Joshua, Author at Joshua Spodek - Page 9 of 244

Climate Week NYC: Slimy and Duplicitous, causing the problems they complain about.

Hands on Practical Experience / Leadership

Climate Week NYC: Slimy and Duplicitous, causing the problems they complain about.

Climate Week NYC was a month or so ago, but its sliminess lingers. I'm writing this post not to complain, but to call attention for the need for leadership, integrity, and credibility. I saw none there, but huge demand for it. I haven't engaged yet with the event planners so attended passively, therefore include myself in showing no leadership there. It's further motivation to finish my next book, which will be my platform for taking responsibility and leading. In the meantime, people act performatively---that is, as if they were helping, but doing nothing effective, or more often counterproductive. Take, for example, the first thing on display at one of the main events, a race car. Is the idea that its being electric means it helps?…

October 29, 2025

When I mess up doing a sidcha: I get to practice integrity

A recent morning burpee

Fitness / Habits / SIDCHAs

When I mess up doing a sidcha: I get to practice integrity

I'd been meaning to write a post like this since what I'm about to describe happens every now and then. Part of the value of a sidcha is developing the skill of integrity. As with any performance-based activity, we learn to practice integrity through practicing the basics. There are probably many basic practices for integrity, but sidchas are a good one. I can think of few things more valuable to learn than to live with integrity to one's values. My evening burpee-based calisthenics usually involves 27 burpees. How I do them depends on my six-day exercise cycle. On rest days, I do three sets of 9. Tonight's set was four sets of 6 followed by a set of 3. Today was busy. My mind was…

October 28, 2025

A video tour of Drew Gardens, fall 2025

Nature / Visualization

A video tour of Drew Gardens, fall 2025

Today I posted about My fifth annual cooking workshop at Drew Gardens: pictures and video. I also made these two videos to show off Drew Gardens. I don't think I posted a walk-through before. Anyone wondering how much they can change a neighborhood will love these videos. For context, here is what Drew Gardens looked like before, barren and strewn with garbage. After looking at it, watch the videos. The first video is about three and a half minutes of me giving a more full tour. I start at the southern end, which abuts the Cross Bronx Expressway. You'd think that proximity would ruin a garden, and it probably did when all the land you'll see was bare of foliage and scattered with used tires…

October 27, 2025

My fifth annual cooking workshop at Drew Gardens: pictures and video

Doof / Education / Nature

My fifth annual cooking workshop at Drew Gardens: pictures and video

I love Drew Gardens' space and community. Every year I lead a workshop on cooking, though less now about low-cost, low-waste cooking. Now I focus on helping them create a food coop there. The city has some programs I consider "push," where they try to supply fresh, local produce to the community. Having grown up with parents who, because they struggled to make ends meet, started a family food buying club to save time and money while increasing quality, which folded into a coop, which helped even more, I see the potential for a "pull" effort. Starting a coop Starting a coop takes work, but it's a labor of love, and the Drew Gardens crew loves the work they do. Check out my other post…

October 27, 2025

This week’s selected media, October 26, 2025: The SCUM Manifesto, The Eye of the Storm, A Class Divided, Dirtbag Billionaire, The White Rose movement

Tips

This week’s selected media, October 26, 2025: The SCUM Manifesto, The Eye of the Storm, A Class Divided, Dirtbag Billionaire, The White Rose movement

This week I finished: The SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas: I'd heard about this book, or manifesto, by the woman who shot Andy Warhol. I listened to a podcast or two about it first. They couldn't tell if the author was serious and crazy or sarcasm or what. Seeing as how she shot an innocent person, I'm inclined to think she's crazy. The diatribe is bizarre. I kept wondering what would happen if a man wrote it with the sexes reversed, would he be locked up. Mostly I thought of the pattern I can't prove but seems to apply every time I check: when someone insults someone, they're describing themselves more than the other person. Next mostly I thought of the society that could lead…

October 26, 2025

How “helping” people with disposable goods, especially plastic, isn’t helping compared to reusable. It’s not hard to switch back.

Nature / Nonjudgment / Tips

How “helping” people with disposable goods, especially plastic, isn’t helping compared to reusable. It’s not hard to switch back.

Regular readers know I volunteer to deliver food that stores were going to throw away to groups that make it available for free to anyone who wants it, and sometimes to people directly, always for free. The context: free food distributed with disposable plastic One of the groups, Food Not Bombs, distributes food that many volunteers bring. They also distribute for free hot food that they cook. I believe all the food they cook is made from food that would have been thrown away, though maybe small ingredients like spices, salt, and oil might be bought. People who want the hot food get in line. When served, they are given the food in disposable containers in their choice of plastic or paper (lined with coating)…

October 25, 2025

Why form is important in lifting weights, especially Turkish Get-Ups

Fitness / Visualization

Why form is important in lifting weights, especially Turkish Get-Ups

In case you can't make out the image below, it was lesson number one in the importance of proper form in doing Turkish Get-Ups. In particular, it's a dent in my floor in the shape of the bottom edge of one of my kettle bells. If you lose control of a kettle bell while doing a Turkish get-up, especially when you're holding it high above your body and the floor, you can try to regain control, but there's a good chance it will hit the floor hard. That dent is where a kettle bell hit when I lost control because I lost my form. It happened something like five years ago. I mention that this dent was lesson number one. Lesson two was the weight…

October 24, 2025

Movies so great that they spoil me for other movies

Art / Creativity

Movies so great that they spoil me for other movies

I've talked a lot lately about a few movies that have spoiled me for most other movies. That is, I find them so meaningful that other movies might entertain but don't compare in value they bring to my life. After seeing them, if any other movies resemble them, I can't help but try to compare them and the other ones don't measure up. The movies that spoil me for other movies that I've seen lately include Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day, and Tokyo Story. Older ones include Fanny and Alexander and The Best Intentions. I have to watch The Grand Illusion again to see if it qualifies. Maybe Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Annie Hall. What I love about these movies is that…

October 23, 2025

The joy of learning from people I diametrically disagree with (I recommend the practice)

Education / Habits / Tips

The joy of learning from people I diametrically disagree with (I recommend the practice)

I've written before about a practice I've come to see as a part of maturation: reading and studying people I disagree with---the more opposition, the more I value the learning. I mean more than just learning their views. I mean empathizing with them, learning the sources of their views, and reaching a place where what they say makes sense. Reading, learning, and understanding don't mean agreeing or supporting. On the contrary understanding to the point where they feel understood enables you to lead them. For example, if a pro-choice person says a pro-life person just wants to control women's bodies or a pro-life person says a pro-choice person wants to kill babies, each has undermined their ability to influence the other. When I tell people…

October 22, 2025

Hear my second time on the Heritage Foundation podcast The Power Hour with Jack Spencer

Audio / Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience / Leadership / Podcast

Hear my second time on the Heritage Foundation podcast The Power Hour with Jack Spencer

It's been close to a year since I first appeared on the Heritage Foundation's podcast The Power Hour, hosted by Jack Spencer, who has been a guest on my podcast three times. First, I enjoy Jack's hosting both as a guest and a listener. I really was laughing as hard as I said when I came on. You'll hear me share more about how America's founders, Lincoln, Adam Smith, and other Enlightendigenous thinkers inform my views and actions. To my credit, I think I convey important thinking about sustainability based on what we need for society to work. It won't work if anyone can just do what they want. Roles for government include ensuring the consent of the governed and protecting people's life, liberty, and…

October 21, 2025

Attend my fifth annual Cooking Sustainably workshop in the Bronx THIS SATURDAY

Education / Events / Hands on Practical Experience

Attend my fifth annual Cooking Sustainably workshop in the Bronx THIS SATURDAY

Come to my third annual cooking workshop at the wonderful Drew Gardens in the Bronx THIS SATURDAY. Click for all the logistics: Sustainable Living with Joshua Spodek Drew Gardens is one of New York City’s great gems. I love it there. You will too, along with my famous no-packaging vegan solar-powered stew. GREAT NEWS: Past workshops have led to Drew Gardens having their own solar panels, battery, and pressure cooker. Anyone can do what I've done and they're taking steps themselves. You can too! If you're near New York City, come, meet your neighbors, and learn to do what everyone else says is impossible, but I see is the future. If you don't mind my ranting a few sentences: I can't tell you how many…

October 20, 2025

This week’s selected media, October 19, 2025: The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The Wave (1981), Die Welle (2008), Lithium Extraction and “Green Capitalism,” Anything You Want, Hell Yeah or No

Tips

This week’s selected media, October 19, 2025: The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The Wave (1981), Die Welle (2008), Lithium Extraction and “Green Capitalism,” Anything You Want, Hell Yeah or No

This week I finished: The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon Wood: Wow, what a book. I'd never read a history like it. It didn't just present dates and events. It talked about how people lived, how their lives changed, how culture changed. I found it fascinating. I learned plenty, including areas I thought I knew well before. His perspective put me more in the moment, understanding changes from their perspective. The book contrasts with Howard Zinn's history of America. Wood's coverage seems as comprehensive and he seems as thoughtful, but he paints a very different picture. Wood loves America, though not blindly. His description of life in the colonies and how things worked before the revolution reveals how it differed from any other.…

October 19, 2025

Abolitionists didn’t free slaves by teaching children that slavery was wrong. Yes, they taught children, but they freed slaves by freeing slaves.

Education / Freedom / Leadership

Abolitionists didn’t free slaves by teaching children that slavery was wrong. Yes, they taught children, but they freed slaves by freeing slaves.

