Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
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.
We’re all getting creative when it comes to juggling work and kids these days. Michelle put up this sign at her desk to try to encourage her children not to bug her when she’s working. Unfortunately she says it hasn’t made a huge impact.
This week, we got a kind note from a Strong Towns reader who teaches in the humanities department at a midwestern college. He said he plans to make Charles Marohn’s 2019 book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, required reading for the Honors English course he teaches.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Strong Towns ideas being shared in a college class, but we’re always pleased to know that young minds are learning about the Strong Towns approach and we hope these folks go out into their communities to start making them more financially resilient soon. If you’ve got a story of how the Strong Towns approach has made its way into your community (classroom, church, neighborhood, etc.), we’d love to hear about it. Email us at team@strongtowns.org.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
John: Portland’s iconic bookstore, Powell’s City of Books, closed its doors in March just as stay-at-home orders were being issued in Oregon. Not long after, when Powell’s re-launched online ordering, they experienced a huge spike in business. “Sales really went through the roof, to unprecedented levels,” Emily Powell, the bookstore’s third-generation leader, said in a fascinating recent interview. (She also talked about the kinds of books people are buying during a pandemic, and what goes through her mind when she sees an Amazon delivery truck.)
Unfortunately, online sales are in a steady decline. Now, Powell’s is trying to figure out how to, again, offer its customers all those things that make shopping in a brick-and-mortar store so wonderful — walking slowly down narrow aisles, alone or with a friend, browsing, taking a book off the shelf and flipping through its pages — yet in a safe and responsible way. But the challenges, says Emily Powell, feel like “an insurmountable hurdle.” The United States is grinding its way through the pandemic and there is little reason to believe we’re going to get the virus under control any time soon. Powell’s may just make it to the other side, but many of the other locally-owned businesses we love won’t.
Chuck: The most formative moments of my teenage years corresponded with the unraveling of communism in Europe’s Eastern Bloc. The cascading revolutions for freedom culminated in the Christmas Eve firing squad killing of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The video of his final speech, where he lost control of the narrative for good, is profound to watch, especially knowing how events unfolded. (This was the same year as the Tiananmen Square massacre, which happened six months earlier and ended quite differently.)
Melissa Fay Greene wrote a chilling, and redeeming article in The Atlantic about Romanian orphans, denied human contact as babies, now living as adults. It’s both a reminder of the cold and cruel way a closed state will discard its unwanted as well as our shared need for love, compassion, and human connection.
Rachel: Under the headline, “The Supreme Court can’t solve all our moral disputes. It shouldn’t try,” the America Magazine editorial board advances a needed conversation questioning a current prevailing social tendency (whether you’re on the right or the left) to look to a distant governing body to solve our problems. When it comes to the most significant and complex ethical questions of our time, why do we put our hopes in a small group of judges to make decisions that will have a profound impact on the lives of so many? The editorial staff writes:
We bring our most vehement moral disagreements to the court, which almost never resolves them to anyone’s full satisfaction. And even when real agreement does exist, we fail to legislate according to it, continuing the vicious cycle that brings us back, June after June after June, to wait for nine people, who all attended either Harvard or Yale, to try to achieve compromises that our legislators, elected officials and the voters themselves cannot reach.
Decision-making should be spread amongst many hands at all levels of government (and beyond), and if you’re relying on a group of nine judges in Washington to determine the moral direction of your nation, you’ve invested in a very empty dream.
Daniel: I stumbled upon this six-year-old piece from The American Conservative that makes a provocative observation. Author Chris Wray posits that most Americans’ conception of political power and agency has become so singly focused on the federal government that many of us have lost the ability to conceive of solutions to societal problems that don’t begin and end there, or that lie outside of national political narratives. “We are centralizing power in practice because we are erasing the alternatives from our minds,” writes Wray. “We have forgotten that the regulation of human societies can come from communities, from states, and from civil society—and so, increasingly, it can’t.”
The author discusses how our telling of our own history often erases the complex, bottom-up ways in which policies and institutions actually came to be. And he mentions the curious phenomenon of state and local office-seekers talking mostly about national issues in their campaigns, something that I have experienced with dismay as well.
Lauren: This week I found a YouTube series called “Sweet Digs,” in which people show off their (mostly itsy bitsy) living spaces in various U.S. cities. My sister-in-law, who lives in NYC, commented on how inexpensive the apartments were while I watched in horror. It’s not the size of the apartments that wigs me out so much as the financial burden that comes with living in them. One thing we do agree on is that these people have some great style.
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Finally, from Alexa and all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Douglas Bataille, Rita Hawes, Paul Kopp, Leon Lindstrom, Wallis Meshier, and Curtis Rogers.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments or continue the conversation in the Strong Towns Community.