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Chronicles of Civic Engagement: The Leafblower Battle in D.C.
Back in the fall of 2015, in the midst of travels around the country in which my wife, Deb, and…
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Action at the Local Level, D.C. Edition
As I mentioned yesterday in another note on Erie, Pennsylvania, I’ll try to send out some reports on still-functional local-level…
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Libertarians and Lawn Equipment
I’ve been lying low in public on this front, while a lot of activity has been going on backstage. …
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The Sociology of the Modern American Urban Landscape, Cont'd
We’ve had a lot of development on the scientific, public-health, technology, and local-government front since the previous reports in this…
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LA: City of Tomorrow
The ongoing theme in this thread involves “hastening the inevitable.” That is, speeding the transition from the very noisy…
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The Pianist vs. the Leafblower: WAMU Reports
Last week the local NPR station, WAMU, ran an interesting report by Matthew Schwartz about the ongoing effort to outlaw…
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Leafblower Legislation: The WaPo and the Current Weigh In
Two updates on local coverage of the initiative I’ve been describing in the past few months: the D.C. effort…
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D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh Introduces Leafblower Bill
As a reminder, the updates in this thread are part of an unfolding real-time chronicle of community efforts in D…
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The Future of Leafblowers: The Guardian Weighs In
I’ll begin my emergence from a long bout of print-magazine writing by mentioning an article by Lawrence Richards, in The…
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Technology Can't Solve Every Problem, but It Sure Helps With This One (Leafblower Dept)
In this space I’ve been reporting developments in local D.C. citizen-action efforts to phase out the super-polluting, uniquely noisy…
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Request for Community Reports on Leafblower Policies
On Wednesday night, as reported here, our local Advisory Neighborhood Commission in Washington voted 8-1 to support a shift from…
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On the Sociology and Economics of Omnipresent Noise
Two very different accounts of the neighborhood dynamics of modern community living, related to the community campaign being chronicled in…
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On Natural, and Less Natural, Approaches to the Autumn Season
This is part of the ongoing chronicle of a minor-seeming but conceptually significant effort in local community action. The conceptual…
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Civic Engagement Update: First Step With the Advisory Neighborhood Commission
This evening the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission for our part of D.C. voted 8-1 to endorse the proposals from…
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The Two-Stroke Engine: A Remnant of Poor-Country Technology in Rich Countries
In response to the item immediately below, which kicked off this Thread, I’ve gotten reports from different corners of the…
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Local-Level Democracy: Beginning a Chronicle
Over the past two years, my wife Deb and I have been increasingly impressed by the importance, vitality, difficulty…
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In Which I Consider Jumping Ship for The New Yorker
Yeah, here at The Atlantic we’ve got our 158-year-long tradition, our Civil War reportage by Nathaniel Hawthorne, our up-to-the-minute reportage…
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What the Devil Does in His Spare Time
First, he invents the leafblower. Then he hires crews to blow things all around his back yard in Hell, at…
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US CPSC/Flickr History's Greatest Monster
I have a nominee.
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Why YouTube Was Invented
Technology lets us share how-to knowledge.
