our epidemic of loneliness."

The look of gentrification by one of my favorite Twitter writers, Darrel Owens (@idothethinking). "If you think of gentrification as coffee shops and bike lanes then you don't understand gentrification at all. It's about what's inside, not outside."

What are the five dimensions of curiosity? From Psychology Today.

America's long (unaddressed) history of class. From WNYC's "On the Media" back in March 2016. Before Trump "won" the election.

Also from spring 2016, Anil Dash on The Immortal Myths About Online Abuse. "After building online communities for two decades, we’ve learned how to fight abuse. It’s a solvable problem. We just have to stop repeating the same myths as excuses not to fix things."

Anand Giridharadas interviewed economist Stephanie Kelton about the "deficit myth," Modern Monetary Theory for dummies, and why the age of capital may finally be ending. The Trillion-Dollar Woman.

"This American Life" from November 2018: But That's What Happened. As they describe it, "Stories of women in unsettling situations. When they try to explain what’s wrong, they’re told that they don’t understand—that there’s nothing unsettling about it."

A lecture (YouTube video) by historian Heather Cox Richardson on how the gilded age created the progressive era. We can only hope.

From Press Watch, January 2021: What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters. "First of all, we’re going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors). That’s an important distinction, because it frees you to cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning."

From the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Keeping NYC Land Out of Corporate Hands — Episode 118 of Building Local Power. Looking at land banks and land trusts, particularly.

Long Day, a Few Tabs

It has been a long day, so here are a couple of tabs that have been weighing down my browsers. (You should hear the fan on my computer).

The myth that gets men out of doing chores. They’re just as good at recognizing messes as women—they just don’t feel the same pressure to clean them up. That one's from from The Atlantic in January.

An interview by Noah Smith with James Medlock. The pseudonymous prophet bringing the word of Social Democracy to the masses.

Study tells why women have higher injury risk in car crashes. Women are more likely to be injured or killed because of vehicle choice and the types of crashes they're involved in, not because of physiological differences.

Teaching kindness isn't enough. Teaching kindness is a staple of elementary practice, but that isn’t the same as teaching justice. From Learning for Justice, fall 2019.

The world's most annoying man (guess who: Stephen Pinker). From Current Affairs, May 2019.

Just a Few Tabs

It's been a long time since I did a too-many-tabs post. It doesn't mean I don't have too many tabs open (hah!). I just don't have the energy to look through them all and summarize the content for you... sorry!

So instead today I'm going to just post a few fresh ones before they even have a chance to be come tabs.

Oh, and before I start, let me just say: everyone should throw some money to The Atlantic because it seems like half the great articles I end up wanting to read are theirs and they're hiring great writers lately.

The Lesson Americans Never Learn by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic (see?). "The United States is forcing its citizens to bootstrap their way through a global catastrophe, saddling traumatized families with the burden of public administration and amplifying the country’s inequalities." And: "trying to replace the government with personal initiative requires an impossible amount of energy: raising money for your post-COVID-19 convalescence, working with multiple providers and a Kafkaesque health-payments infrastructure. Setting up a temporary school for your high-needs kid, interviewing teachers and working out payroll on your own. Figuring out how to get an Uber to an infrequent train to an unpredictable bus line to make it to your job. Liaising with dozens of nonprofits to save your restaurant. Searching for a day care, then arranging a nanny-share, then arguing for a reduced-price slot in a nursery school, because the United States has no public child-care and preschool system. It is exhausting." And: "The answer that virtually every other rich country has figured out: The government should act like a government, like its job is to provide these things."

I'm asking my friends on the Left to vote for Joe Biden by tech guy Anil Dash. "I do understand that for many of you, there are principles you feel you cannot compromise. You can never vote for a person who has Biden (or Harris’) view on the issues you care about most. But I want you to have the chance to elect that candidate who will support you on those issues. There’s a very real threat that you won’t have that option if we aren't able to hold things together this year."

Incremental Change Is a Moral Failure: Mere reform won’t fix policing. By Mychal Denzel Smith in The Atlantic (again). "...I hate the police the same as I hate any institution that exists as an obstruction to justice. It’s important here to define justice, as the U.S. legal system has perverted our sense of it. It cannot be punishment or retribution for harm caused. Justice is not revenge. Rather, justice is a proactive commitment to providing each person with the material and social conditions in which they can both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being. This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us to buy into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another. But it is the only form of a just world. The police have never been capable—historically, presently, either in statement of purpose or in action—and, I believe, will never be capable of fostering such conditions." 

Tying in with that, there's How to dismantle white supremacy by Barbara Smith in The Nation. To end systemic racism, the country needs a comprehensive racial justice program even more sweeping than the Marshall Plan. "I would start by calling it the Hamer-Baker Plan. Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker did as much to end white supremacy as any persons who ever lived. It feels appropriate to evoke their legacies in the process of envisioning the completion of that task."

How to avert a post-election nightmare from Vox. A “war game” that tried to simulate the 2020 transition ended in violence. One of its organizers explains how to prevent that. (The answer, in short: Biden has to win in a landslide.)

Oh, heck, here's one more tab that's been sitting open for months (also from The Atlantic) just to round things out. It's by the great science writer Ed Yong (whom I've mentioned before, but not often enough). It was published on MARCH 25, 2020. The title was How the pandemic will end, and the deck was this: The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out. It's quite something to finally read it now, on August 22, just about five months later, still nowhere near the end of the pandemic.

The Great Tab Cleanup of December 2019

I know it's probably not interesting to hear about the way my browser tabs overwhelm my computer, but it's been getting to the point where things were almost inoperable. So I closed a whole ton of tabs on two of my main topics, climate change/sustainable cities and white supremacy, by giving them bookmark folders. (So now, instead of never reading the tabs, I can never read the bookmarks.)

