Scotland vs. Phoenix: Par For The Course?

View of the Old Course in Saint Andrews, Scotland. Image taken from the St Andrews links website.

Golf. It’s Donald Trump’s favorite sport, which is probably adjacent to at least some of the reasons why it’s one of the most controversial sports in today’s world. Indeed, do I even need to add the “probably” qualifier? Probably not.

On the surface, the sport is as simple as they get. All you need to do is hit a ball into a hole in as few “strokes” as possible. Seriously, could they not have chosen a less unfortunate word for it? To some extent, the sport is seen as “elitist” - a lot of people say that only rich people play it. 

Now, I might get some hate for this from my fellow progressives, but I’m not inherently against golf. If you don’t use a cart, it’s a good source of exercise, and it truly is a game of patience. These days, a lot of us could use more patience. But that’s not why the continued existence of the sport is so contentious.

Rather, the reason is due to its environmental impact and resource use. It’s no secret that in order to keep all that grass green, country clubs need to use a lot of water. Lots of Redditors complain about perfectly manicured lawns and how wasteful they are, but golf courses take up far more land and water than the average lawn.

It wasn’t always this way. You see, golf is considered to have begun in Scotland in the 15th century, and one of the oldest and most famous courses is the Old Course in the town of Saint Andrews. Now, because this was more than five hundred years ago, technology wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now. It was not yet possible to grow tomatoes in Norway, since greenhouses weren’t a thing. Likewise, it was far more difficult to make land something it wasn’t.

Much of Scotland’s coast is made up of linksland, a type of gently rolling sandy terrain with light elevation and short grasses throughout most of the surface area. At first, the coast was the only place where golf could be played, but as the game grew more popular, demand grew for more courses inland. But in order to understand why so many courses emulated the design of the linksland (though, since it’s naturally occurring, can we really call it “design”?), it’s helpful to understand what makes this landscape so ideal for golf.

As of October 2023, according to Scottish governmental sources, Scotland had nearly seven million sheep. This number is greater than Scotland’s human population, but is a slight decline from the previous year. The northernmost part of the United Kingdom has always been fertile ground for these adorable woolly creatures, and these creatures in turn made Scottish linksland into fertile ground for golf.

You see, sheep eat grass. This act is fancifully known as “grazing”, and it’s necessary for the sheep to survive. With so many sheep feasting on the verdant linksland near the ocean, this ensured that the grass would never grow extraordinarily high, certainly not prohibitively high for golf. No industrial-strength lawn mower would be necessary to keep the grass at the proper level - the sheep would take care of that!

Additionally, if you’ve ever been to a golf course (or even if you’ve merely seen a picture of one), you’ll know that there are pits known as sand traps. Golfers strive to avoid hitting their ball into these hazards, but they actually formed naturally at first. Whenever a storm hit in the oceanic climate of Scotland, sheep would burrow into the ground in order to escape the wind. The resulting holes in the Earth would become today’s sand traps, which is why they’re also referred to as “bunkers.” And whenever a golf bunker is brought up, I always picture this.

I’m not the sort of person to say that everything is preordained. Perhaps everything happens for a reason, but sometimes that reason is because you’re stupid and make bad decisions. In the case of golf, there’s an important reason as to why it originated where it did. And there’s a time and place for everything.

Now, I’m not naïve to the fact that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of skiing. But you’ve never been able to ski in Florida. 

The reader is probably wondering: Why the hell is he using such a ludicrous example to prove a point? And what point is he trying to prove, anyway?

In all my time on this planet, I have never seen or heard anyone complain, at least unironically, that you can’t ski in Florida. In all probability, I will pass from this Earth without ever hearing that. Florida is a popular destination for domestic tourists even in the face of Ron DeSantis’ horrific policies; the mass boycott of it, at least among Americans, is far more prominent online than it is in real life. 

But when it comes to skiing in Florida, everyone just accepts that it’s not the place for that. Nobody’s talked about building mountains on the Gulf Coast and trucking in boatloads of snow to create pistes. That’s just not something any serious person even brings up. If you want to ski, you don’t travel to Florida.

Golf in Arizona is a different story.

A Google Maps screenshot of some golf courses in Greater Phoenix, Arizona, United States.

The Phoenix metro area, also known as the Valley of the Sun, has a lot of golf courses. In fact, some estimates say it’s as many as two hundred. This would mean that the courses featured in this Google Maps screenshot are a fraction of the total, the ones who were able and willing to pay their “Google dues” to be featured more prominently. 

The mild, rainy climate of Scotland is an ideal location for golf. Yes, with climate change upon us, droughts will become more frequent in Scotland, but they’re still abnormal. Most of the time, it still rains enough to keep the courses relatively green without needing to water them an absurd amount.

Contrast this to Greater Phoenix. Yes, I am aware that the fifth-largest city in the US, with a metro area of about five million people, experiences a monsoon season. I’m not denying that. However, for most of the year, it’s dry enough in general that the word drought hardly means anything. If it’s a desert, to what extent can it really be called a drought as opposed to the way things are? 

That being said, as climate change gets worse, Phoenix will get dryer, and the continued maintenance of these two hundred golf courses will become increasingly difficult to justify. It’s already causing lots of problems, as this ArcGIS article explains.

I’ll confess that whenever I’m on Discord and talking to someone in Europe, a continent that largely designs its cities far more sustainably than the United States, I love telling them about Phoenix. It’s so insane that they can’t believe it! Or at least, they’re so shocked that it exists the way it does. And I realize that I have only so many stones to throw, given that I live elsewhere in the United States, one of the world’s biggest climate villains. But as shocking as most American cities are for Europeans, Phoenix is a particularly egregious example due to its sheer number of golf courses.

I talked to a friend of mine from Spain not long ago. I’m not going to name names, but he literally told me that whenever there’s a drought in his autonomous region, they aren’t even allowed to fill swimming pools. Meanwhile in Arizona, they keep the golf courses green no matter the weather, which has led many to brand Phoenix as the world’s “least sustainable city.”

Now, the problem isn’t so much building a city in the desert. There have been desert cities before - indigenous peoples lived in the area we now know as Phoenix for many centuries. But as far as we know, they didn’t have massive lawns and golf courses. 

Aerial view of a golf course in suburban Phoenix. Image taken from Meridian CondoResorts.

A different Native American group, the Iroquois, practiced the “seven-generation sustainability” principle. Decisions on environmental policies, particularly those related to natural resources, were meant to be filtered through the lens of making sure these resources could remain extant through seven more generations of such policies. As this blogger on indigenous issues in Canada notes, it was rather ironic that the authors of the U.S. Constitution referred to the indigenous peoples as “savages”, or maybe projection is the better word here.

To be clear, Phoenix is far from the only American city that can’t environmentally sustain itself. It’s only one instance of the suburban sprawl that swept the nation following its victory in World War II. Now, if anything, the United States wasn’t as helpful as some other Allies in defeating the Axis powers, but that's a separate conversation. 

But it is my belief that this country got too big for its britches after winning history’s deadliest armed conflict to date. Uncle Sam, the personification of the United States, probably thought: If we could beat the Nazis, we can build a giant, sprawling metropolis in the desert! 

Here’s the thing, though. Phoenix serves as an important exhibit in the following lesson: Just because you have the money to do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Trapped In The Drive-Thru

The meme posted above has been thrown around so frequently that it’s practically in the public domain at this point. I’m not sure exactly who created it, but in the highly unlikely event that this person reads my article and brings their identity to my attention, I will credit them. I think I’ve covered my bases here.

In any case, take a look at that photo. The caption is typically something along the lines of “30 American people waiting for coffee” versus “30 French people waiting for coffee.” It’s often used to mock either American urban planning or American café culture. 

Now, I should probably make clear that the specific images chosen for this meme are somewhat misleading. The “30 American people” photo of a suburban drive-thru in Anywhere, USA was taken in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the United States had far fewer pandemic-related restrictions on gatherings than most other countries (and our death rates speak for themselves), the photo isn’t inherently reflective of how it always looks here. Most restaurants were closed for indoor dining, making takeout or the drive-thru the only option.

Conversely, the “30 French people” photo is of a famous café in Paris. Of course, Paris is and remains one of the most-visited cities in the world, and the café in question is a well-known tourist trap near the Louvre. You can probably get considerably better coffee at a considerably lower price just a few blocks away. Additionally, given that it’s a tourist trap, some of the people in the photo are probably Americans. So the “30 French people” part is likely not true.

But let’s also be clear about something else: It doesn’t really matter that the photos are misleading. The overall point is still a very salient one.

It’s no secret that American suburbs, generally speaking, aren’t the best places to live if you don’t love driving. Then again, even if you do love driving, plenty of urbanists have argued that it’s more pleasant to operate a motor vehicle in a place where not everyone has to do it. Let’s have a look at that photo again.

According to the original source for this image, the location is Hicksville, New York. It’s in western Long Island, not far outside of America’s biggest city. But if I didn’t tell you that, you’d have no idea, because a lot of it looks the same as anywhere else in the USA.

Let’s talk about how depressing a drive-thru is. Basically, you get in your car and drive to the nearest fast food restaurant. Maybe there’s a lot of other cars, or if you’re lucky enough, you may escape bumper-to-bumper traffic. But if you’re getting dinner after a long day at work, that’s a big if.

Once you arrive at Mickey D’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s, or whatever other chain dominates your metroplex, you sit idling in your car as you pull in next to the restaurant. In the past, drive-thrus invariably had a human being working them, meaning that you at least had that modicum of interaction with another living thing. In fact, this is still largely true today, but McDonald’s briefly tried using AI voices for their drive-thrus last year. If anything, that makes it even more dystopian.

You wait in a line with several other cars. Again, if you’re lucky, several means seven just like David Jelinsky teaches us. If not, you could be stuck in a considerably longer line as they prepare your “food.” Even though Google Docs gave me a blue squiggly line here, I’m not removing the quotation marks, as I use the word “food” loosely here.

Once you get your Happy Meal or whatever they call them these days, you either drive home through even more intense traffic to enjoy it, or you just eat in your car while questioning your life decisions. If you went to a specific location in suburban Philadelphia on a specific day in October 2024, your non-biodegradeable fries might have been served to you by one Donald Trump. Remember that?

Now, look: They say McDonald’s is better in Europe than in the United States. Given the ingredients they put in the food here that they don’t use in Europe, not to mention the fact that other countries have unique menu items that aren’t found in America, I don’t doubt that this is the case. But is it really so much better that it’s worth skipping a meal at a far more authentic restaurant just to get a Big Mac? Quite frankly, I can eat as much fast food as I want on this side of the pond (and for the record, “as much fast food as I want” is “very little” for me).

Compare that to the café culture in many European cities. It’s perhaps ironic that the volume of your coffee in fluid ounces (or rather, milliliters) is a lot smaller in Europe, because people tend to linger over it for a far longer time. In America, most people just chug their coffee or soda and then toss it into the garbage can. Or, if you’re Morgan Spurlock, you toss it a different way.

By contrast, European coffee culture is about sitting at a table or bench beside a street lined with picturesque old buildings. You’ll take sip after tiny sip, possibly reading the newspaper (not that very many people do that nowadays in the United States or elsewhere - “possibly” might be doing some heavy lifting). If you’re the more outgoing type, maybe you’ve got a friend with you. You might discuss the events of the day, both in the wider world and in your personal lives. And of course, ordering your coffee and possibly a pastry actually entails looking at another person’s face.

Of course, I’m not going to say that everyone in Europe engages with this culture in its most complete form. Plenty of people there stare at their phones too - if anything, more people do while ordering because they don’t need to focus on other people in their cars. But the American drive-thru is truly one of the most isolating experiences a person can have in this country.

Think about that for a moment. The car in front of you might have anywhere from one to five or six occupants. Depending on the identities of the people within the vehicle, their stories and reasons for being there could vary wildly.

Maybe it’s a family on a road trip that happens to pass through your suburban area. In that case, perhaps the parents are exhausted from driving all day and don’t want to take the time to look at a potentially unfamiliar menu. Instead, they’d rather go to Burger King in Anywhere, USA (which has the same menu as Burger King in Anywhere Else, USA) and know exactly what they’re getting. It’s by no means gourmet, but it’s probably not horrible either. It’s consistent mediocrity, a “reliable level of shitty” just like Ryanair.

Or maybe the family isn’t on a road trip. Maybe they’re just tired from a long day at work or school, and the children disagreed about what they wanted to eat, and the parents didn’t really feel like cooking. So they aim for consistent mediocrity, figuring that if it’s a reliable level of shitty, it’s not that shitty. They’ll eat fast food that night and maybe cook the next day.

Or, perhaps, there’s only one person in the car. Maybe they’re on their way home from work and, like the hypothetical parents in our hypothetical family from the previous paragraph, they aren’t eager to whip up something edible. It could be a total stranger, or it could be the next-door neighbor whose name you’ve never bothered to learn because you’re too overwhelmed by the daily grind to form relationships with the people in your next pod over. 

If you stopped to talk to this person (even if only for a few minutes), it’s possible that you could learn a lot about them. Maybe they watch the same TV show as you. Maybe they’re fans of the same sports team, or maybe they play the same video games. Maybe there’s some other hobby that you two have in common, or at least would have in common if both of you had the energy for hobbies after such a commute. 

In order to truly form a bond, it would help if you two could leave your cars and find a place to meet. Even if it’s just a picnic table beside the parking lot, that’s still better than nothing. And once you spoke for a few minutes, and potentially established that you have some common interests, it could be that you’ll become close friends. In a different world, the person in the next car could have been your best friend. Or maybe you’re just completely different people with nothing remotely resembling compatible personalities. 

But if you never try (and in a drive-thru, you can’t try), you’ll never know. You’ll never know.

My Best GeoGuessr Plays: Version 2.0

Hello. As all of you know, most likely, I’m a big fan of GeoGuessr. You know it - it’s the computer game where you get plopped somewhere on Google Street View and you have to guess the location. In today’s article, I’ll be listing a few of my most memorable rounds since my last article three weeks ago.

Google Street View imagery within the GeoGuessr interface. Large detached homes with small lawns and abundant palm trees can be seen.

This round looks like any other upscale suburb from the American Sun Belt. That is, until you see the street signs!

In this round I saw giant McMansions amidst palm trees. This area looked relatively it car-dependent, and at first I was convinced I might be in Florida. After all, given the vegetation and architecture, it looks like it could be down the street from Mar-a-Lago. They say lots of places are starting to look the same these days, but what do I know?

But then I saw a white street sign, which is instantly a red flag if you’re tempted to guess in the United States. As most people who watch American movies will be well aware, our street name signs are green. The signs in this location were in English, suggesting an Anglophone country, but the cars were driving on the left. My first thought was Australia.

That in itself presents an issue, however, because Australia’s a pretty big country. Given the sheer number of palm trees present, I felt like it was Queensland as opposed to New South Wales or especially Victoria. So I ended up plonking just south of Brisbane, near the city of Gold Coast. And, lo and behold, I was correct, earning a point value in the 4700s.

Now, here’s the memorable part: My opponent guessed in the United States. And again, this was a Moving game, so they might not have had the same information as me. If not for the street signs and driving direction, it would be easy to guess southern California or Florida. However, my opponent guessed a location in the Midwest, which has no palm trees. At least, no palm trees that grow naturally! Needless to say, this guess got me the win against one of the dumbest opponents I’ve ever faced.

Google Street View imagery within the GeoGuessr interface. There is a wooden utility pole with a sign visible on it. This sign advertises a sealcoating/paving company with a phone number starting in 508.

I’ve previously written about how difficult it can be to region-guess the United States. I’m on record saying that trying to memorize all the hundreds of area codes might end up with you “smearing excrement on the walls of a padded room”. And to some extent, I stand by that assertion. 

You see, Turkey’s area codes are intuitive. Phone numbers beginning with 2 are in the western part of the country, those starting with 3 are in the middle of the country, and Eastern Turkey is served by area codes that start with 4. This makes sense, so it’s no wonder why the United States doesn’t do it this way. Rather than the “Turkish Delight” of simpler area codes, memorizing those in the USA might end up an American Bad Dream.

That being said, if you do know America’s area codes without going insane, power to you. It’s the best tool to regionguess the country, and it’ll almost always be enough to win that round unless your opponent is someone like Trevor Rainbolt. It also helped me during one particular round last week. As you can tell, a phone number featuring the 508 area code is visible, and as a Massachusetts resident myself, I knew that this code serves the Worcester area, the South Shore/Buzzards Bay region consisting of Bristol and Plymouth Counties, Cape Cod, and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. In fact, I’d seen a sign for “Bristol”, giving me a general idea of where to look for this code.

I scored in the low 4900s on this location in Westport, Massachusetts. Even though I ended up choking on the resulting comfortable lead, I still consider this round memorable because you never know what will come in handy.

Google Street View imagery (within the GeoGuessr) interface of land surrounding an oil refinery in a somewhat dry tropical climate. The street has double yellow central lines.

Oh boy. This one was a doozy.

I found myself in a tropical setting that otherwise looked like the United States. Street signs were green, and the signs said “SPEED LIMIT” rather than Canada’s “MAXIMUM” (not that Canada has any tropical zones) or Puerto Rico’s “VELOCIDAD MÁXIMA”. That’ll be important later. Additionally, the road’s center lines were deep yellow, and there were two of them.

My first thought was Hawaii. As you can tell from the images, this was an industrial zone containing what looked like an oil refinery. Clearly, this is not the Hawaii of the brochures and Instagram reels. 

I guessed Kauai, and I’m not sure exactly what possessed me to send Kauai rather than the more populated and industrialized island of Oahu. This cost me a couple hundred points (giving me a score in the 4600s as opposed to the 4900s). However, it only prolonged the match by one round, because my opponent guessed Puerto Rico.

Now, I suppose Puerto Rico does have a strong petrochemical industry. That’s what this Wikipedia article suggests, after all. It’s kind of ironic that Wikipedia has now become The One Reliable Source™  that must be Defended At All Costs™, but that’s America in 2025. In all seriousness, watching the replay, it looks like my opponent made a “panic guess” after I sent Hawaii and they only had fifteen seconds to plonk.

If they’d seen what I saw, though, I don’t think they would have guessed Puerto Rico. And I saw possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on street view while playing GeoGuess. Get a load of this:

Google Street View imagery within the GeoGuessr interface of a building advertising “Aloha Petroleum, Ltd.”

This honestly could have been its own article. I’m now aware that “Aloha Petroleum, Ltd.” is a chain of gas stations serving Hawaii that has about 60 locations. Of course, it’s no surprise that Hawaii is car-dependent like most of the rest of the United States. We can have a conversation any time about how, in the words of one Joni Mitchell, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot. But let’s leave the big yellow taxi alone.

Seriously, look at that. Aloha Petroleum. This felt Orwellian to me. Like, “Aloha”, the well-known Hawaiian word for both “hello” and “goodbye”, is associated with paradise on Earth. It’s the word you’re greeted with upon landing at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu, along with (allegedly) a flower necklace called a lei. At least, that’s what popular culture would have us believe.

So to put that word associated with a beautiful place with environmentally conscious people, and plop it right next to one of this world’s most destructive industries…it’s darkly comical. It reminded me of sayings like “alternative facts” or that time Donald Trump told a rally crowd in 2018 to disbelieve their own eyes and ears.

It’s like: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. ALOHA PETROLEUM!

There are plenty of debates about whether it’s ethical to visit Hawaii. Truth be told, lots of people abroad are questioning whether it’s ethical, or even safe, to visit the United States in general at present. I’m not naïve to the fact that international tourism in the USA is down like 20% and will probably fall further. But this particular conversation isn’t really about America generally - it’s about Hawaii specifically. Some people say Hawaii should have been an independent nation as opposed to a tourist mecca for people from the American mainland. Here’s an article I think is fairly grounded, which describes reasons why some people say you should never visit Hawaii.

Anyway, these are three notable rounds from the last few weeks of GeoGuessr. Thank you for reading!

The Revolution Was A Mistake

An American flag engulfed in flames. Image taken from Accent Banner.

Two hundred and forty-nine years ago today, the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Following a bloody revolution, the country we know today as the United States came to be. Even today, many Americans mark this day with parades, barbecues, and fireworks.

Of course, I don’t think there’s very much to celebrate today. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” passed yesterday, and it’s going to kick millions of people off their health insurance, drastically increase the budget for ICE agents to snatch people off the street with no due process whatsoever, and make it even more difficult for the country to do anything about climate change. (Not that we were doing much anyway, to be fair.) And of course, that is far from an exhaustive list.

The more I think about it, the more I think the Revolution was a mistake. And to be clear, I’m not saying this just because Donald Trump is President. Plenty of systemic issues in American society would have remained even if Kamala Harris had won that election, gun violence being an example. 

Even if the general public has forgotten in most of the country, I still recall the July 4, 2022 mass shooting at a parade in Highland Park, Illinois. Some people commented at the time that it was appropriate, given where the country has fallen. It occurred as the country was still reeling from several other shootings, such as the racially motivated supermarket massacre in Buffalo, NY and the Robb Elementary massacre in Uvalde, TX. Are you sensing a pattern here? 

It was the Highland Park shooting that specifically motivated singer-songwriter Pat Benatar to announce that she would no longer perform her most famous song. And I respect her a lot for that decision, but it just shows where we’re at as a society.

Of course, gun violence is far from the only reason I’m not proud to be American, but it’s among the biggest. The United Kingdom, the country we gained independence from, had one school shooting in 1996. Dunblane was so horrific that they simply had to act, and they did. There hasn’t been a school shooting in the UK since. Meanwhile, when the American version of Dunblane happened at Sandy Hook, we did nothing. Indeed, less than nothing, for we have even more gun violence than we did prior to that horrific tragedy.

It’s the same thing with Australia after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre - they passed gun control. Of course, Australia had hundreds of thousands of firearms as opposed to hundreds of millions. I’m convinced that even if the will to pass gun control existed in this country, there would be no way to actually confiscate everyone’s AR-15s. 

But let’s imagine what it would be like if Britain had won the Revolutionary War. Now, we can’t be sure of everything. If Grandma had wheels, she’d be a bicycle. 

If the USA had lost the Revolution, slavery would have been abolished decades earlier. There wouldn’t have been a civil war either, so that would’ve been preferable. It’s often said that the South lost the war, but won the Reconstruction, and that creates many issues that persist to this day.

Now, I’m not going to say that environmental racism doesn’t exist at all in the UK and Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia. It does. But it’s not to the same extent, and besides, look how these other countries address it.

The bill currently being debated in the British Parliament, which is often referred to as “Ella’s Law” after a young girl who died as a result of air pollution, would aim to address it. The bill has support from many MPs of both the Labour and Conservative parties. I expect it to pass overwhelmingly, because who doesn’t want cleaner air? 

Well, apparently the GOP doesn’t want clean air over here. If this bill were brought up in the current Republican-controlled US Congress, it would never get a vote. And even if it did get a vote, few if any Republican politicians would vote for it. That’s how totally captured by fossil fuel interests the GOP has become since Citizens United. 

And we just accept that as normal. We consider it normal that one party keeps pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accords whenever they retake the presidency. Obviously, this accord has little to no enforcement mechanism, so when faced with a leader like Donald Trump it’s basically toilet paper. But other countries are massively reducing their emissions. We’re the only country where “climate change denial” is even a thing, and the rest of the world is going to pay dearly for our revolution.

Consider also the foreign policy of Donald Trump’s second term. During Joe Biden’s presidency, he was able to repair foreign relations to a great extent. He supported Ukraine without reservation. If they wanted weapons from the United States, they typically got them. It was because of this support that the war in Ukraine lasted over three years as opposed to three days. Compare that to Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine. He’s not only withdrawing weapons that have already been pledged, he might even start sending weapons to Russia. He might literally support Russia materially as opposed to just rhetorically, and that’s a disgrace.

It’s not just Ukraine, though. Trump keeps calling Canada, a far greater country than we are (in large part because they don’t feel the need to announce it all the time) the “51st state.” He’s one hundred percent serious about annexing them. Unlike Vladimir Putin, who claimed until the day before the invasion that he wasn’t going to attack Ukraine, Trump’s not even bothering to deny it! 

Whether or not Trump actually follows through with his threats to Canada is only part of the issue. Even if we don’t end up invading our former ally, and Trump leaves office to hopefully be replaced by a Democrat, I don’t think any country is going to trust us again. Any deal that requires longer than a four-year commitment on our part isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on when the next Republican President is going to go back to talking about invading Canada and Greenland. Prime Ministers of other countries might have varied foreign policy, but much like with climate policy, it doesn’t do a total 180° just because a different party took power.

Of course, one reason for this political stability is the Parliamentary system that Canada and Australia inherited from Great Britain. A system where the head of government is selected from the majority party or coalition in the legislature is far more resistant to political gridlock. Additionally, it encourages the formation of multiple parties, which encourages consensus to a far greater degree than the American two-party system. 

Not every Parliamentary system has ranked-choice voting, but those that do are generally more harmonious. It disincentivizes negative campaigning, which means that you’re a lot less likely to attack another candidate if you’re hoping that candidate’s voters will rank you second. Besides, ranked-choice voting can stimulate the growth of third parties, because you’ll now be able to vote for them without feeling like you’re wasting your vote.

Now, I’m not going to defend everything the British Empire did back in the day. Some of their actions were…not great. And that’s putting it mildly. But when you look at the alternative, which is the shitshow that is the United States of America, I think the healthy Parliamentary democracy we could have been sounds rather appealing at the moment.

How Reality TV Explains European Grocery Shopping

Phil Keoghan, host of “The Amazing Race”, demonstrating a task in Naples, Italy.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, The Amazing Race remains one of my favorite TV shows. Even in this day and age, it astounds me that the show’s production goes as smoothly as it does, considering that the premise is a race around the world.

 Admittedly, as is the case with the great majority of TV shows that air at a discrete time, viewership is a fraction of what it used to be. Therefore, not as many people are still talking about it. Which is why I’m going to talk about it here!

 There are plenty of details behind the scenes that the average casual fan doesn’t necessarily know, such as the fact that each team has a two-person camera crew. The team must always be able to travel with their crew, including when vehicles are provided by production for self-driving. 

Of course, teams must also complete various tasks themed after the location they currently find themselves in. According to the show’s Wikipedia article, production tends to select tasks based on things residents of a given location would do as opposed to those merely visiting as tourists. And as a viewer, I believe the show is at its best when it shows what life is like in the given destination. So if that’s their goal, keep ‘em coming.

The Amazing Race has held some pretty insane challenges from a thrill-seeking perspective. The most recent season contained camel riding, skydiving, and scuba diving all in the same episode. Visually speaking, they’ve been to stunning locales all over the globe. And then there are those moments when they trick contestants, which are even better.

But one task from the most recent season of the original American edition that I think is highly underrated, if for no other reason than it tickles the ‘tism as far as urban planning is concerned, was in the ninth episode.

Here’s some background. Teams had traveled to Naples, Italy and were in the city’s historic center. I don’t want to deny that the historic center of Naples is probably gentrified beyond belief at this point, and that AirBNB is a driving force behind that gentrification. This was the same episode that contained a challenge involving folding mozzarella twists and making Margherita pizzas from scratch.

Married couple Jonathan and Ana Towns shopping for groceries in Naples, Italy on “The Amazing Race 37.”

There was a Route Info task in this neighborhood that involved shopping for locals. Teams had to purchase zucchini, bread, sausages, and one other item I forgot from a list that had been lowered to them in a bucket. (Teams were given money to use specifically for this task; perhaps begging locals for cash has fallen out of favor). The shopping list was written in Italian, which led to some teams facing a language barrier. 

On a side note, for what it’s worth, of the places I’ve been to within Europe, Italy had probably the lowest percentage of locals who spoke fluent English. At least, among the people I talked to. And to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Italy has 59 million residents to make life convenient for, and there’s nothing wrong with putting them before temporary visitors, particularly those tourists who act like Ugly Americans™. Besides, it’s always more fun when they make challenges difficult for the contestants.

 Here’s the thing that struck me about this task: The four items teams had to purchase could be found at three different stores, all within reasonable walking distance of the clue box.

Now, to those of us living in most of the United States and much of Canada, this is something you only experience if you’re visiting a different country. If you’re talking to a friend who lives in a European country, something made easier by the advent of digital technology, you might have a conversation like this:

EU: Where do you go to get your vegetables?

NA: Uh…the produce aisle at Market Basket.

EU: You mean, the vegetable store? Where is that?

NA: It’s a section of the store.

EU: Really? There’s no vegetable store?

Now, it is true that for most people, your needs as a tourist are different from your needs as a resident. If you’re eating at restaurants, you probably aren’t spending a lot of time in grocery stores.

However, the hypothetical interaction I describe above isn’t actually hypothetical. A family member of mine told me about discussing this with a friend who lives in Europe, and their exchange went more or less as shown above. Honestly, I find this an interesting cultural difference between North America and Europe, and it’s an area where I think Europe has North America beat by a light-year. (Yes, those measure distance rather than time.)

I believe one of the most important reasons for this cultural difference is related to the far higher degree of car dependency in North America. You see, car dependency seriously hinders the ability of small businesses to exist if they don’t have their own parking lots. And maintaining all the asphalt needed for a parking lot is an expense that a business that’s just starting out will have a hard time covering. In practice, it turns into a catch-22 situation.

It might not be totally impossible for a small business to survive, or even thrive, in this environment, but it’s certainly a pretty steep uphill battle. 

This is, to some extent, intuitive. When you're driving, even if it's not on a horrendous six-lane stroad, you're paying little or no attention to what's beside the road. You simply aren't. To be fair, you really shouldn't be, because you need to focus on what's actually on the road so that you don't crash. But that also means businesses beside that road aren't going to catch your eye, and they won't get as many, for lack of a better word, "impressions." Even if a high percentage of drivers who notice the business decide to patronize it (or, within the bounds of my analogy, that business garners a high "click-through rate"), most drivers aren't going to notice it, and that's a major threat to that business' profitability.

Married couple Brett Hamby and Mark Romain inside a small Italian grocery store on “The Amazing Race 37.” I posit that it’s very difficult for such stores to exist in the United States these days.

In the long run, big-box chains and supermarkets people already know about are going to dominate, because they have the biggest parking lots. If my countrymen wanted to deal with the increasing monopolies in the grocery market, changing our zoning laws (at least on new developments) would be a good start. Since it's the United States we're talking about, a country that’s become infamous for never fixing its problems when they arise, it's an open question whether that'll ever happen at any significant scale. Certainly not anytime soon. But it is at least theoretically possible.

While the contestants racing this particular leg (Season 37, Episode 9, also titled  "La Pizza d'Resistance" for anyone curious) seemed to enjoy this task, nobody commented on the urban planning principles used in most of Europe that make it possible for small grocery stores to turn a profit. Or at least, if they did comment on it, said comments were not shown in the episode. Even if European tourism to the USA is down markedly from last year (not that I think of this as a foreign tourist-friendly country even at the best of times, but that's another rant entirely), American tourism to Europe is not. 

I'm far from the first person to observe that plenty of Americans love the dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods they visit in Europe. Americans spend at least six hours, and often thousands of dollars, to travel to popular European destinations in the hundreds of thousands. There’s a sort of novelty to cities like London, Paris, and Amsterdam that people from all over the United States enjoy. But even plenty of those people don’t realize exactly why they enjoy visiting such places as tourists.

I posit that the reason is simple. Demand for housing in walkable neighborhoods, even in a country infamous for its obesity epidemic, is far higher than the supply. This is evidenced by the fact that the few remaining such neighborhoods in North America are getting more expensive to live in. That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s just the most fundamental principle of economics; supply and demand, as they say.

The Amazing Race task described above showed what is possible with the help of a nuanced zoning policy. Now, zoning exists for a reason. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, cities were notoriously polluted thanks to the sheer number of factories popping up. For obvious reasons, having a heavy industrial zone next to a densely populated residential area isn’t a good idea unless you’re a big fan of environmental racism. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have commercial properties located near to peoples’ dwellings, and in so doing find a “happy medium.”

It’s not just the economic health of small grocery stores that is hindered by American zoning practices, however, but also the physical health of many of its residents. You see, in a location with several small grocery stores spread throughout the neighborhood, one can purchase whatever they want or need for that particular day. It doesn’t feel like a chore, and it can be done in ten minutes or less if the store’s not terribly crowded.

By contrast, in the typical American suburb, because shopping is such an event, most people only do it once or maybe twice a week, buying their groceries in bulk each time. This puts pressure on those people doing the meal planning for the household, because they have to think about what they’ll cook every day that week. It can be overwhelming, and it’s not hard to understand why plenty of people go for the more “convenient” option of either nonperishable processed food or ordering takeout more often than is healthy. People have free will, yes, but that doesn’t mean their decisions aren’t influenced by external factors. 

