In the distant time, when a now mythical subculture known as “moderate Republican” once existed amongst the folded hills and valleys of America, I landed a job as wetlands policy coordinator for the California Resources Agency. The job, really a glorified internship, played to my strengths as a recent elite Read more…
For my end of 2022 post I want to reflect on a social institution for which I’m personally grateful, and that is foundational to shared urban prosperity. That institution, as you have no doubt already gleaned from the heading above, is organized labor. One immediate reason I’m grateful for labor Read more…
Perhaps like you, the eventful year of 2020 led me to do several unusual things. One was to rebuild this blog. Another was to attend my first protest since a bright, cold Manhattan afternoon, eighteen years earlier, devoted to speaking out against George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq. Read more…
It is nearly Halloween. But I have been thinking of the photograph below since the long, heady days of early summer, when I captured it on a bike errand to deliver paperwork to my son’s school. The nature of the paperwork has already slipped my mind. But the image of Read more…
A colleague once told me that the great hidden advantage of teaching as a career is this: teachers invariably have the most entertaining stories at dinner parties. While this is certainly true, I think it’s important to keep classroom stories to dinner parties, or perhaps the department break room. This Read more…
Working in a classroom with thirty or more teenagers it sometimes feels like you need lots of arms, which is the reason my teacher totem has long been the octopus. This August, which of course represents the beginning of school in California, I’ll do a teacher move, pick up five Read more…
Charm, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps. But I can’t escape the conviction that it would be an aesthetic crime not to place Guanajuato, Mexico at or near its apex of any list of the most charming cities in North America. This colonial era gem of Read more…
“It’s not my Seattle anymore” My wife’s dear auntie, a lifelong Seattleite, mostly “It looks like one of those matchboxes sold already” Woman talking to her boyfriend on the street, Fremont District, June 2022 I’ve come to realize that I have a perhaps unique perspective on my natal city. I Read more…
It’s been a dark month in America. With the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, I had resigned myself to again write a monthly post primarily about violence, the central topic of my post for April. And I do have a couple of thoughts and links to share about gun violence. Read more…
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot once wrote. Thankfully, this has rarely been true in my own life. But it seems wrong to begin any urban news and ideas column for this April 2022 without briefly foregrounding the cruelty and destruction imposed by the Russian military on Mariupol and Read more…