I asked myself last week, if I had never seen a single newspaper article, magazine photo essay, or television news report on climate change would I, at some gut level, be aware of any particular changes in weather patterns here in southern New England. The answer was no. I recall the snowless period from the
One of the problems with passenger rail is that for many people what they see in their mind’s eye when it is referenced is a steam locomotive from a movie out of the Old West; a technology of a time before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease, before the light bulb, and before
Distinguishing between the objective and the subjective is beyond the capacity of most people it seems. I’m not talking about the rabbit hole of philosophical discussions, whatever their value, in which we end up at cogito ergo sum and everything else must be doubted, but rather distinguishing between what we want to be true and
This post is an extended response to my friend’s post at Granola Shotgun. We have two areas of the city which fit the description of Marsupial Urbanism. Baystate Medical is an enormous regional healthcare provider and its main campus and the repurposed industrial buildings which make up its satellite campus both sit a block away
Almost 15 years ago I found myself at a city council meeting of some sort and spoke in favor of a plan to turn a vacant building into a boutique hotel, but against the idea of tearing down some adjacent buildings to provide parking and “provide a better view”. The proposal was being made by
As I am feeling a bit under the weather I worry that attempting my usual long form essay would result in an even less coherent result than usual, and so I offer this: Almost two years ago I wrote this post on Michael Klare, and Hampshire College. Now it looks as though Hampshire is an
Consider this a thought experiment based on science fiction or dystopic fantasy if you will. Imagine that places must be functional without the vast majority of their populations having access to cars. Which places survive, and which don’t? The Hudson River Valley is astounding in this regard. Only the enormous wealth of New York City
When we found out that we had about half the time we had been planning on for a long weekend getaway my wife and I felt compelled to switch our plans from Montreal to someplace a bit closer, so we found a cool hotel in the Hudson Valley and we started to make plans based
In his book The Long Emergency as well as in many of his “Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles” James Howard Kunstler has made reference to the fact that Americans will engage in heroic efforts to salvage what he describes as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. In JHK’s conversation with K-MO on
I was called an icon this week. After I expressed my hopes that the person nice enough to express such a thought was not an iconoclast it set me to thinking about orthodoxies. At 17 the orthodoxies which ruled my life, whether I knew it or not, were Mormonism and God belief, laissez faire Capitalism,