And consequently, it’s not hard to see why the United States has a higher obesity rate than its peer nations. It’s just like my recent essay about loneliness: There are plenty of fat people in Europe, just as there are plenty of lonely people there. But exclusionary zoning is a systemic factor exacerbating this issue that just isn’t present in Europe, at least not nearly to the same degree. 

Thank you for reading. I can’t say I really know how to end this article, but I would really appreciate any and all comments. Take care.

Smells Like Autistic Spirit

Infinity symbol sometimes used by autistic people. Image taken from Brainwave.

Autism. I have it.

That’s no secret. I don’t pretend otherwise. That’s just the way it is. And on some level, I like to feel special, because if all of us were the same on any level, it’d be a pretty boring world. It is hard to quantify why I like being one of the special ones. It’s complicated.

Recently I was on a Discord server. That’s pretty common for me, given that I spend hours there a day, certainly more time than I should. But I mentioned that I adored geography, because I genuinely do. That’s one of my bona fide “special interests” to no small degree. 

Seconds later, the server owner responded to me with the words “I smell autism.” And look, there are plenty of autistic people on Discord, particularly in the servers I happen to make myself part of. Half of my online friends have it, at least. I realize that “autistic” has become a highly offensive slur some terminally online people use on 4chan and whatnot, but I want to say that this quote felt pretty flattering.

After I confirmed that the server owner “smelled” correctly, the owner replied that he knew it. 

There are the stereotypes, of course, that autistic people love talking about certain topics. The classic one is trains, whether that be the mechanics of how locomotives work or rail schedules in general. And there are lots of other special interests autistic people have, and I’m not even saying that every person who’s just deeply fascinated by a certain thing is on the autism spectrum. That’s not true at all.

But I’ll share an anecdote from my own life, because I might as well.

When I was about ten years old, I remember seeing the word “autism” on a medical form about myself. Yes, even though I’d been attending speech and occupational therapy since age 2 or so, I wasn’t quite sure why, nor am I sure exactly what I thought. I guess I just figured that every child went to these forms of therapy. 

In any case, I remember freaking out about the word on the form, and my parents had to assure me that it was okay. My brain just worked differently from most other peoples’. I was different, but not deficient. I know this now to be the case, but I didn’t understand it quite as well as a kid.

Come to think of it, there were a few moments as a child when I probably should have put two and two together and thought maybe I’m different from most people.

I’ll provide you with an example. I live in Greater Boston, where there are a surprising number of museums given that it’s an American city, a country that’s supposedly a cultural wasteland. (I’m not even saying I totally disagree with that claim, but it’s not terribly relevant here.) One such museum is the Museum of Science, which is located by the Charles River. 

As a child, I visited the museum quite a few times with some combination of my parents and siblings. There was one particular exhibit that I was drawn to.

Alamy stock image of the “Archimedean Excogitation” sculpture.

It was an audiokinetic marvel officially called Archimedean Excogitation, but that me and my family just referred to as the “ball sculpture.” This sculpture stands more than two stories high and contains a veritable maze of ramps, gears, drums, and chimes that a plethora of billiard balls navigate in perpetuity. A switch will send one ball to the left, the next to the right, and so on. 

Even now, not having been there in person for several years, I can still hear the sound of the billiard balls sliding down that xylophone ramp. I still hear the gears turning. And I can still feel the excitement now - I can induce that childlike wonder in myself even at my current age, even when nothing auditory is happening besides my fingers dancing around on the keyboard.

You can probably guess where I’m going with this: I was obsessed with that thing. I would stand in front of it for at least twenty minutes, and for that period of time, the rest of the world didn’t matter. My “interoception”, a fancy word describing one’s awareness of one’s bodily sensations indicating that you’re hungry or hot or whatever, was likely impaired significantly. I didn’t care what was happening in the outside world as long as I could stare at the exhibit and watch those billiard balls make their way to their destinations, then back to the same ramp so that they can keep going around and around in that circle game. It never ended, and I never wanted to walk away.

My school had field trips once or twice to the Museum of Science, and on both occasions I was allowed extra time in front of Archimedean Excogitation. And I now have a better idea of why I was so entranced by the ball sculpture. The term “sensory heaven” might be almost cliché at this point, but it literally was one of the closest things I’ve had to a spiritual experience.

Another time I should have realized I was autistic was early in elementary school. I remember that in each of my classes, there was an assistant teacher in the room who seemed friendlier with me than with the other students. Or at least, she spent more time with me than with the other students. At the time, I didn’t realize exactly why this was.

But I’ll share a story from this anyway. When I was in transitional kindergarten, which would have been when I was 5 years old or so, the assistant teacher (who I now know was a special education aide) wrote a picture book about me that depicted me and my friends at the time. Sadly, I can’t say I remember the other children shown in the book, and I only have vague memories of the woman who wrote it. However, I still have the book itself in the bedroom of my childhood home.

The book follows me and my fellow TKers as we took part in age-appropriate adventures such as sledding in the abundant New England snow of twenty years ago. Interestingly enough, in that story I’m depicted as being afraid of heights, which isn’t really the case anymore. Nor is it still the case that children can frequently go sledding in my state, as sad as that is. Some things change, but some stay the same.

I remember that at one point, I was depicted swinging my legs beneath the breakfast table while eating, and I didn’t think much of it at the time. After all, that’s just what I did. Had I been old enough to understand my condition, I would have realized that lots of people on the autism spectrum engage in repetitive actions, referred to as “stimming.” Given the context of that scene, I would have been excited to play with my fellow TKer in the attic, so the stimming makes even more sense when you put it together.

It’s also mentioned that I loved to swing, and spent much of recess doing that. Really, I’ve always loved such motions. There was a rocking chair in the corner of my fifth-grade classroom, and I hogged it like nobody’s business, reading a book while using my legs to swing the chair back and forth. I also couldn’t sit still during “morning meeting” on the rug; I’d often curl up in a ball and, again, rock a few inches back and forth. But even with all that motion, I was always the worst in my class at anything involving lots of coordination - case in point, being told to stand on one foot for thirty seconds and requiring many attempts to succeed.

This desire for motion has followed me into my twenties. I still love hammocks and swing gently back and forth, though not with the reckless abandon that many fearless children have. And, though this activity is far from synonymous, I tried paragliding as an adult and found it to be a wonderful sensory experience that defies clean categorization. It helped, of course, to be harnessed to a professional whom I could communicate with, and to know what to expect.

The third and final moment I’ll bring up, which, again, wasn’t exactly a particular moment, is related to the aforementioned topic of special interests.

Again, special interests. A lot of us have them. A lot of us are very proud of them. But mine have evolved considerably during my lifetime so far.

