At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
Tom Friedman has a very interesting piece in the March 16 edition of the New York Times that reports the back story of the announcement last month that TXU would not build eight high-polluting coal plants in Texas. Turns out that the new owners of the utility were concerned about the public relations fallout from the battle they’d been engaged in with grassroots groups in Texas, and national environmental organizations, particularly Environmental Defense and the …
One of the rules of journalism that I learned a long time ago is that it’s okay to be ahead, but not okay to be too far out front. Another rule is conflict sells better than cooperation. Mode Shift, which describes the political, cultural, and economic context of a civic movement that is changing patterns of metropolitan development, is ahead of most other forums in covering these stories. But it’s not too far ahead, which is probably …
Ryan Burke is a student at the University of North Carolina who until Valentine’s Day this year rolled through his undergraduate career in a veil of unmistakable obscurity. But this is the age of social media, when ubiquitous video cameras, email, and the Internet can vault creative instinct to unimaginable heights of notoriety. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and legions of video file-sharing sites have enabled young people to reveal, expose, share, and broadcast every aspect of their lives. Social media is responsible for …
This week the price of regular gasoline in my village at the top of Lake Michigan reached $2.60 a gallon, about 62 cents a gallon more than in January. Late last month, the Dow Jones experienced the steepest drop in years. Are the two connected? You bet. You might also ask how these two trends are linked to the American Mode Shift, the transformation of metropolitan regions into cleaner, greener, more energy-efficient, more prosperous places? Here’s how. Oil is and will remain the …
A couple of months before it became clear in 2004 that John Kerry didn’t have a clue about how to frame his election bid — “Lt. Kerry reporting for duty,” is the memorably stupid way he started his nomination address – a University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor named George Lakoff (see pix) burst onto the national political scene to remind progressives that the message was everything in public policy and politics. His 2004 book, “Don’t Think of an …
My writer’s life occurs principally in two media arenas. One is the reporting I do for the New York Times and other mainstream press that involves structuring the gathered facts into a narrative that is purposefully designed not to have a point of view. My focus is delivering expertise in a 1,000 to 3,000 word package distinguished by studied detachment. The other arena is the public interest journalism I prepare for the Michigan Land Use Institute. The idea is to dig just …
In 2002, when he was still the governor of Maryland, Parris Glendening invited a handful of Smart Growth leaders from around the country to join him for a three-day talk fest at Seaside, the famous Florida Gulf Coast resort community that served as the weirdly perfect set of the 1998 Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show. I attended the weekend, serving as the message and media guy for a gathering that also included Andres Duany, the architect and co-founder …
This fourth installment of Flip, which tracks keen new convergences between urban affairs and new media technology, was suggested by Joe Mielke, an IT professional and a colleague at the Michigan Land Use Institute. It’s Google’s recently introduced tool to track urban congestion in real time, and available now in New York. Click the traffic link on the top right of the page. The applications for this tool are immeasurable. If you’re swinging up the New Jersey Thruway …