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:
[W]e find no statistical evidence that home values near turbines were affected in the post-construction or post-announcement/pre-construction periods. Previous research on potentially analogous disamenities (e.g., high-voltage transmission lines, roads) suggests that the property-value effect of wind turbines is likely to be small, on average, if it is present at all, potentially helping to explain why no evidence of an effect was found in the present research.
Alan
From Japan comes an example of another kind of underground parking: this time, for bikes. It comes with robotic arms, hidden caverns, and laser guidance. The only things missing are Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible theme music.
RebelMetropolis exaggerates the importance of bike culture as a cause of “peak car” but rants so righteously that I didn’t care. And for this car-free, single man’s money, no sentence written all summer has been truer than this one: “Bikes, however, straight up reek of sex appeal.” Check the pix, too.
Speaking of two-wheeled sizzle, did you know that Copenhagen Cycle Chic—one of my guilty-ish pleasures—is among the world’s top ten fashion blogs?
I didn’t know this existed: the eBay of human hair.