As one example, it was around the time that I first saw the medical form mentioning autism that I became very fascinated by diseases. These included those maladies that had largely been wiped out as of circa 2010 (including those that are sadly making a resurgence such as measles - vaccines truly are a victim of their own success). But then there are plenty of diseases we still have today, and I remember asking my mother if I’d ever had anything serious. That’s when I learned I had viral meningitis when I was less than two months old, sending me down another rabbit hole.

In all fairness, I think part of the reason I found it intriguing is because ever since I was born, I have never had to spend more than a few hours in a hospital. At least, that’s what I believed until I asked my mother that question. The point is, I have no memory of the illness, and even now I only know the sanitized version. I’ll only ever know the sanitized version of what viral meningitis is like unless the disease comes back for round two. If so, I take comfort in the knowledge that my immune system will likely be better prepared the second time.

Anyway, I wanted to know everything about the disease that had made me so sick when I was so small. And from what I’ve read, it’s not pretty. Supposedly I would have screamed myself raw from the agony and my eyelids would be so irritated they’d need to darken the room. I would have been dosed to the gills to various extremely powerful antibiotics, possibly tearing my stomach to shreds. And supposedly, according to a semi-funny part of this story my mother later shared with me, the headaches would have persisted for several weeks after I was healthy enough to no longer be hospitalized. 

And to think…the pathogen responsible for crossing between my blood and my brain, the very unique brain that makes me who I am, would have caused little more than a cold in someone my current age. It was only such an ordeal because of my very young age at the time and the fact that my immature immune system couldn’t cope as well as that of an otherwise healthy adult. (According to some more medically-inclined people than myself, the heavy-duty antibiotics might also have been to protect me from secondary infection, important since a secondary infection would have been very dangerous for someone who’s already seriously ill.)

Now, at one time, I wondered if the meningitis was the reason I later became autistic. Maybe it had cooked my brain or whatever. Knowing what I know now, this is of course totally not true. It’s as much a fiction as the notion that vaccines cause autism, even if not nearly as dangerous. But it would have been an interesting “head canon” for my life.

These days I understand that my brain was already laced with autism by the time I got sick. It had been that way as soon as I’d been cut from my mother’s womb, and probably before that too. Indeed, it’s pretty fascinating how a soul, for lack of a better word, is matched with a body. None of us, whether you’re religious, superstitious, spiritual, or none of the above, has any idea how or why this cosmic lottery works. It just does.

Anyway, that was almost a quarter of a century ago. It’ll be twenty-five years later this summer. So why am I bringing it up now?

Well, combined with the other factors I’ve mentioned in this essay, it was a moment that should have raised a red flag. Or maybe it would have been a green flag because, again, I like feeling as though I’m different. This isn’t even unique to autistic people; the more cynical among us talk about how humans invented religion so that they could think they were unique. That God had chosen them as opposed to any other nation, or any other species. And for the record, I don’t normally love thinking about the veracity (or lack thereof) of any religious claims because it stresses me out. 

These days, I might not be as obsessed with diseases anymore. At a solid 200 pounds, I might be too big for your average swing set. And I haven’t been to the Museum of Science in several years. But that doesn’t negate any of the things I’ve already said.

A while back, my mother confided in me that she’d been told I might one day lose my diagnosis. In other words, it could eventually be determined that I no longer met the criteria by which I’d been labeled autistic. And honestly, that thought depresses me more than I can say.

Don’t get me wrong: If I could be more adaptable to when things don’t go my way, or I could have more social stamina and/or know how to hold an ideal conversation face-to-face with a friend or acquaintance, if that’s why I “lost my diagnosis”, then that’s one thing. In a perfect world, I could be a version of myself with all my good qualities and none of the bad. Leave aside the fact that we don’t live in a perfect world, as well as the notion that, arguably, we shouldn’t want to live in one.

Imagine if I received a lamp and could call a genie. This genie, rather than providing me with the standard three wishes, instead gave me a deal. (Maybe then it’d be a devil instead of a genie, but you get the point). The terms of this deal (whether with a genie or a devil) would be as follows:

Saclux, would you give up your passion and feeling special in exchange for not talking too fast and having no social difficulties?

I’ll admit that I would think about the real challenges I’ve experienced in life. Whether it’s being burned out socially within an hour of joining a party, or my mother constantly asking me to speak more slowly, or my difficulty talking about anything else besides my preferred special interests, I’m not going to deny that it’s not all a bed of roses. Indeed, there’s usually a thorn or two, and sometimes there’s a whole mattress worth of them.

But then, if I could overcome the impulsivity, I would consider the time I’ve spent gazing at a certain site called PlonkIt. I’d consider the time I’ve spent learning the difference between American and Canadian speed signs, or the way you tell Almaty and Aktobe apart based on the bus color, or admiring some of the world’s most unique styles of architecture. 

I’d consider the fact that obsessing over these variations makes me feel like a kid again. It’s the sort of sensation that “Disney adults” crave when they go ape-shit over the live action remakes of their favorite animated classics. And I’d remember the way that, according to my friends and family, my eyes light up when I’m talking about stop signs around the world. The way that they can hear the excitement in my voice. And the way that my evident exhilaration makes them, too, exhilarated. It’s said that emotions are contagious, after all, and people saying that are one hundred percent.

And I would tell that devil to pound sand.

American Bad Dream: GeoGuessr Edition

A map of the United States that proves the four-color theorem and contains postal abbreviations for each state. Image from Wikipedia.

The United States was not built with GeoGuessr players in mind.

Now, to be clear, the engineers, architects, and blue-collar construction workers who brought the country’s infrastructure to life (even with all the problems it’s brought us) were under no obligation to make matters convenient for future players of a computer game. They had enough problems as it was. 

The fact remains, however, that the way this country’s infrastructure was set up renders it very difficult to tell what state you’re in on Google Street View. In other words, region-guessing the United States can turn into an American Bad Dream.

I am aware that the Kane Brown song “American Bad Dream” is about gun violence, a topic that isn’t funny at all. Indeed, it’s horrendously tragic that we’ve lost so many people to so many acts of it. That’s far worse than whatever happens to people as a result of playing GeoGuessr

But let’s look at some maps, shall we? It’ll tickle the ‘tism, as someone in one of my Discord servers put it. And it’s always fun to do that!

A map of some interstate highways in the United States. Image taken from r/MapPorn.

If you know the general pattern of the Interstate system, conceived by President Eisenhower (or at least, named after him), you can narrow your guess down pretty effectively. The numbering scheme was at least designed in an intuitive manner. It was really a pretty remarkable feat of engineering and one thing to almost be proud of if you live here. More on that later.

Anyway, even-numbered highways run east to west across the contiguous 48 states, and their numbers increase from south to north. They show up on the mini-map you use to send your guess, so you don’t necessarily need to memorize them. As for the odd-numbered highways, they run north to south, with numbers increasing as you move eastward. Again, they’re on the mini-map, so it shouldn’t be too overwhelming. 