Today I'm going to post as many of the tabs that don't fit neatly into those two categories in this post, hoping I will get back and read them later! They're sort of grouped by topics, but they flow one into the other without subheads, so you get to guess what I think the topics are.

The Highlander Idea. For decades, the Highlander School has nurtured some of the most important radical movements by pushing a simple idea: ordinary people can act as agents of change. It's an idea that's threatening to the Right — and it should be. From Jacobin.

Why I no longer attempt to build a rigorous science of social change. An academic paper I came across somewhere.

A bunch of TED Radio Hour talks on what it takes to change the world for the better.

Dangerous nostalgia: Why romanticizing the 1950s and 1960s won't get us anywhere. From Strong Towns.

One way to tell if you have good neighbors. From Strong Towns.

America loves the idea of family farms. That’s unfortunate. By the great Sarah Taber for New York magazine.

How America's elites lost their grip. By Anand Giridharadas for Time.

Why society’s biggest freeloaders are at the top. No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there. By Rutger Bregman.

Time to end the multi-generational Ponzi Scheme. By one of my favorite science fiction writers, Kim Stanley Robinson (written in 2009).

Inside the minds of the mega-rich. Discussion on the NPR show 1A with psychologist Michael Kraus, writer Anand Giridharadas, and rich guy Nick Hanauer.

The radical moral implications of luck in human life. Acknowledging the role of luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening. By Dave Roberts at Vox.

It's time for some queueing theory. From Jason Kottke.

The water-park scandal and two Americas in the raw: Are we a nation of line-cutters, or are we the line? From Esquire, 2012.

Americans can't escape long-disproven body stereotypes. People continue to fall back on harmful assumptions about the link between body shape and personality. From the Atlantic.

American Psychological Association links 'masculinity ideology' to homophobia, misogyny. For the first time in its 127-year history, the APA has issued guidelines to help psychologists specifically address the issues of men and boys.

When YouTube red-pills the love of your life. What it's like to watch, terrified and helpless, as your partner becomes radicalized by hate on the fringe right.

The Rawlsian diagnosis of Donald Trump. Does Trump’s success vindicate or undermine liberal theory?

"And I turned out fine!" by education writer Alfie Kohn. [No, you didn't.]

How mosquitoes changed everything. They slaughtered our ancestors and derailed our history. And they’re not finished with us yet. From the New Yorker.

Much of rural America is doomed to decline. Public policy solutions need to grapple with, not ignore, this economic reality. From High Country News.

What I’ve learned from collecting stories of people whose loved ones were transformed by Fox News. From New York magazine.

The magical thinking of guys who love logic. Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they're wrong.

Science says toxic masculinity — more than alcohol — leads to sexual assault. By Maggie Koerth at FiveThirtyEight.

The bitter origins of the fight over big government. What the battle between Herbert Hoover and FDR can teach us. From the Atlantic.

The decade America terrorized itself. The next 9/11 never came. Instead, we got Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas, and Parkland… By Patrick Blanchfield.

Conservatives have a different definition of "fair." And liberals ignore it at their peril. From the Atlantic.

Before Tomorrow

Tomorrow, for the first time since December 2007, Daughter Number Three will not publish a post, in honor of the Global Climate Strike and its digital form.

So before that day begins, here are a few links I've been hoarding to read as the day approaches.

The case for climate rage by Amy Westervelt. "I barely know your kids and I feel like I would jump in front of a bus to stop this shit."

But the greatest of these is love by Mary Annaïse Helgar.

How to be young in a climate emergency by Alex Steffen.

A podcast about women who are fighting for climate justice.

Can climate activism solve the problems of teenagehood?

Another 2050 look-back (akin to this one), this time an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on NPR.

How to face the mess we're in without going crazy. Active hope with Joanna Macy.

The Amazon: how do we heal a burning heart? by philosopher Charles Eisenstein

Greta Thunberg's interview with Trevor Noah on the Daily Show.

And an hour-long interview with Greta from Democracy Now!

Lifestyle changes aren’t enough to save the planet. Here’s what could by Michael E. Mann for Time magazine.

Money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns by Bill McKibben for the New Yorker.

Where our new world begins: Power, politics and the Green New Deal. From Harper's.

The power of multisolving for people and climate — a TED talk by Elizabeth Sawin.

The end times are here, and I am at Target: On the strange experience of living through the only accurate doomsday prediction.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go make a sign for tomorrow.

Tabs More-or-Less About Climate Change

There are, once again, lots of tabs. So here are the ones related to climate change.

Good news posts:

Emissions-free energy system saves heat from the summer sun for winter. ​A research group from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has made great, rapid strides towards the development of a specially designed molecule that can store solar energy for later use. Their work was presented in four scientific articles in 2018. The next steps are to combine everything together into a coherent system. Researchers estimate it could have commercial application within 10 years.

The sequel: life after economic growth by Shaun Chamberlain.

Hope and fellowship by Dave Roberts, from 2013, back when he was at Grist. "Remember, there is no 'too late' here, no 'game over' — it will be a tragedy to shoot past 2 degrees to 3, but 4 is worse than 3, and 5 is worse than 4. Being unprepared for any of those will be much worse than being prepared. The future always forks; there are always better and worse paths ahead. There’s always a difference to be made. When we ask for hope, then, I think we’re just asking for fellowship. The weight of climate change, like any weight, is easier to bear with others."

The case for making transit free (and how to pay for it) from The Urbanist.

Why walkable cities are good for the economy. From Vox.

The Green New Deal, explained. By Dave Roberts at Vox.

The truly big picture. By Alex Steffen.

Six principles to for pricing driving to reduce congestion, pollution, and crashes. From Spur News.

In-between posts:

Online shopping is terrible for the environment. It doesn’t have to be. From Vox.

'How do I break bad news about climate change?' A six-step guide to honest and compassionate conversations. From Yale Climate Connections.

The case for conditional optimism on climate change. By Dave Roberts at Vox.

What's limiting us? By Jonathan Foley, now executive director of Project Drawdown.

Why more and more cities aren't prioritizing your parking problems. From Governing.

It's time to redefine the single-occupancy vehicle. From Strong Towns.

Grim critiques (things to make you angry or something similar):

Predatory delay and the rights of future generations by Alex Steffen.

Elon and the collective. Everything (and a little bit maybe right) with the many projects of Elon Musk.

Why the climate change message isn't working. An excerpt from Charles Eisenstein's book Climate—A New Story, which I am going to read soon.

What the believers are denying. Ibram X. Kendi for the Atlantic. The denial of climate change and the denial of racism rest on the same foundation: an attack on observable reality.

Big cars kill: "monster" vehicles make you feel safer, but they're more likely cause fatal collisions. From the Canadian newspaper the National Post. Montreal scientists sifted through data on three million Canadian crashes and found driving an SUV instead of a car makes a driver 224 per cent more likely to cause a fatal crash; a study UC San Diego, found every life saved in a large vehicle came at the expense of 4.3 dead pedestrians, motorcyclists and car drivers.

It's simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up. By George Monbiot from the Guardian.

Tabs Late in 2018

Lots of tabs, of course... are you surprised?

Climate-change
Climate change is already damaging American democracy. Major disasters and challenging long-term weather conditions are weakening local governments, increasing racial and class inequality, and reducing trust in government. Vann Newkirk for the Atlantic.

Is climate change driving you to despair? Read this. From Ensia.

We could shift to sustainability and save $26 trillion. Why aren't we doing it? The costs of the status quo keep rising; the costs of sustainable alternatives keep declining. By Dave Roberts for Vox.

What's really warming the world? Great graphics from Bloomberg News.

Survival of the richest. The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind. By Douglas Rushkoff on Medium. In which the author is asked by a very rich man, "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" (The answer is... you can't. Sorry, dude. Better help fix things now.)

The planet can't survive our transportation habits. In light of the IPCC’s dire report, substituting some personal convenience in the present could mean that much more hope for the planet’s future. From CityLab.

"Hothouse Earth" co-author: the problem is neoliberal economics. By Kate Aronoff for The Intercept.

Halfway to boiling: the city at 50°C. It is the temperature at which human cells start to cook, animals suffer and air conditioners overload power grids. Once an urban anomaly, 50°C [122°F] is fast becoming reality. From the Guardian.

Racism and white supremacy
The unbearable whiteness of pro-lifers and pundits. By Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic. (From January 2011.)

To be black and woke is to be in rage all the time. Nic Stone for the Huffington Post.

How increasingly diverse neighborhoods affect white anxiety. From Pacific Standard.

Anti-racist parenting while white: an inquiry. By Sherri Spelic on Medium.

A video: How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history. Vox on the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Income inequality and work
The philosophical argument for working less (and wasting time). By Zat Rana on Medium.

How wealth in childhood shapes personality later in life. From the Atlantic.

The Body in Poverty. The decline of America’s rural health system and its toll on my family. By Sarah Smarsh for the Nation.

Politics and hell-in-a-handbasket
Why technology favors tyranny. Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don’t take steps to stop it. Part of an Atlantic series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying?

How Christian nationalism begets political conservatism. New research finds that fused identity apparently produces a predisposition toward authoritarianism. From Pacific Standard.

The least analytical 2016 voters: Democrats who supported Trump. New research finds liberals and libertarians are particularly prone to reflective thought. From Pacific Standard.

Passionate sports fans are more likely to endorse right-wing policies. Also from Pacific Standard.

Politicians love to talk about "survival of the fittest." They don't know what that means. By novelist M.T. Anderson, writing for Salon.

Change the world, not yourself, or how Arendt called out Thoreau. By Katie Fitzpatrick for Aeon.

Miscellaneous
The protaganists. Living in a world built by years and years of stories about white men who take whatever they want. From Vox.

Superfoods are marketing ploy. The deck: Blueberries and macadamia nuts aren’t that good for you. By rock-solid nutritionist Marion Nestle for the Atlantic.

‘Everything we’ve heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong’ - researchers. Widely accepted numbers on how much of the world's population lives in cities are incorrect, with major implications for development aid and the provision of public services for billions of people, researchers say. From This Is Place.

Tabs Today

It's been a while since I did a Too Many Tabs post. I've been getting better about not leaving sooooo many tabs open, but now it's time to close a bunch of 'em.

On immigration

All possible responses to "they should get in line and do it the right way, the way my family did" with citations (also jokes). By an immigration attorney. Just remember: there is no line!

Mulligan constantly flails about the gang MS-13, which I confess I don't know much about. This Politico story (posted as members-only content on MinnPost) is by Hannah Dreier, a reporter who's been covering MS-13 for a year: Here are the five things Trump gets most wrong. The gist is: The gang is not growing or even particularly large compared to other prominent gangs in the U.S. It's not involved in the international drug trade, or involved in illegal immigration, and its victims are 99.x percent people they know. Not that they are harmless, no one claims that, but they exist in a context that Mulligan pretends does not exist.

On income inequality, exploitation, poverty

Laziness does not exist (but unseen barriers do). By a social psychologist. This one will stick with me for a while.

