At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
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 …
More on that train race out west that I wrote about earlier this month. Metro, the transit agency in Phoenix, is asking the state for $1.7 billion to accelerate construction on the 57-mile light rail system that is being built, and to add more than 20 new miles to the system by 2027. This according to the Arizona Republic. That’s the very same strategy that Salt Lake City voters approved in November when they raised the sales …
This third installment of Flip looks at how two artists view the geography of urban and suburban place in America. Both come from Flakphoto, another of the terrifically creative places to view digital photography. Photographer Terry Evans looks at Chicago in this site, which deploys interactive motion graphics in an easily navigable format. The next example is how Jeff Brouws looks at sprawl. His is a sort of inspired cynicism. Very cool stuff. If you find …
Tonight Al Gore could win an Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Later this year he could also win the Nobel Prize for Peace. And if he lost 50 pounds and jumped into the 2008 presidential race, he could win that, too. Ever since he published “Earth in The Balance,” his 1992 best-seller, Gore’s two issues have been global climate change and himself. The first, global climate change, is drawing the nation inexorably to logical choices about energy, …