I’ve lived in California for most of my adult life and feel proud to have traveled widely within its many and varied landscapes. I’ve been to the remote desert Saline Valley to gaze at 10,000-year-old petroglyphs and to Sequoia National Park’s land-that-time-forgot Mineral King to hike into the largest and Read more
As a person who tries to pay constructive attention to policy it’s important to learn to be open to moments of joy in the political space, especially now, during the dark reign of the fundamentally-unfit-human-now-President. So, I wanted to briefly share the joy I felt listening to journalist Derek Thompson’s Read more
I’ve had several reasons for taking a break from prospericity.net over the last few months—three preps at school, wanting to make my novel project a success, not knowing what to say about the chaos and immorality already wrought by the new Trump administration, and, oh yes, a cancer diagnosis. Perhaps Read more
” … New York / Where I am now; which is a logarithm / Of other cities. Our landscape / Is alive with filiations, shuttlings; / Business is carried on by look, gesture / Hearsay …” From “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery, 1974 In the early 1970s, Read more
I’ve decided to describe my recent trip to Vancouver, British Columbia in the context of four one-sentence notes I wrote on my phone while I was there. But I also want to make the upfront statement that I loved Vancouver when I last visited there as a teenager, and I Read more
There are a lot of beautiful things about Mexico, and a lot of hard ones. But if there is one single thing that keeps me coming back it may be the clever urban design and intense sense of public culture. I speak fluent though accented Spanish, which over the years Read more
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