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Policymakers in other cities can learn from Minneapolis
Minneapolis Land Use Reforms Offer a Blueprint for Housing Affordability: Rents stayed flat as more apartments were built, even as the rest of Minnesota saw increases.
Your Cells Can Think
"It turns out that regular cells—not just highly specialized brain cells such as neurons—have the ability to store information and act on it. Now Levin has shown that the cells do so by using subtle changes in electric fields as a type of memory. These revelations have put the biologist at the vanguard of a new field called basal cognition. Researchers in this burgeoning area have spotted hallmarks of intelligence—learning, memory, problem-solving—outside brains as well as within them."
The Indignities and Mediocrity of Brute White Patriarchy
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is under investigation by his own Attorney General and is facing possible impeachment for two colliding scandals: mounting allegations of sexual misconduct, and allegations that he deliberately under-reported COVID-related nursing home deaths. Today, New York Magazine published a lengthy, exhaustively researched, and incredibly damning exposé about the toxic culture of Cuomo's Albany. Despite calls for his resignation from a majority of state lawmakers and New York’s Congressional delegation, Cuomo says he's not going anywhere.
I Want To Believe
In less than six months, US intelligence agencies must report what they know about UFOs to Congress. December's coronavirus relief and government funding bill began a 180-day countdown for providing the information. This follows the Pentagon's acknowledgement last year of its Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, the existence of which they had previously denied.
"It shall bee published that hee is a man and a woeman”
For Intersex Awareness Day, Colonial Williamsburg shares the story of Thomas or Thomasine Hall, an early Virginian settler who was brought to trial for refusing to identify as a man or a woman.
The necessity of self-defense is not a theoretical principle
The Case for Black American Self-Defense. "Pacifist injunctions obliterate the history of, and need for, armed protection. The Black tradition of organized, armed self-defense should be regarded as one of the many tools in the repertoire of modern protest movements."
The real viral content was the friends we made along the way
I Used The Sims To Perfect My Apartment is not what it says on the tin. Instead, this 15 minute video from gaming site Polygon.com unravels into a bizarre meditation on depression, loneliness, and friendship which in These Trying Times scratched an itch I didn't know I had. (However, it will almost definitely not help you perfect your apartment.)
Don't Drive Like My Brother
Car Talk's Long Goodbye: an interview with Ray Magliozzi, former cohost of the NPR mainstay Car Talk, on the show's history, its legacy, and his relationship with his departed brother. And for dessert, a podcast interview with Ray on the brothers' surprisingly conflicted feelings about cars and car culture.
Long Live Pale Male
In 1991, a red-tailed hawk settled in New York City. Dubbed Pale Male by birdwatchers, he went on to establish a dynasty of urban hawks - now over 20 individuals strong - who have so embraced city living that they display many distinct behavioral differences from other red-tails. But is Pale Male still alive? There are passionate arguments on both sides of a debate that has been described as "the third rail of the birding world."
A Random, Motley Crew Of Fuckups Flying Through Space
Mission to Zyxx is an improvised science fiction podcast following a team of ambassadors as they attempt to establish diplomatic relations in the remote and chaotic Zyxx Quadrant. What elevates it above other improv podcasts is an obsessive dedication to professional sound design and editing, with each 30-45 minute episode requiring up to 80 hours of post-production work. Read about the team's process here - and then get listening.
Some neighborhoods were not worth fixing.
In the 50s and 60s, Syracuse's 15th Ward was a thriving working class black community. Then the calls for “urban renewal” came, and the 15th Ward was destroyed to make way for Interstate 81. Today, the Syracuse portion of I-80 is at the end of its useful life. To determine what comes next, the city must come to terms with what the highway destroyed. But can tearing it down fix the sins of the past?
The Last Days of John Allen Chau
In the fall of 2018, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau traveled to a remote speck of sand and jungle in the Indian Ocean, attempting to convert one of the planet's last uncontacted tribes to Christianity. The islanders killed him, and Chau was pilloried around the world as a deluded Christian supremacist who deserved to die. Alex Perry of Outside Magazine pieces together the life and death of a young adventurer driven to extremes by unshakable faith.
“I can’t wait to get back to the shop again and blow things up.”
The surprisingly engrossing history of How The Milwaukee Bucks And A Former Wedding DJ Won The T-Shirt Cannon Arms Race.
"We absolutely have an emergency on our hands."
