Just a quick piece from Miller-McCune highlighting one of the many stupidities of contemporary education: high school start times.  Basically, high schools have, over the last two decades, started earlier and earlier, so that millions of teenagers across America now start their school day at 7 AM.  Conversely, every study ever done on the subjectRead moreRead more

I can’t stop ruminating about this article. I think my obsession stems from several sources.  The first time I ever encountered food stamps, it was at a farmers’ market; Cleveland’s West Side Market, to be specific, long hailed as a model for a market which manages to capture upper-class income and interest without losing itsRead moreRead more

I am in love. Gangstagrass is a new album — and I mean “new” on a conceptual level — that’s a crossover effort between bluegrass and hip-hop.  On first glance they seem like opposites, inhabited by incompatible binaries (black/white, urban/rural, liberal/conservative), but a closer reading reveals striking similarities: both are largely outsider narratives, both tendRead moreRead more

Yes, I’m blogging on a Friday night.  Feel free to judge me for it. I leave you to your weekend with a nice bit of environmental contrarianism that’s really progressive pragmatism.  “Off the grid” is, indeed, a fallacy today, and dangerous in that it only serves to enable our national delusion that each man canRead moreRead more

Thursdays are the day when full issues of the Economist show up in my RSS feed, so it’s also when articles from that august publication are likely to show up here.  This week’s issue dealt quite a bit with poverty — there’s a lot worth checking out — but my favorite piece was this, discussingRead moreRead more

I give you an article by Elizabeth Warren, she of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency-architecting and sassy interviews on “The Daily Show.”  I loved her before, but I love her even more now.  The article is a few years old (2005 publication date) but still quite relevant, particularly when considering much of the rhetoric surroundingRead moreRead more

Well, maybe not.  But a couple recent pieces have me feeling like a smarty-pants anyway. First up: this essay, excerpted in the Harvard Design Magazine, about ecological urbanism as a new design paradigm.  Initially, I was put off by the “OMG, cities and sustainability can go TOGETHER?  Whaaaa?!?!” tone of the introduction, but it turnsRead moreRead more

Sometimes, I am in love with Kevin Drum of Mother Jones (and not just because he was also a one-time Techer who left because he liked words more than math.  Call me, Kevin!  We can totally start a club with Harold McGee!  It’ll be awesome!).  Like when he writes things like this. In other news,Read moreRead more

As a comedian, I am jealous that I did not come up with this concept first: Catalog Living, my favorite new piece of the Interwebs, which brilliantly and succinctly punctures our aspirational, consumerism-fetishizing culture each and every day.  It is pretty much made out of awesome, so you should go check it out.

I quite enjoyed this article by Julian Dobson, posted at the RSA website.  Although the statistics are drawn from Britain, the gist of the article — that ‘unemployment’ and ‘uselessness’ are not identical states of being — resonates well on this side of the pond, particularly given the lingering employment concerns of the Great Recession.Read moreRead more