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When I'm visiting the haunts where great stories are found — pool halls, bathroom stalls, coffee shops, comedy clubs — I am looking for ideas on new fixes to less new social problems.
A couple of the irons in the fire right now are on mental health reporting. One is a look into the fascinating world of service dogs trained to detect and intervene on suicidality in patients with PTSD. Another one is following behind a group of folks working to translate mental-health research data into policy.
I also look for emergent ideas in the climate crisis. The first link below is my recent short piece on what happens when big oil gets into Direct Air Capture.
In general, I bring a decade+ of experience in editorial with bylines in the Independent Lens TV blog; Lateral Magazine; Bay City Beacon; Daily Climate; A Beautiful Perspective; Wired; MTV; Time Out Guide; Berkeley Ecology Center, and the PBS-affiliated KQED. My style aims for brevity without sacrificing nuance and detail.
In the race to remove the trillion tons of excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the treatments we choose for this problem ought to at least be slightly better than the problem itself.
It takes 2,700 liters of water to grow the cotton for one "Nevertheless, She Persisted" or "We Should All be Feminists" T-shirt, often sewn by a worker making just a few dollars per day. "Let's take a look at where that T-shirt was made. Where are the rights of the woman at the other end?"
September brings the end of summer vacation and the equally sobering National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. I wanted to write a suicide myth-buster, but from a mental health standpoint, it's a tough subject. Social stigma doesn't make it any easier.
A seismic hum and what it could mean for the Earth Sciences community.
When National Geographic Magazine reported that about 94% of the world's vegetable seeds circa 1903 are now missing from the Earth, Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz promptly started work on a feature-length documentary about the seed saving movement.
As a lead in to the Independent Lens premiere of What Lies Upstream , which is an exposé about what led to a major source of water becoming poisoned after a disastrous chemical spill and the government's response thereto, take a trip down memory lane to look at how we used to warn people about pollution, chemicals, and other environmental hazards.
A survey of the trivial, the provocative and the outright revolutionary since the discovery of the double helix.
While the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously since 2013 for full divestment from fossil fuels, the San Francisco Employees Retirement System (SFERS) has postponed its decision, even in the face of dismal returns. SFERS is now accused of "dithering" on the financial challenges of climate change.
Flickr:Blakespot By Jennie Rose An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that's not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
So how do educators help kids become problem-finders when they don't know what the problem is or where the next one might be coming from? "A lot of people hate this word but I think we have to take it seriously, which is relevance," Pink said.
Flickr:Miish By Jennie Rose In his new book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, author Paul Tough makes the case that persistence and grit are the biggest indicators of student success. Being resilient against failure, he says, is the fundamental quality we should be teaching kids, and he gives examples of where that's being done.