Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
There’s lots to be thankful for this year in our content manager John Pattison’s home. Last month, his housemates, Emily and Elijah, welcomed their first child into the world. Everyone is in love with Milo, and John’s six-year-old, Julia, insisted on making a “Happy Birth-day” (get it?) banner.
Each week, the Strong Towns team shares their favorite links—the things that made us think in new ways, delve deeper into the Strong Towns mission, or even just smile.
It’s great to be back with you for Friday Faves after a couple weeks off but alas, this is also our last Friday Faves of the year. For the next couple weeks on StrongTowns.org, you’ll get to see some of our best content from 2020, as well as some other special end-of-year pieces. Meanwhile, we’re working behind the scenes on some very cool initiatives that are all about helping you take action to make your town stronger. We’ll be excited to share them with you in early 2021. In preparation for that, this week found our team in a mini online staff retreat, as well as recording some final podcasts for the year and sharing the Strong Towns message in a few different webinars. We also got a shout-out from Pete Buttigieg so, you know, plenty going on over here…
Be well and stay warm. Here’s our final round of Friday Faves for 2020.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Rachel: One of my favorite food bloggers recently shared a surprisingly touching story about getting the fence around her house fixed up. When the builder reached a section of the old fence that was missing, he asked whether she wanted that part filled in, to which she replied, “No way.” She writes, “That fenceless stretch is the spot where, over the years, my neighbor Lori and I have exchanged the day-to-day necessities of living: flour, a roll of packing tape, a quarter cup of chicken broth, and more parenting advice than I can recount…” She talks about how this neighborly connection has been particularly meaningful during 2020, when baked goods, games and even tomato plant seedlings could be shared between families, bringing small patches of joy to this hard year. This is how Strong Towns are built—with a foundation of friendship and kindness amongst neighbors.
Daniel: This photo essay in the New York Times takes readers on a tour of Russia’s remote Kolyma Highway, the “Road of Bones,” which once transported prisoners to Stalin’s forced labor camps. The stunning photographs reveal how a dwindling number of people make their lives in one of the harshest environments on earth. (This frigid part of Siberia, since the gulags closed, has been populated mostly by miners and their families, drawn by salaries much higher than in the rest of Russia.) The essay also touches on historical memory: there have been recent efforts to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation, and what seems like a growing lack of national consensus on a shared account of what happened in that era. In light of that reckoning, what does it mean that the physical evidence of the camps is being swept away by the elements?
Lauren: When I was little, my mother would shout at us when she put an angel food cake in the oven: Don’t stomp, don’t jump, don’t close doors, don’t yell, don’t speak too loud, don’t play too rough. As an adult, I wonder how much of her threat that the cake would fall was just an attempt to get a few hours of peace. Thanks to this recipe (and an absence of stomping, shouting children) I’ve never yet had an angel food cake fall. But if you should choose to take on this treat as a weekend baking project, take this advice: The recipe says not to overbeat, but don’t let that scare you off of beating it enough! Make sure to share your results with a friend or neighbor who may be isolated these days.
Chuck: Why, International Falls, why? This is right out of the textbook of unforced errors and it makes me really sad, especially for a place that needs fewer of these restrictions. Why have a citywide vote on something that really needs to be worked out between neighbors? As I wrote earlier this year in regards to garbage cans here in my hometown, the city can—in the spirit of subsidiarity—assist neighbors in resolving this issue, but it should never take away their agency to decide something that they, at the block level, are fully capable of deciding. Doing this kind of thing over and over is how you slowly strangle a community.
John: A couple nights ago I had a dream about modern monetary theory. It’s an occupational hazard of working at Strong Towns, I guess, especially in a week in which we published a podcast episode called “Just Print the Money.” (It’s maybe my favorite episode of the year.) But here’s the spooky thing: the first thing I saw when I opened my email this morning was an article from Axios called “Our make-believe economy is here to stay.” Dion Rabouin writes that “[the] Fed-driven economy relies on the creation of trillions of dollars—literally out of thin air—that are used to purchase bonds and push money into a pandemic-ravaged economy that has long been dependent on free cash and is only growing more addicted.” (Just print the money?) Even so, says Rabouin, most of the money “gets stuck at the top—winding up in the accounts of large corporations and highly paid executives, while leaving behind small businesses and everyday Americans.” Macroeconomics made more sense to me asleep than awake. Yet with the stock market soaring while millions remain out of work, sometimes it feels like I’m not the only one in fantasyland.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Lisa Becker, Christine Caveen, Justin Dahlheimer, Benjamin Feikema, Stephen Grist, Jane E. Haasch, William Hall, Gaurav Kulkarni, Zachary Mannheimer, Kelaine Mitchell, Ashley Monterusso, Betsy and Horace Nash, Lisa Packard, Kris Robertson, Ilona Ross, George Schricker, Michelle Uberuaga, Rob Wenman, William B. Wiener, Jr. Foundation, Rhys Winder, and Emily Wolfe
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments.