I may be heading to some kind of Pedestrian Hell: I have enrolled my daughter, a first-grader-to-be, in a charter school.
Actually, The Watershed School, which opens this fall, has a component that should make pedestrian-types long to send their kids there: it focuses on “place-based” education, in which students focus on their local communities to [...]
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Just a week ago, I got my first radio interview: I talked for 20 minutes with Marielle Smith, the producer of Energy-Wise. The short segment played Monday morning on Newsradio 970 KFBX (and perhaps the other local Clear Channel stations). We covered:
Our denied pedestrian right;
The social aspects of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods and cities;
The need for and [...]
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I often think that, in Fairbanks, I must be seen as some kind of pervert.
At a recent work meeting about re-visioning our reference services, we were asked to describe our ideal reference service. I suggested that we should offer, in one place, all the things students would want to hunker down and study: not only [...]
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Why do we hate teenagers so much? What made them an acceptable target for disenfranchisement?
On one of my professional e-mail lists, somebody brought up a problem with teenage skateboarders: they love to use the covered walkway in front of a facility frequented by senior citizens with visual and mobility challenges. Too often (I [...]
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This Saturday (May 17), join me at Clucking Blossom for a discussion on the future of neighborhoods and city planning amid rising gasoline prices.
Clucking Blossom is an annual festival of music, art, and ideas. It is absolutely free of charge — in fact, no cash is allowed to change hands on the day of [...]
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As you may know, I’ve been reading Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. (In fact, I’ve been reading it for months. Now that I’ve started biking to and from work rather than riding the bus, it’s [...]
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As you may have learned from the News-Miner or elsewhere, it is currently TV Turnoff Week (April 21-27) — a chance for us to power down the tube and do something a little healthier or more creative. But what to do?
Based on the readers of this blog whom I know, turning off the television [...]
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Usually, I try to present my own thoughts and words here. But in The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg so beautifully implicates us in our drunken-driving fatalities that I’ll just quote him here:
Many middle-class Americans escape the boredom of their neighborhoods in various kinds of drinking establishments that must be reached by automobile. [...]
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Edited 2 April 2008
My wife and I have been confronted with a choice — one that is available mostly to those in our privileged social condition, but a difficult one: where should we send our children to school?
Just a few years ago, we wouldn’t have had this difficulty. We’d have sent the kids to [...]
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