Things could go either way Rainy Day, Boston, 1885, Frederick Childe Hassam In 2017, a three-year campaign by housing justice advocates to curb Boston’s eviction crisis culminated with a tenant rights bill called the Jim Brooks Act being quietly shuffled into a corner of the legislature to die. It
Prepare to jump not knowing if there is any place to land This week I was talking to some people for an article about the Living Building Challenge, specifically a new building in Atlanta that is seeking to qualify under this super-rigorous sustainability standard. It’s kind of hard to
[Wind howling] This is the last Crisis Palace before Halloween so it will be a very special frightening edition a holiday spooktacular you might say. If you are faint of heart consider yourself warned. — In May of 1845, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus set out for the Arctic on
Take a moment to appreciate that feeling of all the things working There’s a fissure in the climate community around the extent to which racial and economic justice issues should be a driving force behind climate solutions. I’ve written about this divide often, because for many years mainstream
You turn the key, harm is being done. Earlier this year, two miles west of my house, a woman named Marilyn Wentworth was crossing the street to get a coffee at her favorite shop, a little family-owned place I go to all the time. As she used the crosswalk to
It was 3,000 people arguing with 2 million people This week I’m going to reach way back into the archives to share an article I wrote about the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. A huge engineering feat—and a surprisingly common tactic as the nation
Wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side “Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism itself can generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at center to face
I want you to panic and act as if the house was on fire Pretty much as long as climate change has been in the realm of public dialogue, there’s been this oddly accepted wisdom that there are certain ways you should and should not talk about the issue.
I've developed an uneasy ambivalence Between Epstein and the Sackler family, there’s probably more scrutiny being placed on philanthropy and the donor class now than in decades—the sector’s flown under the radar for way too long. Along with the indispensable work of investigative journalists hunting
You can't hide as much on an island. From Sunday all the way into Tuesday, Hurricane Dorian pummeled the Bahamas, leaving behind mass destruction and flooding and a death toll of at least 23. Two entire neighborhoods home to many Haitian immigrants were pretty much leveled. One meteorologist
Come to my house and call me a bedbug to my face I kind of didn’t want to talk about David Koch because there’s something about it that makes me imagine some Portlandia sketch where there’s a community meeting about a dog park or something and a
Humidity can be difficult. Usagi Yojimbo, Stan Sakai, 1987 Someone asked me recently who some of the leaders are in the climate change field and it was hard to think off the top of my head. I was like, oh, I don’t know and named some scientists, a couple