Prosperity has many potential definitions. But if we read the concept broadly, as a state of happiness and contentment and not merely as the economic accumulation of things and experiences, then other kinds of ideas and policy concerns might boil to the surface. I feel I need to say this Read more
Maybe TS Eliot was right that April is the cruelest month. But here in California March was relentless. Atmospheric river after river doused hopes that the dark and cold might end. Even my third spring break sojourn to Los Angeles yielded downpour instead of sunshine, block-long puddles splashing down La Read more
February turns out to have been a good month to muse about housing. For instance, this opinion article by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic got me going on the question of whether lack of housing might truly, as Lowrey proposes, be the root cause behind the decisions of San Francisco Read more
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