Busting the myth of the American Dream: Economist William Darity talks inequality (audio). "Why are some people rich and others poor?" Answering this elusive question has been Darity's lifelong work. He studied economics at MIT and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and later pioneered the subfield of stratification economics, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding economic inequality.

The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy. From the Atlantic, June 2018. "The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy."

Why we should value invisible labor. A really excellent look at the idea of universal basic income from Yonatan Zunger on Medium. "Money doesn’t, in fact, buy happiness.... But poverty can buy you one hell of a lot of misery." And: "someone who has to accept a long-term loss to survive the short term is in a very weak bargaining position — and that sort of weak bargaining position is exactly what breaks the free-market hypothesis that 'trade makes everyone richer.'" So many pithy observations in one place, including the need to stop confusing "our work" with "our job."

On sustainable cities, utopia, climate change

The little-known behavioral scientist who has transformed cities all over the world. Meet Ingrid Gehl, whose husband Jan is more well-known for popularizing her ideas.

Alex Steffen's recent keynote speech to the UN Forum on Sustainable Development. Steffen is the person I've cited who uses the phrase predatory delay when discussing climate change.

Density does not have to equal more driving (and less parking). From StreetsMN.

I'm an environmental journalist but I never write about overpopulation. Here's why. By Dave Roberts at Vox.

A dazzlingly delicious taste of the future in Liége by Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition Town.

Traffic engineers still rely on a flawed 1970s study to reject crosswalks. From StreetsBlogUSA. You may not know this, but traffic engineers always claim that painted crosswalks don't make pedestrians safer. Turns out... they don't have much to back that up.

Utopia is all around us. A conversation with Ruth Potts of Schumacher College in STIR magazine.

And here's an 11-year-old article from the New York Times called Local groups use peer pressure — and fines — to cut carbon emissions. Back when they had reporters covering climate change, I guess.

A five-step guide to having the talk, from StreetsMN. In this case "the talk" is the one about biking and walking instead of driving everywhere.

How the Koch brothers are killing public transit projects around the country. From the New York Times, June 19, 2018. (Minnesotans are all too familiar with the relatively recent Republican attack on transit at our state legislature. What a coincidence.)

Humans didn't exist the last time there was this much carbon in the air, by Eric Holthaus for Grist. That's a grim but true way to put it. As climate scientist Michael E. Mann put it on Twitter today, "We have ZERO years left to solve climate change. Emissions have to come down steadily in the years ahead to avoid committing to catastrophic climate change impacts."

And then a few random things of interest

From This American Life: Heretics. "The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a rising star in the evangelical movement, who cast aside the idea of hell, and with it everything he'd worked for over his entire life." I confess I haven't listened to most of this yet, but the part I heard on the radio sounded worth listening to the rest.

When America's basic housing unit was a bed, not a house. A very cool extended info graphic from City Lab.

Johan Hari discusses the ideas about depression and anxiety in his book Lost Connections (audio).

What Americans think about abortion. It's a lot more nuanced than polling can show. (For instance, 39 percent don't identify as either pro-life or pro-choice.) From Vox.

Did you hear that Mulligan and his cronies are covering up the fact that U.S. military personnel on bases have been drinking contaminated groundwater for years? No? Well, it's true.

Power causes brain damage. From the Atlantic, July/August 2017. Psych professor Dacher Keltner has found over a few decades that subjects with power "acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view." But neuroscience research now finds that the brains of those with power show signs of impairment to "a specific neural process, 'mirroring,' that may be a cornerstone of empathy."

Some of what's wrong with David Brooks, from Pacific Standard. Personally, I just don't listen to or read anything that includes him. I figure he's had his chance and I will spend my time on other people who don't have his megaphone. "In the zero-sum choice between American patriotism and critical thought, Brooks is always happy to take the former."

White people abandon diverse neighborhoods for racial, not economic reasons. From Quartz. Not a surprise to anyone who's read The Color of Law, but worth checking out nonetheless. The findings hold up not just when there's an influx of black people into white neighborhoods but also for incoming Latinos and Asians. (But the tipping point is lower for black people: somewhere around 10 percent, while whites can tolerate up to 20–25 percent Latinos and Asians... they're somewhat more tolerant of Latinos than Asians, in case you were wondering.) Here's an Indiana University article where the cited research is described in more detail.

Months of Tabs, and This Is Maybe Half of Them

As I said yesterday, the tabs are getting to the crush level. Here are some of them.

Strong Towns' Chuck Marohn explains why autonomous vehicles will make our streets worse. One great quote: "Streets are the framework for growing a place, a platform for building wealth where the quality of the human habitat is more important than the throughput of vehicles."

Initial property continues to vex Libertarians. By Matt Bruenig at the People's Policy Project. "Perhaps the most interesting thing about libertarian thought is that it has no way of coherently justifying the initial acquisition of property. How does something that was once unowned become owned without non-consensually destroying others’ liberty? It is impossible."

America's made-up culture of guns. From The Week. "...when you say something is part of your culture, you're placing it beyond reasoned judgment. Its status as a component of culture infuses it with value that can't be argued against."

Ezra Klein does an admirable job (at Vox) of explaining why Charles Murray and all his apologists are wrong about inherent differences in intelligence between what racists call "races." Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science, from late March 2018. (Some day, I will get back to writing up my thoughts on Nell Painter's The History of White People and finally read Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, which is sitting on my to-be-read shelf.) As Klein writes, "the idea that America’s racial inequalities are driven by genetic differences between the races and not by anything we did, or have to undo, is not 'forbidden knowledge' — it is perhaps the most common and influential perspective in American history."

