Weekend Reading 6/29/2018

Alan Durning

This brilliant piece strikingly illustrates how building more homes—of all shapes and sizes—is a solution to our climate-changing cities’ problems, and also to our surging homelessness problems, and our deepening economic apartheid problems, and our traffic congestion problems, and our racial inequality problems, and our opioid abuse problems, and our access to job opportunity problems, and our access to good schools problems, and so on.

Everyone who works on homelessness agrees on the way to fix the problem. Build more homes. . . . “This is not something like pancreatic cancer, where thousands of scientists are striving to find a solution for a really difficult problem that we literally don’t know what to do about,” says Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UCSF who studies homelessness. “We actually know what to do. We just lack the will.”

Eric de Place

For all the griping we do about Seattle schools (and I’ve contributed my share), Danny Westneat is absolutely right to point out that things are getting much, much better: enrollment is way up, test scores are way up, and graduation rates are way up too. They’re far from perfect, it’s true, yet there’s good reason for optimism.

Kelsey Hamlin

I’m going to delve into some societal stuff because I’m weird and that’s what makes my brain happy—in a thought-provoking sense, maybe not in an optimistic sense. With that, I highly recommend watching the trailer for a documentary called “The Mask You Live in.” It analyzes the social dynamics of growing up in America as a boy—and as a man—in an incredibly powerful way. Toxic masculinity isn’t only a matter discussed by women about men, it very much impacts how men see themselves and how they behave toward each other.

On a related note, it reminded me of an incredibly well-produced introductory video to hyper masculinity that I watched before and is worth another look. It was produced by a sixteen-year-old no less, illustrations and all, for his senior project in Seattle.

And, speaking of society, we’re real weird with the internet, aren’t we? But sometimes—thank god, sometimes—that weirdness expresses itself as chasing after our interests, even when it means something as niche and quirky as Being That Guy who updates Wikipedia pages like nobody’s business.

But our internet use comes at a cost. All of that data has to be stored somewhere. That somewhere, it turns out, is facing up to a steep climb in carbon emissions, as noted by CityLab’s Feargus O’Sullivan:

Those presumptions are indeed broadly born out by figures from elsewhere in the world. In the U.S. alone, data centers consume 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year…This consumption isn’t declining any time soon, either. By 2025, the communications industry could consume one-fifth of all the world’s electricity. The increasing use of the cloud for video streaming is a major factor driving the need for ever more capacious data centers, as is the rise of bitcoin mining.