It’s Shocking How Badly New York City Is Failing Cyclists. "For [Robyn] Hightman, riding a bike was everything: It represented work, recreation, and family. But the city Hightman had embraced so completely wound up fatally failing them."
Scoot The Future
Last year, people took 84 million trips on shared micromobility (ie bike and scooter share) in the United States, more than double the number of trips taken in 2017. This infographic-heavy report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials shows where and how these rapid increases are happening - including the stunning fact that almost all of that increase came from scooter share programs, which didn't even exist the year before. How are our cities grappling with this trend? And could it ultimately reshape the design of our streets?
Wear Your Meds On Your Sleeve
Wear Your Meds distributes buttons with images of commonly-prescribed mental illness medications, with the goal of normalizing the open discussion of those medications and the conditions they treat. All proceeds are donated to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The project was developed by copywriter Lauren Weiss, who upon finding the right medication thought “It blew my mind that people actually lived a mentally stable life all the time. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
"We just beat the richest man in the world."
After months of public outcry and demands for transparency, Amazon has cancelled its plans to build a corporate campus in Queens. Activists and community groups who swore they would crush the deal are elated; real estate brokers, not so much.
“She came out of nowhere for us and it and it felt like a cavalry.”
When Kate McKinnon Spoofed New York City’s War on Cars. Before Saturday Night Live, the comic starred in a series of shorts for Streetfilms.org as an angry SUV lobbyist railing against the pedestrianization of Times Square, helping to cut the legs out from under the opposition.
Aurora Astorialis
Last night, for several minutes, the night sky over New York City was illuminated with brilliant electric blue light. The NYPD insists that it wasn't aliens, but you can draw your own conclusions.
The subway crush transformed New York into what it is today
It’s Time to Fall in Love With Stuffy, Crowded Subways: Why Elon Musk is wrong about the future of transportation. "Ubers, self-driving cars, and hyperloops titillate the imagination by promising a speedy, comfortable, and isolated vision of transportation — but all these promises are illusory. If we’re ever going to make cities work, we need to accept, and come to love, a fundamental truth: Packed urban transit is good urban transit."
Reflection as a self-congratulatory proxy for action
"Conservative funders focus on the big picture, act quickly, do not micromanage, provide significant general operating funds, fund for twenty or thirty years, support leaders and movements, engage in policy and politics, and treat grantees as equal partners. Progressive funders—with a few exceptions—intellectualize, are severely risk-averse, focus narrowly, fund isolated strategies and programs, avoid politics, and treat grantees like parasites and freeloaders." 10 things progressive funders must learn from conservative ones, or we are all screwed.
Who would deign to attack such a German institution as soccer?
SPOIDS
Spiderween: An Arachnophobe-Safe Guide To Spiders. "I think everyone deserves a chance to learn about such an amazing corner of the animal kingdom, and so for an entire thirty-one entries in a row, we're about to go over some of the most interesting spider species, spider habits and spider superpowers without a single realistic spider in view. Instead, we're substituting the real animals with anthropomorphs I believe I've designed to capture as much of a spider's 'character' or 'personality' as a four-limbed, two-eyed, endoskeletoned biped ever reasonably could."
“I would never run, never. I don’t know where they got that from."
The New York Times called dozens of the Queens party machine’s nominees for county committee. The candidates for 21 seats were running without their consent. Only four candidates The Times spoke to said they were running on purpose. Some no longer even live in New York. Meanwhile, more than 60 members of the progressive New Queens Democrats sought nomination but were disqualified for paperwork technicalities by the Board of Elections - whose commissioners are chosen by county political bosses.
It really could have been anyone.
"Having killed two people and hit three others, Dorothy Bruns did not receive a summons. Had her car not been wrecked, she might have been allowed to drive home. A couple of weeks after the crash, we learned that she had reportedly hit another pedestrian in September and sped off. Paperwork that would have led to a deeper review had gone unfiled. Like Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter, she was recognizably unfit to handle a dangerous machine, known and perhaps flagged by the authorities but not stopped, leading to violent, preventable death. And a lot of people seem to think of a driver’s license in near-purist Second Amendment terms: as a right that can be revoked under only the most extreme circumstances." What New York Should Learn From the Park Slope Crash That Killed Two Children.