Why I sold my guns. A piece from 1999 from UU World. "My experience has taught me that if average citizens and legislators think they can whip a concealed gun out to shoot down a bad guy, they’re living under an illusion—the same dangerous illusion—I once cherished myself. We cannot spend every moment of our lives on alert, prepared to use lethal force against another person."

White supremacy and the church of the Second Amendment. From Jeremy Scahill's podcast on the Intercept, with a transcript for the time-pressed. Starting with the Black Panthers in California... and heading to Barack Obama and our present-day hysterical NRA. An interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of the recently released book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.

It's science: we know the most effective ways to decrease your individual carbon footprint in Western countries. They are: having one fewer child (decreases 58.6 tons of CO2 emissions per year), living car-free (2.4 tons), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tons  per round-trip trans-Atlantic flight), and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tons). Notice the scale difference between having one fewer child and the next best thing, living car-free. It's well over an order of magnitude.

Does segregation beget segregation? Two poverty researchers talk about the social forces reinforcing the cycle of segregation. From Pacific Standard.

How discriminatory policies harm Latinos' mental health. Also from Pacific Standard. (This fits with other research that found lower birth weights among the children of Latinas after ICE raids in an Iowa town.)

A Boing Boing post from December 2017, about Zephyr Teachout's book Corruption in America (currently sitting on my to-be-read shelf), contains this quote:

[The book is] also a fascinating look at the way that the Reagan years represent a sustained attack on the idea of public service and the common good. [Ayn] Rand and [Friedrich] Hayek and their disciples held that acting in your own self-interest produced the best possible outcomes, and their mathematically inclined acolytes at the University of Chicago produced endless shitty equations to prove that selfishness was Pareto-optimal. 

Geez, some of these tabs are really old. This one from Quartz is also from December 2017, called The 100-year capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor, sick, and stuck on coal. "It turns out that places with less economic complexity tend to grow more slowly and have much bigger gaps between rich and poor, even after taking into account factors like income and education levels." In which I learned of a guy named Nick Mullins, a former coal miner who now runs his own public relations firm aimed at bridging political and cultural divides surrounding Appalachian issues, and a lot more.

An Ivy-League ethnographer worked in a check-cashing business for four months and came up with some surprising findings.  From Business Insider.

Why do poor Americans eat so unhealthfully? Because junk food is the only indulgence they can afford. It's part of the scarcity problem. From the LA Times.

Patterns of death in the South still show the outlines of slavery. From Five Thirty Eight.

I'm also very late to this on HuffPost, by one of my Twitter favorites, Tressie McMillan Cottom: The real threat to campuses isn’t ‘PC culture.’ It’s racism. This is the lead:

I’ll never forget the first time I received a panicked call from a fellow academic who was being harassed online by a “white identity” group. That was about six years ago, and it has happened many times since, becoming more coordinated and more frightening as the years go by. Now, not a month goes by that I do not receive such a call.

And she nails it on the idea that colleges are indoctrinating the young into the Left:

...even elite institutions are not nearly as radical as the alt-right believes. They are, if anything, the finishing schools for conservative economics, social science and social policy. A handful of gender studies courses could not begin to check the power of an economics department or a business school at any university in the U.S.

Thomas Edsall explores Why is it so hard for democracy to deal with inequality? for the New York Times. He cites five reasons:

First, growing bipartisan acceptance of the tenets of free market capitalism. Second, immigration and low turnout among the poor resulting in an increasingly affluent median voter. Third, “rising real income and wealth has made a larger fraction of the population less attracted to turning to government for social insurance.” Fourth, the rich escalated their use of money to influence policy through campaign contributions, lobbying and other mechanisms. And finally, the political process has been distorted by polarization and gerrymandering in ways that “reduce the accountability of elected officials to the majority.”

The lost art of bending over: How other cultures spare their spines. From NPR. It's all about "hip-hinging." Kind of like that drinking bird toy. It also loosens your hamstrings.

And I'll close with a couple of possible pieces of good news: 

The health benefits of humor. From WNYC's The Takeaway. 

This company may have solved one of the hardest problems in clean energy by Dave Roberts at Vox. About unlocking the possibilities of hydrogen.

This new graphene invention makes filthy sea water drinkable in on simple step. From Science Alert. This graphene is made from soybean oil, too.

Norm activation theory helps reinforce the need to do the right thing when it comes to your personal carbon footprint.

A Box of Tabs

Here are the tabs I currently have left open, while I instead read the much-recommended book Killers of the Flower Moon. (And it's pretty great, I have to say.)

Inside Trump's cruel campaign against the USDA's scientists. The always-excellent Michael Lewis writing for Vanity Fair.

There's hope at the end of the world as we know it. "Though the shift in the climate conversation from debate about science to emphasis on impacts is welcome, we need more focus on solutions to show that change is possible." From Ensia, the environmental magazine of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.

The criminalization of gentrifying neighborhoods. "Areas that are changing economically often draw more police—creating conditions for more surveillance and more potential misconduct." From the Atlantic.

A prescription for reducing wasted health care spending. From Propublica.

Strategies for getting to 50 million employee-owners by 2050. By Marorie Kelly, senior fellow at the Democracy Collaborative.

The IMF confirms that "trickle-down" economics is, indeed, a joke. From Pacific Standard.

What Elon Musk doesn't get about urban transit. "The Tesla CEO’s recent comments about public transportation triggered a firestorm of criticism. Here’s why." By Jarrett Walker for CityLab.

Streets wide shut: a principle for urban streets. Simply put: "No street should carry more than four lanes of private vehicle traffic in a city. No more than two of those lanes should go in the same direction. Most streets should be three, two, or one lane wide." By David Levinson, the Transportist.

