Family-friendly, easy, and safe group ride on Saturday, August 29th at 9am. Meet at 1211 Riverside Drive. You don't have to have a kid to join the ride, and it would be suitable to anyone who's just starting out on a bike.
An NPR science correspondent and writer of the parenting book Hunt Gather Parent has recently been writing a lot about food, especially ultraprocessed foods. In general, I have mixed feelings about her work - Hunt Gather Parent has some interesting insights I find helpful, but also falls back onto a lot of noble savage tropes that are awful and also ignores things like other cultures spanking, hitting, inequality of how boys and girls are treated, etc.
Her food reporting lately has been just abysmal. She has this story on ultra-processed carbs, which include something that could be interesting/useful - a water test. How fast does something dissolve in water could be a useful hermeneutic for thinking about how quickly you'll digest it, and how long it'll keep you full. Could be a neutral, useful tool!
But instead she claims that refined carbs are "predigested." That is so truly insane that it's stayed with me since I first heard the story. My spouse and I now, jokingly, call things like rolled oats predigested. After all, it doesn't include the hull anymore!
In a more recent article on kids' snacks, she recommends limiting children's snacks and also getting rid of all carby snacks, citing things like pretzels. I also think this can be an opportunity for something helpful - quick carb snacks aren't very satisfying, foods with fiber and protein will fill you up better. But also, kids run around a lot and sometimes need access to quick sources of energy.
Anyway. It's been bugging me for months, especially the predigested claim. Seems like wildly bad reporting to me.
>Four years into our Vision Zero plan, Nashville is approaching one of its deadliest years for traffic violence, especially for pedestrians and cyclists. There were three pedestrians killed in two separate crashes on Easter morning alone, and others killed in places we know to be problematic and yet refuse to change much: Nolensville, Gallatin, Murfreesboro. Most recently, an Australian tourist was killed when crossing in a marked crosswalk on Broadway. It’s only August, and we’ve already seen the deaths of twenty pedestrians, along with cyclists killed on Nashville streets
>These deaths are happening at a pivotal moment for Nashville. We have a new store of cash from Choose How You Move. We just hired a new director of our Department of Transportation. We will host NACTO next year, and our mayor is up for reelection. The political will, the money, and the city’s motivations are all there.
>Now the question is: can we actually do anything to make a difference?
I somewhat impulsively got a chipdrop in my front yard, which before was a pretty anemic mixture of non-native grasses, wild violets, and clovers. The previous owner was very fastidious about raking (we have a huge maple tree in the front yard) and mowing, which ultimately left the lawn sparse to begin with.
I've spread the mulch all over the front yard, but I'm a little at a loss about what to do next. I'm in zone 7a (Nashville), and I want to make a plan for the fall planting season. Before I plant anything else, would I need to add soil? The front yard is all partial shade.
I'm a moderately experienced gardener, but have normally done things in a rather chaotic way in my garden, and have realized that I need to have more of a plan for the front yard from here on out. So I guess my question is - how do I plan my next steps from here on out?
Hi y'all. I've been building benches in Nashville with some friends for about a year now. The response by city government here has been... kind of crazy. We've built about a hundred of them. The city isn't at all sure what to do or how to respond to our TU benches. Clearly some government employees like them and the project and want to keep them, but others are genuinely angry. There have been attempts by councilmembers to find ways to make them "legal". It's been a very interesting journey.
I know Nashville is far from the only city with bench building initiatives. For those of you who have lead bench building initiatives, what has your city's response to them been?
(I'm writing something for Substack and the comparison to other cities would be helpful, just an fyi)
>Of all Tennessee cities, Chattanooga has the most appeal for urbanists - on paper. Downtown Chattanooga features a long pedestrian bridge over the Tennessee River, a highly walkable district with shops and museums, protected bike lanes, a free trolley to shlep tourists about, and old school gridded streets to form its core neighborhoods. But Jon Jon told me that things are not as good as they might appear, at least to the residents of Chattanooga.
>For one thing, the urbanist playground of downtown doesn’t extend to the rest of the city, and unsurprisingly leaves lower income residents high and dry, often stuck on dangerous roads. Furthermore, Chattanooga lacks transparent numbers on pedestrian and cyclist deaths, unlike Nashville, which makes advocacy harder. Chattanooga also lacks a low-barrier homeless shelter, meaning that many people are stuck on the streets when they’re struggling, even when conditions are dangerous for them to be outside.
>The last time Metro Parks independently designed, funded, and built a new greenway segment was 2018...
If we want our parks and greenways to keep up with citizen demand, then we have to start talking about this issue in public. It is not sufficient that Metro Parks has built one mile of greenway in the last decade, nor is it appropriate that they hide this number behind greenway projects built by others. What happened to the Seven Mile Creek Greenway - the squandering of $400,000 in federal dollars for a greenway expansion, and the subsequent misappropriation of those funds for a bathroom in a floodway - should be a wake up call for any Nashvillian who is interested in bettering our parks and greenways systems.
>People experience infrastructure socially before they experience it technically. Our built environment — whether we dodge cars or stand on bulbouts, whether we must drive or have other options to move freely and safely — is loaded with moral weight. Infrastructure elements become symbols of who the city is investing in, who belongs, and who may no longer belong soon.
On US urban planning, gentrification, race, class, the public health elements of transit and cycling infrastructure
>A few days later, across town, another homeless man died to traffic violence in Nashville. Billy Ray Swaner was 58 when he was struck by a semi-truck turning right. He appears to have been in the crosswalk at the time that the semi hit him. He died very publicly at a busy intersection in the middle of the day. Police claimed his death happened because he fell down, preemptively absolving the driver...
>Billy Ray and Hershel aren’t even the only homeless people who have died in Nashville while biking or walking in recent weeks. Another man, Larry Wallace “Pops” Smith was killed by the driver of a pickup truck on Second Avenue while riding a bike. Smith was housed at the time of his death but had a history of homelessness. He formerly lived in Nashville’s Old Tent City. In March, another homeless man named Clifford Coleman was killed while walking on Ewing Drive.
On homelessness & traffic deaths in Nashville
>...to love your child and to fear for their safety in their own neighborhood compels one to reject that kind of narrative, just like Howe rejected war as the natural course of things or Jarvis accepted infant mortality as normal. Mothers, again and again, are compelled by love to demand change when change seems impossible.
>The world wants us to accept violence, but motherhood makes that impossible. That is the celebration at the heart of Mother’s Day, that a love so remarkable exists in this world.
To me, this is a sentiment that underlies a lot of mother's activism, including in the "moderately granola" aspects