Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Strong Towns senior editor Daniel Herriges with his daughter, on a snowy Christmas Eve in Minnesota.
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.
At Strong Towns, we were all getting back in the swing of things on Monday after some time off over the holidays. We kicked off 2021 as our Year of Action and announced our Local-Motive Tour—a series of 10 online events all geared towards helping you take action in your place (Grab your ticket now, if you haven’t already!) And then things got pretty wild and scary on Wednesday, as we all know.... This nation desperately needs to pull itself back from the brink, and part of that work starts at the neighborhood level. If you’re out there participating in local democracy, advocating for what’s needed in your community and supporting your neighbors, you’re doing the hard work to build a strong town and, together, a better nation. Thank you for all that you do. We’re honored to walk with you on that journey.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Daniel: This New York Times piece on East Cleveland is a gut-wrenching reminder that Americans are not all experiencing the same pandemic—not even close. Poverty is a dramatic force multiplier for nearly every disruption to life caused by COVID-19. In a community already deeply fragile from decades of disinvestment and depopulation, the direct effects of loss of income and in-person services and social supports reverberate in a thousand devastating indirect ways, beginning to unravel the social fabric among people for whom social capital is everything (as it always is when financial capital is scarce). This reporting illustrates that in painful specifics. Not an easy read, but an important one.
Rachel: This interview, conducted by occasional contributor and friend of Strong Towns, Gracy Olmstead, is a conversation with author Leah Libresco Sargeant. It’s a thought-provoking discussion about different ways of defining “feminism,” and widening its identity to make room for conservative women too. Plus there’s a nice shout-out to Strong Towns near the end. I encourage you to read it with open eyes—no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. One thing the incidents of this week showed us is that we can’t let an extremist fringe dominate our rhetoric. We need to start finding more common ground and walking our country back from the polarized edge.
Lauren: Take muffins to some of your neighbors this week. Here’s my new favorite recipe. The blackberry-lemon-thyme trio is delightful, sweet and a little savory. And if you leave out the flavoring ingredients, this is a phenomenal base to add your own spin on. Stay well.
Chuck: I often use this space to share my passion for science, archeology, and basic curiosity leading to inquiry. I ascribe heartily to the equation “Water + Sewage = Sewage” and the equally valid “Science + Politics = Politics”. Some of you wired to think like me might remember how, in the very early days of the U.S. portion of the pandemic, we were told (quoting from a research paper published in Nature) that the data “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct”, a claim that tripped my alarm bells since it (a) asserted something that, to my understanding, might be true but couldn’t be proven and, thus, (b) didn’t sound like a valid scientific conclusion. Throw in election year politics and I felt like a whacked conspiracy theorist for continuing to entertain the idea that this conclusion was an outcome of Science + Politics. This article in New York Magazine was soothing to my psyche. If you are interested in the type of scientific questions we should always be asking, this long article is worth reading.
John: Alfred Melbourne was released from prison in 2016, having served an 18-year sentence for gun and assault charges. After working for a time as a phone installer and forklift driver, he came across an overgrown piece of land in West Sacramento, all that was left of what had once been a community garden. Over the next three months he transformed it back into a garden. That, in turn, led to the creation of 3 Sisters Gardens, a nonprofit in West Sacramento that cares for several urban farms, runs a CSA, and employs at-risk youth to keep them off the streets. “Out here, [the young people] learn that they have a responsibility,” Melbourne told Modern Farmer magazine. “No one really gave me a responsibility. They gave me a gun. I’m trying to give these youngsters every opportunity that I didn’t have.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: C.T. ("Kit") Anderson, Joseph Beim, Peter Bess, Miles R. Fidelman, Elizabeth Hart, Margaret Hruschka, Christine Kahlow, Joy Khalil-Juwaynat, Cecile Kirouac, Shauna Mecham, Matthew Parker, Polly Rickert, Sunjana Thirumala Sridhar, Brian Voerding, Emily Wicks, and Claire Willett.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments.