My letter to the New Yorker’s editor in September led to a reporter, Zach Helfand, visiting and writing a story on me. They published it today (including spotlighting it, see below): Off the Grid in the Big City: It begins, “Josh Spodek disconnected the circuit breaker in his apartment, and now—thanks to solar-powered vegan stew—his carbon footprint is about that of three house cats.“ Along with the New Yorker piece,[…] Keep reading →

Conservatives have their ways of stopping themselves from thinking too. I’ll cover them in another post. Actually, everyone stops themselves from thinking and acting. For example, people of all backgrounds parrot some version of I care about the environment and act as much as I can, but I can’t do everything. I have to balance it with other real-life concerns, like safety for my children and how much time I[…] Keep reading →

Conservatives say that if you give people food and money, they won’t work for it and they’ll learn not to work. As Milton Friedman said, if you pay people to be poor, you’ll have a lot of poor people. Liberals say nobody wants to be poor. They don’t want to stay poor. If you don’t help them, they’ll drag on society. If you do, they won’t, and they’ll rise back[…] Keep reading →

Here are the notes I read from: Comments on Better Angels of Our Nature I finally finished Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature. I started it more than skeptical of its main thesis. The book is 800 pages long, so I’m sure I’ll oversimplify and not do it justice, but I recommend it so you can get his full message. He says that we are living in the least[…] Keep reading →

Here are the notes I read from: Comments on Better Angels of Our Nature I finally finished Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature. I started it more than skeptical of its main thesis. The book is 800 pages long, so I’m sure I’ll oversimplify and not do it justice, but I recommend it so you can get his full message. He says that we are living in the least[…] Keep reading →

If I talk about not flying, someone is bound to tell me how their spouse lives overseas so they have to fly to visit family or their mother lives on the other coast so they have to fly to see her on holidays and if she’s sick. People walking with disposable containers claim the store cashier gave them the bags and packaging. What could they do? We claim we’re helpless[…] Keep reading →

Kids today might not have watched All in the Family, but it was huge in its time and focused on a clash of cultures. Quoting Wikipedia, All in the Family is an American television series that ran for nine seasons, from 1971 to 1979. The show revolves around the life of a working-class father and his family. It broke ground on issues previously considered unsuitable for a U.S. network television[…] Keep reading →