Serena
“Drive to a spin class at the gym! There, you can ride up imaginary hills with your fellow creatures trying to escape the perils of the sedentary life!” More evidence of the link between the sedentary lifestyle and anxiety, and all the more reason to advocate for more walkable cities: “The normal human solution, which is to walk around the world as we work, gather food, and play, is increasingly inaccessible to us.”
Eric
Interesting new research showing that reduced driving results far more from residential density than rail infrastructure. This sort of thing ends up being ridiculously contentious, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone who glances at landuse patterns in the Seattle metro area.
This two-and-a-half minute video with actor LeVar Burton is a very compelling—and very depressing—look at the way law enforcement treats many people of color, particularly black men.
David Ellis hikes Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline across southern British Columbia and he documents what many have long suspected. It is indifferently maintained, prone to leaks, and highly vulnerable to mischief. Is it really wise to triple its capacity as the company wants to?
Linda Mapes goes deep on Puget Sound’s harbor porpoises, a species, I’ve argued, that we should be paying a lot more attention to.
Anna
To brush up on your master storytelling skillz, here’s Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey explained by sock puppets (and Hollywood).
If you’ve got opinions about the filibuster, check out these clips of Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell engaging in a tense exchange this week over the rules on filibustering cabinet nominees.
Here’s a sobering chart from Mother Jones: Even in what’s been labeled an economic upswing, wages are falling.
Also, Google got in some hot water for throwing a political fundraiser for climate denier and Republican Senator from Oklahoma James Inhofe. He has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a hoax on the Senate floor. Isn’t Google supposed to be all about “doing no evil?” Hearing about it, I promptly emailed action alerts to all my friends—um, via Gmail.
And from Salon, if you’re an End Times believer (that’s around 76 percent of Republicans and around 4 in 10 Americans in total), you’re just not very likely to care too much about climate change. Of course, the research findings on this phenomenon get easily confounded with distrust of government solutions to, well, anything, running so high among essentially the exact same demographic.
