Leadership

I feel honored that Kosmos Journal's Summer Quarterly 2020 published my first piece for them, Our Finest Hour, If We Choose. Kosmos Quarterly | a peer-reviewed e-journal of transformational writing, spoken word, video, music and art. Each Kosmos Quarterly is a deep dive into a special theme through the lens of transformation. Kosmos convenes a new Editorial Circle, each season to cross-pollinate ideas and share the fruits of their practice around the emerging theme of the Quarterly. The magazine is beautifully laid out and written, containing equal parts aesthetic beauty and thought-provoking content. Here's the cover: Here are the contents, including my piece: My piece: Our Finest Hour, If We Choose By Joshua Spodek Expert management is saving lives in this crisis. But we lack leadership. Understanding the difference…

Few associate environmental action with the American political right. Many think that community doesn't care about clean air, water, and land. I don't buy it. I think they care as much as anyone. How they act is another story, but I see almost no one on the American political left acting any more. I believe politics has made a wedge issue out of something everyone cares about, leading one side to smugly say they're right while not acting, while the other says, "you're telling us what to do buy you aren't doing it yourselves," so nobody acts and everyone feels self-righteous. Rob Harper and I have been recording conversations regularly on the lockdown, which leads us to talk about politics around the environment. Before then,…

People keep citing Elon Musk as helping the environment. As best I can tell, most things he does harm the environment---that is, they lower the earth's ability to sustain life and human society. He might think he's helping, but I see the pattern going the other way, as I described in my podcast post and episode, Technology won't solve environmental issues and you know it. One electric car compared to an internal combustion engine car saves fuel, but he wants to sell as many as possible. His overall strategy increases overall consumption, just as the Watt steam engine led to more coal use despite being more efficiency, just as Uber increases miles driven and congestion. Speaking of transportation, on public transit he said: I think…

[EDIT (May 4): My third TEDx talk just went up. I recommend watching it.] I gave the following talk for My Green Lab's Sustainability Summit. I recommend watching it to the end. It's based on my third TEDx talk, for TEDxConnecticutCollege, which TED is still editing but should appear soon. We're probably all used to keynotes delivered from people's homes, but on March 24th it was still new. The people I mention in the talk My sledding hill, covered in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "the hill on the northwest side of the house was called Tommy's Hill, considered for generations one of the best sledding hills in the city."The Tamzine, the little ship of Dunkirk whose picture I showed, now at the Imperial War Museum in…

I gave the lead off keynote talk at the 9th annual Sustainology, hosted by the Swedish American Chamber of Commerce at Citi's headquarters in Tribeca, Manhattan on November 12, 2019. 12 Nov. 2019 New York NY USA Sustainology Summit 201912 Nov. 2019 New York NY USA Sustainology Summit 201912 Nov. 2019 New York NY USA Sustainology Summit 201912 Nov. 2019 New York NY USA Sustainology Summit 2019 Sustainology's mission "An Impact Unicorn is a disruptive company impacting over 1 billion people"Let's measure the success of unicorn companies through impact instead of dollars! In a single day, 'Sustainology Summit — One Billion' will bring together and demonstrate how at least one billion lives will be affected and improved from participating companies' work and products that are…

How obesity spreads You probably heard about a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study, The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years, implying that Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, according to researchers. When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight too as the New York Times stated in, Obesity spreads to friends, study concludes. It continued: people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased one's chances of becoming obese by 57 percent.There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less of an influence than friends. It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles…