Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

This week at Strong Towns, we got to publish the first major article from our resident Copy Editor and Designer, Shina Shayesteh. It tells the story of her family's experiences with multigenerational living, and why living with extended family is often associated with immigrant households...even though it shouldn't be.

In other news, we're including a new section here in the Friday Faves, where each week we'll be featuring a comment left on one of our articles. We get so much insightful feedback from our audience, and we wanted to create a space where we could showcase those comments that made us pause and think. Starting off this new tradition is a comment from this Wednesday's Upzoned episode, which discussed the global energy crisis:

[At] 18:40 - "Why does anyone think that if you have all this excess spare capacity, that without any other adjustment, that the spare capacity isn't going to be negated by the effects they are going to get"

Michael Moore's, "Planet of the Humans" said the same thing. That any increase in energy generation from green sources would be negated by an increase in energy use.

A lot of people balked at his documentary, but he was right. It's like a person going to a buffet and pigging out instead of eating what they normally would. When we think something is abundant, we do not curtail our usage.

—Nevada Man

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

Image via Flickr.

Chuck: The debt ceiling impasse in Washington, DC, is prompting reconsideration of another so-called “extraordinary measure”: the creation of a trillion-dollar coin. While I don’t know where the idea originated, I first heard it described by Paul Krugman (and that did nothing to bolster its credibility). My favorite part of this short Axios article is the assertion that producing a trillion-dollar coin and then ceremonially depositing it at the Federal Reserve—in exchange for a trillion dollars that the Treasury can spend—can be done “without any impact to inflation.” Many economists have rationalized that the abstract nature of a currency allows this kind of flexibility by policymakers. The truth of that assertion has always rested on a broad degree of faith and trust in the institutions managing our financial system. At a time when trust is (rightfully) waning, this farce has the very real potential of not ending well.

Image via Unsplash.

John: Not long ago over dinner, I said to my wife and friends, “I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some level of civil war in this country within the next decade” (I know, I’m Mr. Happy Fun Guy.) Shocked, one of my friends asked, “What percent chance do you think there is?” “I don’t know...three percent,” I replied. “But even one percent is huge because it means the previously unthinkable has now become thinkable.” 

David French is a senior editor at the conservative publication The Dispatch, a writer and podcaster, and someone whose work I’ve turned to regularly over the last couple years to help me understand the current political moment. His most recent Sunday column was called “A Whiff of Civil War in the Air.” In it, French unpacks a recent poll that found that 52% of Trump voters and 41% of Biden voters strongly or somewhat agree it’s “time to split the country.” More than 80% of both groups of voters sincerely view the other as representing “a clear and present threat to American democracy.” French goes on to describe the cycle of malice and misinformation that widens the riff between neighbors and threatens our republic. What is most discouraging for me personally—as it seems to be for French—is not that there’s no 5-point policy plan that can fix all this; rather, it’s that potential forces for charity, grace, and neighborly truth-telling have become compromised or complicit.

Théodore Géricault, “Monomania of Envy.” (Image via WikiCommons.)

Daniel: Jonathan Haidt’s work in moral psychology is a significant influence on Strong Towns and how we approach communicating across political, partisan, and moral difference; you’ve seen his name in this space before. I particularly enjoyed this essay about “monomania,” or “obsession with one thing.” The monomaniac is someone who believes that a single narrative or analytical frame suffices to explain the world around us, or gives us the—not a—road map for solving its problems. What logically follows from this obsessive tunnel vision is that the battle of ideas is zero-sum: the monomaniac perceives anyone with a different analysis, set of priorities, or identified villains as an active threat to their fight to improve the human condition.

The alternative to monomania is, of course, not nihilism or a naïve “every opinion is valid” relativism, but to recognize that many people and groups possess some piece of the truth that you can learn from and integrate with what you think you know—even if you don’t embrace their politics wholesale.

Our Mehregan decorations.

Shina: This past weekend marked the Zoroastrian holiday of Mehregan, which is both an ancient harvest festival and a celebration of love and friendship. Due to the ongoing pandemic, many Zoroastrians celebrated online this year in lieu of meeting with loved ones in person. I like the way this article put it in the Tehran Times: "Mehregan observed online to renew friendships." Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I feel a subtle sense of agency granted in that wording. Isolation has taken its toll on the world, but people still seek out ways to affirm our love for each other, in the absence of physical connection. It reminds me of the "bise boxes" that French students used to pass notes of affection to each other, after being discouraged from giving cheek kisses (la bise) during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. I, too, tried to capture this sentiment through the poetry I included in my Mehregan decorations:

“Like a tree in spring, my life is full of blossom,

I have a lap full of flowers—who should I give them to?”

Who in your life will you give your proverbial flowers to, this year?

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Jonathan Boyd, Jason Cook, Clifford Coulter, Andrew Fenner, Suza Francina, Cooper Frost, Kathryn Keller, Eli Smith, Bjorn Sorensen, and Houston Watson..

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