Ed I found a lot of truth in this Wall Street Journal piece as a father of a son with autism. My experiences since we received his diagnosis in 2005 have certainly informed my professional life, especially once I started supervising co-workers. That does not mean it’s been an easy road (my wife, Jen, captured … Read more
Margaret I’ve been reading a lot about the preparations for the 2020 US Census. The impact of the current lack of leadership and underfunding could be devastating to US policy making in the next decade and beyond, impacting everything from the distribution of congressional seats to immigration policy and much more. (If you want to … Read more
Alan Slate argues that evidence does not actually support the need for filtering backcountry stream water: hand washing, not microfiltering, is the key to avoiding gut mayhem. Maybe I didn’t need to spend $120 last year on that Platypus GravityWorks? I’m not going to throw it away, but I may get much more selective about where I … Read more
Alan US urban rail transit costs two to seven times as much to build as European urban rail transit. Similarly, British Columbia is better at controlling infrastructure costs than the Northwest states. American exceptionalism? As for most State of the Union addresses, I paid no attention to this year’s. The real state of the union … Read more
Alan The costs of our broken US mental health care laws and systems are barbarous and huge, both for those who suffer chronically severe and confusing states of mind from mental illness, and for society as a whole. If you trace other social problems to their roots you often find our collective failure to protect, … Read more
Keiko Folks are starting to understand—Backyard cottages and mother-in-law units are an underutilized solution to the housing shortage. This week, two articles—one from the Atlantic and the other from Curbed, describe how ADUs are a small but mighty solution to affordability. Many cities (like Portland and Seattle) have legal barriers that prevent ADUs from taking … Read more
Clark The LA Times reports on a new study showing that the United States has become “the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born into.” But it’s not a new trend: death rates among young Americans began to exceed peer nations way back in the 1960s. And while US mortality rates … Read more
Kristin I just read Naomi Klein’s No is Not Enough, which references the “Leap Manifesto” she and other leaders in Canada put together. It calls for 100% clean energy, a universal basic income to help pay for the important work of caretaking that is currently often unpaid or underpaid, paid for by a carbon tax, … Read more
Alan As a personal project this year, I read a pile of books and articles about mass incarceration in the United States. The pick of the litter was James Forman, Jr.’s new book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. It may be the best complement and counterpart to Michelle Alexander’s classic The New Jim … Read more
Kristin All the revelations of sexual abuse coming out recently are not just about sex, but about work and power. In classifying them primarily as sexual assaults, we may be making a crucial category error. They are not just about sexual harm to women’s bodies and well-being, but about professional harm to our ability to … Read more