Stop de Kindermoord
The Netherlands is known today as a haven for pedestrians and cyclists - but this wasn't always so. In the 1970s, a growing epidemic of traffic deaths led to a nationwide advocacy movement called Stop the Child Murder. The result was a transformation in Dutch street design which has rendered its public spaces among the safest in the world. With American traffic fatalities on the rise, activists are beginning to call for Americans to get truly angry about traffic violence.
We remain committed to strong, independent reporting that fills the void
Public radio stations WNYC (New York), KPCC (Southern California), and WAMU (Washington, D.C.) have joined together to acquire key assets of Gothamist and its associated sites LAist and DCist. The acquisition is being funded in large part through philanthropic donations from two anonymous donors. Is this another indication of the rising wave of nonprofit journalism?
What the heck is going on at Newsweek?
Last month, agents of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office raided Newsweek's headquarters and seized more than a dozen of the company’s servers. Last week, BuzzFeed News reported that the company had engaged in “fraudulent online traffic practices." That same week, Newsweek Media Group co-founder and chairman Etienne Uzac and his wife Marion Kim, NMG's director of finance, both stepped down - amid increasing allegations about their ties to a controversial fundamentalist Christian church. And today, it was announced that Newsweek had gutted its editorial staff, firing Editor in Chief Bob Roe, Executive Editor Ken Li, and several reporters - all of whom had recently been reporting on Newsweek's recent legal troubles.
"I lived with a ghost, with this child inside me, speaking to me."
The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer. How do you live after unintentionally causing a death? There are no self-help books for anyone who has accidentally killed another person. An exhaustive search yielded no research on such people, and nothing in the way of therapeutic protocols, publicly listed support groups, or therapists who specialize in their treatment. But there is AccidentalImpacts.org, a support group site started by social psychologist and educator Maryann Gray, who at age 22 struck and killed a child with her car.
Providing temporary public open space . . . one parking spot at at time.
Happy PARK(ing) Day, everybody! Every third Friday in September, people around the world reclaim metered parking spaces and transform them into public space. Why? To "call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat." Check out the #parkingday and #parkingday2017 hashtags for more!
"It’s hard to focus on all those things at once."
For a first-time festival, the Newport Contemporary Music Series boasted a program that might make even Tanglewood blush: a star-studded lineup featuring appearances by Philip Glass, four-time Academy Award winner André Previn, and “Lord of the Rings” composer Howard Shore. The festival hired more than 100 professional musicians to form the Newport Contemporary Arts Orchestra, which over six weeks starting in July was to perform challenging works by some of the titans of contemporary music. The man behind it all: Paul Van Anglen, a 25-year-old impresario who managed to present just three concerts before his grand dream cratered amid charges of broken promises, rank amateurism, and an estimated $120,000 in unpaid orchestra musicians fees, plus tens of thousands more for unpaid soloists and other costs.
Scritch your birdos.
My first love will always be Collembola
A Chaos of Delight: The Wonderful World of Soil Mesofauna is the gorgeously photographed website of a macro photographer and obsessive fan of the strange, tiny animals that live in our soil. "For the last two years I've been travelling the world, studying and photographing Collembola, my greatest passion. This website was set up to have as complete an overview of the mesofauna as possible, within the limits of what I find funny."
Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year
I asked her what her secret was, and she said something that would change my professional life as a writer: “Collect rejections. Set rejection goals. I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.”
“We’re really at an amazing moment with bail"
Following a national wave of lawsuits asserting that cash bail requirements violate the Fourteenth Amendment, New Jersey and Maryland have drastically reduced the use of cash bail, instead granting pretrial release to accused persons who would have qualified for release on bail in 2017. New York City similarly expanded the use of supervised release in 2016. Now California, New York State, and even Texas are considering similar bills, as is Chicago. Has bail reform in America finally reached a tipping point?
From Minuscule Spirits To Gigantic Cosmic Monsters
A Book of Creatures is a sprawling illustrated guide to monsters of myth and folklore from around the world, with non-Western creatures heavily featured. Updating on a tri-weekly schedule, it aims to provide a comprehensive database of legendary creatures, accompanied with art and thoroughly sourced. Sadly I can't find a way to look at all the creatures at once - however, in the sidebar you can search by creatures by country or region of origin, type, and theme. Just to get you started, there's Animate Inanimates, Deadly Gaze, and Creatures of Darkness and Night; Iceland, Sub-Saharan Africa, and China; Whales, Unicorns, and Insects. And so very much more.
The Mail Order American Dream
Kit houses, once a staple of suburbia, were complete, easy-to-assemble houses you could order from a catalog and have shipped via rail to your building site. Via the always-excellent McMansion Hell, you can learn more about the history of mail-order houses in America, and tips and tricks for identifying them in the wild.
The diverse patchwork of Southern food styles is beginning to blur
The Surprisingly Recent Story of How Shrimp and Grits Won Over the South. This isn't a new article, but damn did it make me want some shrimp and grits.
She was the PTA mom everyone knew. Who would want to harm her?
FRAMED: A Mystery In Six Parts. The LA Times' Christopher Goffard brings you a truly bizarre bit of true crime, involving planted drugs, PTA moms, sexy firemen, self-published novels, cold-blooded revenge, and a whole lot more.
good good splosions
BeamNG.drive is "a dynamic soft-body physics vehicle simulator capable of doing just about anything." Nick Robinson and Griffin McElroy are two guys who looked at that description and thought "...anything?" Welcome to CAR BOYS! (Currently there are only four episodes of this, but I hope and dream that there will be dozens or hundreds more.)
Any monster looks several times cooler if it's oozing something
Bogleech (previously) is currently providing in-depth reviews of every. single. Pokémon. Not every Pokémon game - every individual Pokémon. He's up to #374 now. He can also tell you all about the real-world biological organisms behind such Pokémon as Parasect, Weepinbell, and his beloved Gloom, and explain why they are both grosser and more charming than you ever suspected.
Orthodox Jews organize against their former high schools
Young Advocates For Fair Education, or YAFFED, is an NYC-based advocacy group of Orthodox Jewish youth and young adults who complain that their limited high school educations left them ill-equipped to support themselves as adults, and demand that the New York City and New York State education departments enforce laws on minimum school standards. Recently the ED of YAFFED co-wrote an op-ed, Why Do Jewish Leaders Keep Ignoring Ultra-Orthodox Education Crisis?
No, I swear, it is
All these worlds etc etc
Europa's Ocean May Have An Earthlike Chemical Balance. A new NASA study modeling conditions in the ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa suggests that the necessary balance of chemical energy for life could exist there, even if the moon lacks volcanic hydrothermal activity.
"History shows us that minorities do not count until they are counted."
What is it like to be queer in China? UNDP has just launched Being LGBTI in China – A National Survey on Social Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression. With 30,000 respondents, the survey is the largest to date on the topic in China.
The Great Green North
At this week's UN General Assembly Special Session on drug policy - scheduled after lobbying by Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, whose leaders are calling for a more “humane solution” to the drugs problem that goes beyond a focus on enforcement and criminalization - Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott announced that Canada will begin the process of legalizing and regulating marijuana in spring 2017.
Jailhouse Stories
In Texas county jails, thousands of people wait for justice. Many have not been convicted but are held in dangerous and inhumane conditions while their cases are decided. Read their stories at JailhouseStories.org. (Warning - there's some tough reading in here, including abuse of the mentally ill and of pregnant women.)
Everything That You’ve Come to Expect
Up close and a little too personal with The Last Shadow Puppets. As I walk away, I try to suppress my ballooning sense that something wasn’t right back there. Is it normal to be asked up to a male musician’s room — even as a joke? Or cheek-kissed, repeatedly high-fived, and stared down? Even if he’s entirely harmless (and I’m sure that he is), is this the sort of thing that I should let go for the sake of my job? After music journalist Rachel Brodsky interviewed the U.K. orch-rock duo, she came away with a very different article than she'd set out to write.
akin to a Rorschach inkblot
A federal court panel has ruled that two of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts were racially gerrymandered and must be redrawn within two weeks. Critics of the 2011 Republican-led redistricting contend the map lines were drawn to concentrate black voters in districts that reduced their overall political power. North Carolina is home to 3 of the nation's 10 most gerrymandered congressional districts.
#freekesha
Wondering why pop star Kesha (or Ke$ha) hasn't produced any new music since 2013? Sony refuses to release her from her contract, which bars her from producing music with anyone else but producer Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, until she's made eight more records. So why is she refusing to work with Dr. Luke? Because, she alleges, he coerced her into drinking and taking drugs and sexually assaulted her when she was just 18, and his ongoing abuse led her to develop an eating disorder. Sony has called the allegations a "transparent and misguided attempt to renegotiate her contracts."