I've written that, yes, we should teach children about living sustainably, but teaching children doesn't solve the problems we're teaching them about. On the contrary, if we teach them to do what we aren't doing ourselves, they learn from our behavior, not our words. We will lead them to see polluting and depleting like cursing or drinking, something kids have to wait until they grow up to do but that is okay for adults to do as long as they mostly hide it from kids. I put it in the frame of smoking in my post Don’t “teach children sustainability”. Here’s why and what to do instead. I also wrote How environmentalists are like smokers who tell others not to smoke … while smoking. Today…

October 18, 2025

Everyone says that raising kids means you can’t avoid polluting and depleting. That’s colonialism.

Addiction / Freedom

Everyone says that raising kids means you can’t avoid polluting and depleting. That’s colonialism.

I've already written how polluting and depleting appropriate other people's lives, liberty, and property without their consent. Societies used to take other society's land---also known as colonialism---by invading or settling. Nowadays they avoid the risk of violence by addicting people. The opium wars were fought over incapacitating a population with opium. Now we do it with cell phones and hydroelectric dams. A new way of appropriating others' land is by sticking them with our poisonous waste, especially plastic. We can see piles of it from space and if we look at the details, we'll see that the shareholders profiting from it are people like you and me. We drink Coke, they live in our plastic waste. Raising kids, pollution, and depletion Everyone says that raising…

October 17, 2025

I missed a sidcha yesterday: picking up litter in Washington Square Park

Addiction / Doof / Habits / SIDCHAs

I missed a sidcha yesterday: picking up litter in Washington Square Park

Regular readers know my sidcha to pick up at least three pieces of litter from the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. While most of my sidchas I haven't missed, that one I've missed, maybe one or two times per year. The park could use more people picking up litter. No, the point of picking up litter isn't just the temporary removal of litter. Picking up litter makes not buying packaged food and doof easy. People act like avoiding packaged food and doof is hard. Partly they're addicted. Even if not, they still like that stuff and their jolt of a reward. Picking up litter daily leads you to feel repugnance and disgust toward those things. It's not hard to avoid things I find repugnant…

October 16, 2025

We respond differently when society conflicts with men versus with women

Awareness / Perception

We respond differently when society conflicts with men versus with women

I keep meaning to write a post on the pattern I keep seeing, but for the time being, I'm just going to collect and list examples of it. The pattern isn't perfect and anyone who thinks I'm suggesting it is misunderstands me, but the pattern I see is: When society conflicts with men, we say men have to change or take responsibility. When society conflicts with women, we say society has to change and we all have to take responsibility. I welcome counterexamples. I like to learn when I'm wrong. For now, I don't plan to go out of my way to find examples, just to post them as I find them. Here's the one that prompted me today to start the list: An event:…

October 15, 2025

How environmentalists are like smokers who tell others not to smoke … while smoking

Addiction / Habits

How environmentalists are like smokers who tell others not to smoke … while smoking

Below is an idea for the new book that I probably won't use so figured I'd share it here. I'm sure I'll use it in conversations with the media. I may develop it more. I like the idea. I should probably specify the behaviors of environmentalists whose counterparts I show in the smokers', though I hope it's obvious. For example, vaping represents all the technologies and efficiencies that people want to reduce pollution and depletion but augment it, like carbon capture, electric vehicles, and lighter packaging for doof. I see many environmentalists like cigarette smokers who tell others not to smoke while smoking themselves. They do the equivalent of the following: They get angry at Big Tobacco while not acknowledging that they themselves are funding…

October 14, 2025

If rivers and animals are people, then are no human people indigenous, only colonizers?

Nature / Nonjudgment

If rivers and animals are people, then are no human people indigenous, only colonizers?

I posted this question before in A paradoxical consequence of considering animals, plants, and rivers people, but wanted to pose the question more directly: If rivers and animals are people, then are no human people indigenous, only colonizers? That is, if we consider animals people, doesn't that they are indigenous and that humans who came into their territories are invading colonizers? I was reading about how humans crossed the Bering Strait, or at the time the Bering land bridge, then populated all of the Americas. To clarify, I'm not trying to prove anything in this post, nor to say "I'm just asking questions," then make a point with loaded questions, in the style of many media personalities. When I first heard the concept of making…

October 13, 2025

This week’s selected media, October 12, 2025: Tokyo Story, Talkin’ Greenwich Village

Tips

This week’s selected media, October 12, 2025: Tokyo Story, Talkin’ Greenwich Village

This week I finished: Tokyo Story, directed by Yasujiro Ozu: Someone in my meditation group recommended this movie after I spoke about how much Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day affected me. I didn't know what to expect. I'd never heard of the director or even the movie. I'm sure I'd seen the title since so many best-movie-ever lists include it. Many reviewers write how it is about a family but so universal that it's about all families. It seemed to me to be so universal as to be about life in general. Yes, it's about an old couple, their children, their children's families, and their grandchildren. It's also about times changing faster than people are prepared for, therefore about war and peace (it…

October 12, 2025

Tik Tok and Instagram or hands-on practical experience?

Choosing/Decision-Making / Hands on Practical Experience / Leadership

Tik Tok and Instagram or hands-on practical experience?

Two things I haven't kept track of but happen over and over: People saying, "Your material is great! You should promote it more on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc to make it available to more people." Me saying, "Leadership requires credibility and integrity, which require hands-on practical experience." Sure, I could go for the quick clicks as the guy off the grid in Manhattan. I could probably get a million followers, but to change global culture, continuing the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, requires a solid, deep foundation. I'm getting closer to launch all the time, but not there yet. The reason my material has value and meaning and that there is so much of it is that I'm not going for the quick clicks, which would…

October 11, 2025

Passing fancies and shiny objects sap life of meaning, if you don’t know your values and how to live them

Awareness / Choosing/Decision-Making / Exercises

Passing fancies and shiny objects sap life of meaning, if you don’t know your values and how to live them

I said the following words today and realized I had to post them here: Chasing shiny objects means you're running away from what you value. For background, I describe passing fancies in my book Initiative: Passing fancies are things we enjoy in the moment but don’t bring long-term emotional reward. Since everyone’s values differ, your passing fancies will differ from mine. Our world is full of passing fancies like social media, fun classes, action movies, and some friendships. Our culture bombards us with more. From grade school through commencement, mainstream education spreads us thin with classes, extracurriculars, double majors, triple minors, sports, after-school jobs, and so on—too thin to go into depth with any of them. Most jobs continue the pattern. Rarely do you act…

October 10, 2025

Artificial Intelligence pollutes and depletes. Using it won’t help sustainability.

Addiction / Doof / Nature

Artificial Intelligence pollutes and depletes. Using it won’t help sustainability.

I read an article, The Costs of the Cloud, by Ashley Dawson in the New York Review of Books and wanted to note for future reference how much artificial intelligence pollutes and depletes. When asked how they think AI will affect the environment, most people seem to respond to a different question: "Can you think of ways AI can help with the environment?" They're doing what I wrote about in my post Nearly everyone misses the danger of artificial intelligence we’re sleepwalking into. They don't ask if people extracting fossil fuels are using AI to further their goals, or their advertisers, lobbyists, scientists, engineers, and politicians. Or people who sell things that lead to more pollution and depletion, like fast fashion, travel, doof, and online…

October 9, 2025

Their motivation to make doof: to drive your emotional system to buy more

Addiction / Choosing/Decision-Making / Doof / Fitness / Freedom

Their motivation to make doof: to drive your emotional system to buy more

I was thinking about the people who manufacture addictive things like doof. If you believe that someone choosing to buy something means they valued what they bought more than what they paid for it, then you think that the more they buy, the more they've improved their lives. Then the more addictive you make the product, the more you sell. You can tell yourself that your profit means their life improvement. The way it looks to me is that science has figured out how to control the human emotional system more effectively than the person with that system, at least in some cases. They've learned to use short-term motivation to override long-term reward and ability to regulate oneself. Then it's a stretch to say that…

October 8, 2025

839: Saabira Chaudhuri: Consumed: Throwaway Plastic Has Corrupted Us

839: Saabira Chaudhuri: Consumed: Throwaway Plastic Has Corrupted Us

Reading Saabira's New York Times piece Throwaway Plastic Has Corrupted Us told me she saw more about plastic and its effect on our culture than most. A quote from it: "The social costs of our addiction to disposable plastics are more subtle but significant. Cooking skills have declined. Sit-down family meals are less common. Fast fashion, enabled by synthetic plastic fibers, is encouraging compulsive consumption and waste." Her tenure at the Wall Street Journal told me she would communicate it effectively, pulling no punches. As much as I prefer not to link to social media, this video review by Chris van Tulleken, bestselling author of Ultra-Processed People, is about as positive a review as I've seen, all the more since he clarifies that he doesn't know her.…

October 7, 2025

What I’ve bought this year besides food

Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience

What I’ve bought this year besides food

I tried to remember what I bought this year besides food. My doormen remark when a package arrives for me since I get a few per year. I ask if anyone else gets less. They say not even close. They tell me that some people receive more packages in some weeks than I do in a year, and many such weeks. As for food, I probably spend about $200/month, though I don't keep track. My biggest food cost is probably dried legumes in bulk. One example: I had been looking for a pair of shoes in my usual way: checking Craigslist and Offerup when I thought of it for a few months. My current pair has holes in the bottom. Since they're minimal, that means…

October 6, 2025

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