Posts by: adam

Create your own bike lane, for real

This past winter, we (meaning I) wrote about LightLane, a concept design for a lighting system that paints a virtual path around your bike at night to encourage cars to keep a safe distance. The idea caught the internet's imagination, so much so that it's soon going to be a real product: The video is kind of cool, and I… read more →

Cash for Clunkers is a hit. But does it work?

The unexpected popularity of the cash-for-clunkers program has sent congress scrambling to find more funding. About 250,000 people have taken advantage of the incentives to trade older cars for ones with better fuel efficiency, burning through the first billion dollars in about a week. The price tag of the program has given politicians something to argue about, but I'm interested… read more →

What’s the most Italian herb?

According to Chris Cosentino, it's mint. Chris is best-known for his artistry with organ meats (which, I confess, I love), but in his most recent blog post, he offers up a laundry list of ideas for mixing more mint into your meals: > * In Piedmont, fresh mint is added to agliata -- a mortar and pestle mix of garlic,… read more →

101 salads, in your face

This is why Mark Bittman writes for the New York Times, and I don't: 101 fairly awesome-looking salad ideas in one epic article. I'll be outsourcing full recipe duty to Mr. Bittman today. A couple of excerpts, chosen virtually at random, that I can happily get behind: > 4\. Shave raw asparagus stalks with a vegetable peeler. Discard the tough… read more →

“Eek! Markets! Wall Street! Bad!”

Paul Krugman digs into an issue that deserves more attention: will Goldman Sachs' use of derivatives to manipulate the carbon markets inevitably cause the sun to explode, blotting out all life on earth? Actually, he digs into the fearmongering surrounding cap-and-trade, and lays out some of the many reasons concerns about carbon market manipulation is overblown. This has been an… read more →

Wal-Mart launches Sustainability Index

By dint of its sheer size, pretty much everything Wal-Mart does is important. So the long-anticipated launch of the Wal-Mart Sustainability Index -- a company-led project to evaluate all of the suppliers whose products appear on Wal-Mart's shelves -- has met with a huge amount of scrutiny. The first version of the index is a simple 15-question scorecard (available here)… read more →

Recipe: pearl barley salad with summer squash and almonds

I had this salad at franny's, a restaurant in Brooklyn that you'd be wise to visit. franny's is a distinguished member of the new class of Neapolitan pizza-fetish parlors, but the non-pizza portion of its menu is equally beguiling. If you've ever cooked with fresh fava beans before, you know them to be a labor of love. I think they're… read more →

Urban waterways: Seoul peels back the pavement and reveals a river

About half the world's population presently lives in cities, and the proportion will increase to two thirds by mid-century. This trend is good for the natural environment, but also highlights the need to maintain the human environment within rapidly expanding urban areas. The New York Times recently highlighted a seemingly unlikely success: the city of Seoul recovered three miles of… read more →

The magic bus

The *New York Times* turns its attention to one of my favoritest topics: bus rapid transit, and in particular the astounding system in Bogotá, Colombia that has been so successful in reducing traffic and the associated emissions that it has qualified for hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon credits. Think of bus rapid transit (BRT) as an above-ground subway… read more →

Waxman Markey changes the climate in Australia

I've argued before that it only makes sense to consider Waxman-Markey as part of ongoing, twenty-year international negotiation, not as an endpoint or a piece of standalone legislation. One problem this presents is that international relations tend to be even more sluggish, boring and inscrutable than the parliamentary maneuvering that takes place in our own Congress, and certainly a lot… read more →
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