The trains are clean and spacious and run on time, but the destination is not always clear Back when the pandemic was first really getting fired up, I did a little communications work on the need to ensure that public transit doesn’t waste away as people flee to their
Not one giant intractable problem, but many complicated, winnable conflicts in our backyards Last week I was going to write about a couple of poli sci papers that have been getting some buzz because they suggest big shifts in how we view local climate action as a path to global
Let's talk about Dune (and climate change) -- Wow it’s hard to believe a whole year has passed. Such an overwhelming experience, so many ups and downs, tragedy and triumph. That’s right, it’s been a year of reading Frank Herbert’s Dune. And now I have
Warms some poor name that never felt the sun Hi fam, I had a good week and we’re up to 63 degrees here in Boston today so I decided to give myself the day off. No thinky stuff up top but I wanted to send you something just so
The ability to assert control over other people may satisfy in its own way, but it is a slow-dripping poison One of the eternal frustrations in trying to make any kind of widespread change is that people with even a teensy bit of power or control generally do not
There seems to be something indelibly broken in the heart of this country that allowed us to get to this place We’re now on the way to having not two, but three vaccines, pharmaceutical solutions to the pandemic that came both sooner and with greater efficacy than most optimists
'Engineers ought to understand how complex systems can have feedback loops that go awry' This week I read a bunch about Texas and Bill Gates, so I’m going to touch on both topics today. Let’s talk Bill Gates first bleh but stick with me I promise
Who we presume to be the heroes in this story, and who we presume to be merely obstacles in the way So Politico ran this big article recently about tensions within the environmental movement, and I had tweeted some criticisms of it earlier, but wanted to discuss some of them
A critical threshold has been crossed I got a late start on the old newsy today, and I’m still trying to get my head around the Biden administration’s spree of climate change-related executive orders and cabinet appointments, so I’m going to take this week’s newsletter
'Don’t confuse what goes on in this building with democracy.' So much happening in national climate news my goodness but today I’m actually going to talk about something happening here in Massachusetts—an effort to fix the lack of transparency in the State House. In part
'I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to remember what it was like these past four years' On Wednesday, at the end of a very full to do list, because sometimes when working in media the moments when you could really
'Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice' There’s this thing that probably always happens during big societal shifts, where for fleeting moments, the bulk of the public seems to share this remarkable clarity that