Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

 

Have you noticed that Strong Towns has a new look? This week, we rolled out our refreshed branding, which you can find out more about here, if you’re curious. Our old logo and colors were with us for 10 years, and now we’re ready to update our look—as a nod to how this movement has grown in that decade. A big thanks to those of you who have been with us since the “classic” logo was first conceived of, and to those who joined at some point along the way, including recently. We hope you all like the new branding as much as we do!

 
 

Comment of the Week:

This excerpted comment came from our LinkedIn. Join the conversation here!

 
 

Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:

(Source: NASA.)

John: Like the rest of the world, I was transfixed by the first images released this week from the James Webb Telescope. Photographs of stars being born. Of stars dying. Images that take us back in time—it boggles the mind—to just 600 million years after the Big Bang. Powerful enough to detect the heat of a bumblebee on the moon, the James Webb Telescope is a marvel. My favorite Webb image so far is the “Cosmic Cliffs.” It looks like the kind of landscape scene I might photograph in the desert southwest, but what we’re looking at is a “stellar nursery” and the so-called cliffs are seven lightyears high. 

I remember watching a documentary a few years ago about the New Horizon spacecraft and the images it was sending back from Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. I was kind of overwhelmed as I considered just how much was happening out there in the universe. It was also weirdly comforting to know that all that happening was happening beyond human attention. Galaxies are forming and colliding, a storm is raging over some mountain peak on some planet, black holes are sucking up stars like boba through a straw—and there’s not a soul to see it. Whether we’re gazing at the stars or at the mysteries in our own backyard, exploration shouldn’t lead only to the accumulation of knowledge, but also the deepening of humility. Looking at these first extraordinary images from Webb, I feel awe, I am humbled.

This isn’t what you’ll find in the suburbs. (Source: Unsplash.)

Tayana: I recently saw a semi-viral post where someone asked why people would prefer to live in the American suburbs over a European city if they had the chance to live in both. I noticed something interesting in the comments. Out of 39 responses, 13—a whole third—said something along the lines of: Living among nature on acres of your own land with your own goats and chickens with nobody around is much better than city life! Sure, totally, I understand this opinion. But…that’s not what the tweet asked. This description is not of the suburbs, this description is of a rural lifestyle. It was a lightbulb moment for me. Are we not understanding each other? The suburbs are not the countryside. They are not “among nature”; you don’t have the freedom to own farm animals in the suburbs, nor are you usually surrounded by acres of your own land with no one around, etc. I understand the appeal of this kind of lifestyle and why many would prefer it over city life. But this isn’t the suburban experiment that we are talking about and critiquing. It is important to understand the distinctions or we end up speaking different languages and wondering why we’re not on the same page.

Lauren: Check out this good find on Twitter—I'd add my commentary, but it really speaks for itself.

(Source: Unsplash.)

Daniel: Rebecca Solnit, always one of my favorite essayists, explores in this piece the provenance of a 300-year-old violin owned by David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet. Each material that went into its creation has a story, from the varnish (“shellac made from a secretion of the lac insect in south Asia, or just pine sap and some kind of vegetable oil”) to the bow (horsehair from a stallion or gelding) to the wood (“pernambuco wood from Brazil’s Atlantic forests” was historically highly valued for the very specific timbre it produced).

Solnit ties a discussion of contemporary deforestation and climate change to this peek into the sort of material culture that could produce an instrument that would give back joy to listeners for over three centuries. It is the exact opposite of mass production, but, Solnit suggests, learning to treat the world of tangible things with this level of deep care and attention has its own rewards: “The sheer thrift of an instrument lasting so long said to me that maybe you could have magnificent culture with material modesty, that the world before all our fossil fuel extraction and burning could be plenty elegant, and maybe that the world we need to make in response to climate change can feel like one of abundance, not austerity.”

Stephen King writing in the 1980s.

Shina: I confess: I've never read anything by Stephen King before. I like horror movies, but I don't usually go for horror novels. However, at the urging of a friend, I finally read King's book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and enjoyed every minute of it. I don't know that I'll take all of his advice (Avoid adverbs and passive tense? Sure. Write 1,000 words every day? Have you got any idea what a slow writer I am??), but even the stuff I'm choosing to disregard was still worth reading. By the end of the book, I not only felt inspired but also had a new, weird, intimate knowledge of King's life story.

Maybe that's why it was such a punch to the gut when he described, in terrible detail, his experience as a pedestrian after being struck by a car. Or maybe it felt so terrible because, as part of my job, I spend every day reading about making streets safe—and here was a prolific horror novelist describing how it feels when they're not. What's worse is that I "read" it as an audiobook, which King narrated himself. Hearing him recount in his own voice that, while he was being wheeled down a hospital corridor with so many shattered bones and a faltering consciousness, he said to the staff, "Tell [my wife] Tabby I love her very much"... Well, here's another confession: Stephen King made me cry pretty hard.

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Michael Bagley, Ryan Breaker, Kathryn S Downing, Abraham Drude, Randy Ethan Gilbreath, Brent Finnegan, Jacob Paul Fischer, Michael Foote, Darrien Glasser, Adrian Glenn, Dave Goldin, Steven Harrell, Kimberly Head Amos, John Hooker, Susan Hoover, Frank Liu, Dianne Loridans, Mary Mayrose, Jon McKinley, Sarah Moore, Chris Olin, Jon Peters, Olga Ronay, Patrick Ryan, Mike Shoup, Tara Stansberry, Sarah Story, and Rachel Treanor.

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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!

 
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