Toxic masculinity is the true villain of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. From Den of Geek.

Are private schools immoral? A conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones about race, education, and hypocrisy. From the Atlantic.

The five immutable laws of affordable housing. From Strong Towns.

Western philosophy is racist. "Academic philosophy in ‘the West’ ignores and disdains the thought traditions of China, India and Africa. This must change."

Is it unethical for people to pass their wealth on to their children? A conversation about inheritance, philanthropy, and aging with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the law professor Saul Levmore. By Helaine Olen for the Atlantic.

Time to Close Some Tabs

A quick too-many-tabs post...

A recent archaeological study found that prehistoric farming women had arms stronger than contemporary women who are elite rowers. Which is interesting, but not as interesting (to me) as the fact that before this study, archaeologists thought prehistoric farming women were couch potatoes because their bones weren't as dense as the men of the same era. See, the earlier archaeologists had only compared the women's bones to men, not to women from other eras. Duh.

My recent favorite facts-I-never-knew article is the paradox of persistent vacancies and high prices from Strong Towns. When there is a high office vacancy rate in an area, why don't the "laws" of supply and demand force rents down until the vacancies are filled? Well, it has to do with banks and how loans are made. Or why aren't those offices made into housing, which we're clearly short on? That also has to do with banking and how loans are made.

Well, those are the two articles among these tabs that I read and fully recommend. Here are the others that are sitting in my tabs waiting for me to read them.

More from Strong Towns:
America's economic problems demand a strong solution. A podcast about the American growth model from Chuck Marohn.

From The Atlantic's CityLab:
We have to be careful not to romanticize cities. Writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie confront the limits of urbanism.

From Alternet:

• American hyper-capitalism breeds the lonely, alienated men who become mass killers. Despair, rage and lack of human connection among white men are key culprits in America's mass shooting epidemic.
• The profound misunderstanding the public has about how the military operates. Connecting the dots between systemic patriarchy, white supremacy and permanent war.

From Dave Roberts at Vox:

• Here’s a road map for solving three of the world’s biggest problems. How to address climate change, energy access, and air pollution, at once.
• Electric buses are coming, and they’re going to help fix 4 big urban problems.
• The McKibben effect: a case study in how radical environmentalism can work. Extreme proposals can shift polarized debates.

From Mother Jones:

• He was a professional climate skeptic. Then he switched sides.
• What if everything you knew about disciplining kids was wrong? Negative consequences, timeouts, and punishment just make bad behavior worse. But a new approach really works.

From the Guardian:
Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says top UK adviser. "...while electric vehicles emit no exhaust fumes, they still produce large amounts of tiny pollution particles from brake and tyre dust.... A recent European commission research paper found that about half of all particulate matter comes from these sources." The good news: it's not carbon! The bad news: it's still bad for human health.

From New Scientist:
SUVs double pedestrians' risk of death. And that's for small SUVs... large vans, SUVs and pickup trucks triple the risk of death.

From Truthout:
How to fund a universal basic income without increasing taxes or inflation.

From the Washington Post:
Canada tests "basic income" effect on poverty amid lost jobs.

From Matt Breunig:
What if everyone benefited when stocks soared?

From Slate:
Is violence the only way to end inequality? A certain read of history says yes. "[The] collapse of states [reduces inequality] because the rich and the powerful are either the same people or are very closely allied, and if you destroy state structures, then the rich simply have more to lose."

From Demos:
Why are we not making progress against racism? "We need Americans to go on fact-finding missions on racism, not try to engage in conversation when there is no agreement on the basic facts."

From Huffington Post:
Thrutopias: Why neither dystopias nor utopias are enough to get us through the climate crisis. (By British philosopher Rupert Read. I have to check him out more thoroughly!)

From Salon:
Reconsidering “The Reactionary Mind” in the age of you-know-who. Is Trump “not a conservative”? Political theorist Corey Robin begs to differ, in a new edition of his landmark book.

From Fast Company:
The Airbnb for affordable housing is here. Nesterly, a new platform that pairs older homeowners with young renters, is riding a wave of interest in multigenerational living.

From The Atlantic:
How American politics went insane. It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse. (Update: I just realized this article is from summer 2016—before Trump was elected!)

From the Niskanen Center:
How Libertarian democracy skepticism infected the American Right.

From Signature:
Language matters: the true definition of "working class." A critique of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.

From Cracked:
Seven reasons so many men don't understand sexual consent. Starting with this film trope: "assault a woman until she loves you."

Tabs, Quieting Down

The tabs, they are a-building once again. Though not so much compared to my most recent listings... maybe I am making progress on staying ahead of it all.

How to fund a Universal Basic Income without increasing taxes or inflation. From Truthout.

The McKibben effect: a case study in how radical environmentalism can work. Dave Roberts writing for Vox.

On American identity, the election, and family members who support Trump. Nicole Chung reflects on the burden of engaging with racism and educating white people, including some of her own family. On Longreads.

The end of walking. In Orwellian fashion, Americans have been stripped of their right to walk, challenging their humanity, freedom, and health. From Aeon.

To understand rising inequality, consider the janitors at two top companies, then and now. Kodak 35 years ago, Apple today. From the New York Times.

The socialist experiment in Jackson, Mississippi. From Oxford American.

Suburban sprawl stole your kids' sleep. Why does school start so early? Blame 1970s planning. From CityLab.

What if everything you knew about disciplining kids was wrong? Negative consequences, timeouts, and punishments just make bad behavior worse. But a new approach really works. From Mother Jones back in 2015.

The language of white supremacy. Narrow definitions of the term actually help continue the work of the architects of the post-Jim Crow racial hierarchy. By Vann Newkirk for the Atlantic. Realizing that the phrase means just what it says — that whiteness is supreme — has helped me a lot. I don't see how anyone can argue with the fact that our culture is built upon that false assumption. It is not identical to "white supremacist," which is a person who overtly subscribes to the belief in white supremacy. But you don't have to march around supporting it to benefit from it or to feel the effects of how it structures our society.

The puzzle of reparations in an extremely unequal society. By Matt Bruenig, writing for his new, Patreon-funded think tank, the People's Policy Project. Definitely give this one a look — it's something I had never thought of within the whole reparations-for-enslavement conversation. Looking forward to discussion of the problems Matt raises.

That's all for now. See, not so many!

A Force-Quit Fury of Tabs

I know I've complained about all the tabs I have open in the past, but these days I have so many open in my main browser that my computer puts up force-quit messages for every other program that's running. So. I'm just going to put the links here without any further comment. No time to read them, but hoping I'll get back to them some day. You'll see how old some of these stories are. I know, I know.

On Trump and Trump voters

Donald Trump's questionable intelligence: All those false claims about his academic record and derision of others bespeak profound insecurity. Salon, December 2016.

How Autocratic Is He? Masha Gessen on whether Trump has been just as scary as she thought he’d be. From Slate, June 2017.

If you really respect Trump voters, tell them the truth. Struggling communities deserve help, but nostalgia economics won’t work. By Matt Yglesias, Vox, April 2017.

Why Trump voters are not complete idiots. By Chris Arnade, May 2016.

Why Americans must stop talking about Trump’s mythical “white working class” voters. From Quartz, July 2017.

The women who helped Donald Trump win. Vox, January 2017.

NBC and the manufacturing of Donald Trump. Bitch Media, March 2017.

How I Discovered That My Dad Is a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorist. One writer reflects on how she can have a relationship with her father after learning he believes in Pizzagate.

Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. Dave Roberts for Vox, May 2017.

Your vote in the 2016 election explains almost everything about your climate beliefs. Dave Roberts for Vox, April 2017

Is Trump a conservative only by accident? By education writer and thinker Alfie Kohn

Why aren't rural Canadians in favor of Trump? Pacific Standard, February 2017.

Why did Planned Parenthood supporters vote Trump? A series of maddening focus groups suggest Clinton made it easier for voters to reconcile themselves to Trump. Michelle Goldberg for Slate, December 2016.

How Glenn Beck laid the tracks for the Trump train. Daily Beast, December 2016.

The front of the classroom. One guy's thoughts on why Clinton lost, from Medium, December 2016.

Why misogyny won. Vox, November 2016.

The Right and money in politics

What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority. Nancy MacLean, author of an intellectual biography of James McGill Buchanan, explains how this little-known libertarian’s work is influencing modern-day politics. (from Slate, June 2017)

The brewing billionaire feud at the heart of the GOP. Two rival families are funding a Republican civil war that threatens to tear the party apart. That would be the Mercers vs. the Kochs. Vanity Fair, September 2016.

The long, lucrative right-wing grift is blowing up in the world's face. Alex Pareene for Splinter, April 2017.

How Fox News changed American media and political dynamics. By Bruce Bartlett, who worked for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.

Zephyr Teachout's loss and the fight against dark money. The New Yorker, November 2016.

Racism and white supremacy

White nationalists see Trump as their troll in chief. Is he with them? Mother Jones, November 2016 (way before Charlottesville).

Baltimore’s Confederate Monument Was Never About ‘History And Culture’. Why would a city in a state that sat out the Civil War erect a monument to Confederate generals in 1948? Huffington Post, August 2017.

The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental. A housing policy expert explains how federal government policies created the suburbs and the inner city. From Smithsonian magazine, May 2017.

No racial barrier left to break (except all of them). We must confront structural racism. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the New York Times, January 2017.

The problem with Obama's faith in white America. Tressie McMillan Cottom for The Atlantic, December 2016. Responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates's earlier article of the same month, My president was black.

The 9 most influential works of scientific racism, ranked. Gizmodo, May 2014.

Born that way? ‘Scientific’ racism is creeping back into our thinking. Here’s what to watch out for. Washington Post, September 2015.

5 of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire, after "historical amnesia" claims. The Independent, August 2017.

Combating racism is crucial to revitalizing American politics: It's not easy, but it can be done. By Sean McElwee for Salon, December 2016.

The stubborn whiteness of white neighborhoods. City Lab, December 2016.

The shifting landscape of biosocial science... how society leaned on flawed judgments about race, and how they're changing. A profile of Dorothy E. Roberts in the Harvard Gazette, November 2016.

Here's what economists don't understand about race. A look at the work of William Darity, Jr. October 2016.

Race, school ratings, and real estate: a "legal gray area." NPR, October 2016.

Trust has never existed between cops and black communities. The call to "restore trust" is a racist fantasy and pure political pandering. By Stacey Patton for Dame magazine, October 2016.

Confessions of a former neo-Confederate. How I fell in love with the Lost Cause. Vox, December 2016.

How the myth of the "Irish slaves" became a favorite meme of racists online. Southern Poverty Law Center, April 2016.

Black Americans supported the 1994 Crime Bill, too. Slate, February 2016.

Stand your ground defense denied for black man in Georgia. Rolling Out, June 2016.

The white flight of Derek Black. The son of a prominent white supremacist makes the journey out of that world. Washington Post, October 2016.

Sexism and misogyny

Hidden pattern of rape helped spur the Civil Rights Movement. NPR, February 2011.

What I got wrong about misogyny. August 2017.

Restoring threatened masculinity, one joke at a time. New research considers the psychology of sexist humor. Pacific Standard, April 2017.

When factory jobs vanish, men become less desirable partners. The Atlantic, March 2017.

Becoming ugly. From Jezebel, December 2016.

This is what really happens when prostitution is decriminalised. The Independent.

I'm a woman in computer science. Let me ladysplain the Google memo to you. Vox, August 2017.

On inequality, poverty, and the future of work

In defense of "entitlements." Jacobin, December 2013.

Escaping poverty requires almost 20 years with nothing going wrong. The Atlantic, April 2017.

The Matt Bruenig section:

• Tax Day and the rich. April 2017.
• Automatic for the people. A podcast conversation with Bruenig on job-stealing robots, inequality, and the future of work.
• Fun game: identify the aggressor in this animated GIF. April 2014.
• Liberals and diversity. Liberal commentators believe that you can have diversity or economic justice, but you can’t have both. They're wrong. From Jacobin, March 2017.
• The Matt Bruenig starter kit. In which a Bruenig fan lists a bunch of links to Matt's writings about poverty.
• Building a moral economy. Matt and Elizabeth Bruenig speaking at Harvard University (video), April 2017.

Breaking out of inequality's rhetorical trap. In his new book, economist Anthony B. Atkinson shatters the conventional wisdom that economic inequality is a natural result of free markets and argues that it is, instead, a willful political choice we should stop making. Mike Konczal for Pacific Standard, November 2015. Plus 15 proposals from Tony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done? 

Rising mortality rate among white, middle-aged Americans is fueled by 'deaths of despair,' say economists. By Susan Perry, MinnPost, March 2017.

Jobs, income, and the future. Doug Muder of the Weekly Sift on universal basic income and the purpose of work, March 2017.

Poverty really is the result of a state of mind — among rich people. From the Washington Post, June 2017.

Why we need to plan for a future without jobs. A conversation with Andy Stern, former president of SEIU, in Vox, November 2016.

Technological inheritance and the case for a basic income. Gar Alperovitz, December 2016.

Workaday woes: the end of work and the problem of leisure. Stuart Whatley for The Baffler, October 2016.

The meaning of life in a world without work. The Guardian, May 2017.

The old economics is based on false "laws of physics": a new economics can save us. The Guardian, April 2017.

An honest look at mental illness. A talk on poverty, education, and the enormous undiagnosis of mental illness in poor communities. Video from March 2014.

Personal responsibility: who deserves to be poor? On the Media, October 2016.

Busted: America's poverty myths. WNYC, September 2016.

Writer Sarah Smarsh, author of "Poor Teeth," on class and journalism. Longreads, November 2014.

Poor teeth. Sarah Smarsh for Aeon, October 2014.

Striking new research on inequality: whatever you thought, it's worse. Washington Post, October 2016.

Climate change

Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good. Dave Roberts for Vox, July 2017.

A beginner's guide to the debate over 100% renewable energy. Dave Roberts, Vox, April 2017.

The climate movement goes to war with Trump. But to save the planet, we need to remake the Democratic Party. Kate Aronoff for In These Times, February 2017.

These experts say we have three years to save the planet from the worst effects of climate change. World Economic Forum, July 2017

A bibliography of limits: more readings on the fallacy of endless economic growth. Pacific Standard, June 2017.

The psychology of turning people 'green': Link environmentally sustainable behaviors to personal goals. Susan Perry, MinnPost, February 2017.

This one weird trick will not convince conservatives to fight climate change. Dave Roberts for Vox, December 2016.

Greening transportation and the ways we live

Driving yourself crazy? Sell your car. From Streets MN, March 2017.

The case for bicycles' inevitable triumph over cars. CNN Tech, May 2017.

What bicycle-friendly Copenhagen can teach us about commuting. March 2017.

How much does your car commute actually cost? From Strong Towns, March 2017.

Suburbanization may have been a plan to counter mass death from nuclear war. Huh.

How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult. Dave Roberts for Vox, January 2017.

Automakers prepare for an America that's over the whole car thing. The New York Times, December 2016.

Miscellaneous

Addiction is not a brain disease. Pacific Standard, February 2017.

We aren't the world. Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture. Pacific Standard, February 2013.

The ableist, racist, classist underpinnings of "laziness." Lindsey Weedson, who is flattered to be called a warrior in any context. May 2016.

How to save our dysfunctional democracy. A political scientist argues the case for bringing more citizens into the political discussion. Pacific Standard, March 2017.

WEB Du Bois's hand-drawn infographics of African-American Life (1900). The Public Domain Review.

The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it. Our World in Data.

If not Obamacare, then what? Trump supporters in southern Pennsylvania say the Affordable Care Act has been a letdown. Here's what they'd like instead. The Atlantic, December 2016.

Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That's what's wrenching society apart. George Monbiot in the Guardian, October 2016.

I went undercover with a border militia. Here's what I saw. Shane Bauer in Mother Jones, October 2016.

You can't fix education. Hank Green on Medium, October 2016.

New evidence that lead exposure increases crimes. Brookings Institution, June 2017.

This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously. PBS News Hour, February 2016.

Why facts don't change our minds. Elizabth Kolbert for the New Yorker, February 2017.

The problem with our media is extreme commercialism. The Nation, January 2017.

How being bullied affects your adulthood. From Salon, June 2016.

Inside the Box: The Not-So-Wholesome Reality Behind The Making of Your Meal Kit. (A story about Blue Apron from Buzzfeed, October 2016.)

My NerdCon Stories Talk about Mental Illness and Creativity. YA novelist John Green writing on Medium, October 2016.

The mysterious virus that could cause obesity. Wired, December 2016.