However, it gets more difficult when you consider state highways. Much more difficult. But as with the interstates, there is at least some method to this madness. This article lays it out more vividly than I feel like doing. However, these state routes (not to be confused with “interstates” that happen to only be in one state) are given triple-digit numbers according to a different scheme. That scheme varies according to the state, so it’s of only so much use if you don’t already have a good idea what state you’re in.

And the highway numbers are all the help you’ll get in terms of infrastructure!

A gallery of license plates for all 50 US States as of 2023. Image taken from r/coolguides.

These are the current license plates for every state. At least, they’re the most current plates I was able to find. And of course, in the last few years some states have changed their plate design for a number of reasons (sometimes adjacent to being more sensitive to racial issues). This means that sometimes, especially in older coverage, you’re going to see previous designs of license plates. For our purposes, suffice it to say that it’s a pain in the ass trying to memorize them all. A lot of them look fairly similar to each other.

There are also a few reasons why license plate meta is only so useful in the United States. First of all, most license plates are blurred on Google Street View. That’s not even exclusive to the USA. If you can recognize any distinguishing features of license plates beyond color through the blur, you’ve got better eyes than me. Either that, or you’re going to strain your eyes to an extent that’s not worth it for a mere computer game. 

But wait! There’s more!

You see, infrastructure in the United States is very often centered around automobiles to an unhealthy extent. This is in no small part due to the interstate system; for all the economic growth it has brought the country over the years, GDP isn’t everything. Hell, some people would argue that GDP doesn’t matter very much at all, and what you should really be measuring is how the people in the middle class and below are doing. It’s also true that these highways were often built through marginalized communities, particularly those where disproportionately many people of color lived. This is a problem that, in a perfect world, would be alleviated somehow.

The reason I say this is because, even more than in countries with considerably less car-centric infrastructure, cars travel. That’s kind of why they exist. This means that you’ll often see license plates from states besides the one you’re in, particularly if you spawn on a highway. 

In fact, the “long road trip” has been a common element of American popular culture for quite some time. I was never one for such trips because I hate sitting in a car for hours on end, but plenty of families still do them. The “license plate game”, in which bored family members compete to see who can spot vehicles from the most states, is also a figment of the public consciousness. So basically, license plates aren’t terribly useful for region-guessing the USA.

If you thought license plates were confusing, you’re in for a rude awakening.

A map of telephone area codes in the contiguous United States. Image taken from All Area Codes dot com.

Holy hell.

Just look at that. It’s a monstrosity. If you try to memorize them all, you might well find yourself locked in a padded room painting the wall with your own excrement. Unless your name is Trevor Rainbolt, of course.

In most other countries covered by GeoGuessr, telephone area codes make sense. At a minimum, they’re ordered in an intuitive manner. In Turkey, for instance, area codes starting with 2 are found in the western part of the country, area codes starting with 3 go in the middle, and area codes starting with 4 are in the east. That’s a reasonable way to order your phone numbers.

Let’s look back at the United States. Hell, let’s just look at my home state of Massachusetts, one of the smallest states geographically that nonetheless packs quite a punch economically. If you’ve narrowed it down to Massachusetts based on architecture, those low stone walls beside the road, or even a sign telling you what state you’re in, you still might see a phone number on an advertisement for a local business.

In Boston and its innermost suburbs, the first three digits of the phone number are 617, so that the number will be 617-XXX-XXXX. Supposedly the next couple of digits are sorted by town, but at that point the walls will smell absolutely rancid due to the resulting insanity. Anyway, correctly guessing the 617 area code will almost invariably get you the win against all but the most insane players.

Just outside of 617, when you get to the outer suburbs and some exurbs, the area code is 781. Where did the 163 numbers in between go? Well, in reality, they’re strewn all over the rest of the USA and Canada like the objects in that Calvin & Hobbes strip about opening a closet.

“Calvin & Hobbes” comic strip from June 23, 1989. If it was set these days, Calvin would probably be asking to play Fortnite, but that’s beside the point. Image taken from GoComics.

In all seriousness, once you’re past 781, you have the 508 area code that serves the Worcester area, Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod, and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Northern and northeastern Massachusetts contains the 978 area code, and western Massachusetts (including the Berkshires) uses 413. So there are five area codes, seemingly random numbers, that zigzag around the state.

And remember, that’s just one state, and a pretty small one at that as far as GeoGuessr is concerned! You still have 47 other states to memorize if you’re in the contiguous part of the country! 

Look: On the list of things to be ashamed about as an American, making life difficult for GeoGuessr players is pretty far down. I’m not naïve to that fact. If anything, I think it’s pretty interesting stuff, because it serves as evidence that this game takes a lifetime to master.

Additionally, keep in mind that you can learn this information all day long, but you won’t need it very often. In my experience, European and Asian countries show up far more frequently in duels than the United States or Canada. Maybe that’s just me, though. But that’s another thing that makes GeoGuessr so hard, yet so rewarding at the same time. 

Level Of Concern

A long-sleeve men’s T-shirt bearing a depiction of US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) with the caption “Often Disappointed, Always Disappointing.” Image taken from Spreadshirt. I have a short-sleeve version of this design.

For the last few days, all anyone has been able to talk about are the U.S.-initiated strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. At least, that’s how it is currently. Who knows if people will still be talking about them next week; my bet is that they won’t be, at least in the United States. No matter how far the conflict escalates, the fact that we are or were ever involved in the war between Iran and Israel will be memory-holed by most American civilians.

On some level, it’s hard to blame them. Donald Trump is using the tried and true strategy of “flooding the zone.” If so many insane things happen that it’s hard to keep track of all of them, people will have a hard time paying attention to any of them. Therefore, many will decide to check out of politics.

Listen: I’m as sick of politics as many other people. The Facepalm subreddit is now about 85% Trump, whereas it used to have a wide variety of cringe-worthy mishaps. I understand that the United States, as one of the world’s most powerful countries, being in a democratic death spiral is newsworthy. But surely there are some newsworthy events that don’t involve Donald Trump, aren’t there?

As for TourismHell, while it used to be largely about overtourism in European destinations, is now about 70% related to the ongoing boycott of the United States by foreign travelers. And I want to be clear: Foreign tourists are well within their right to travel, or in this case not travel, wherever they like. We’re not exactly acting like welcoming hosts at the moment, at least not at the governmental level. Given the reports of foreigners being detained at customs, including that Australian journalist who covered pro-Palestine student protests, I certainly don’t blame those who decide to stay away. And honestly, a decline in foreign tourism is, practically speaking, the least of our worries at this point.

Even so, the “not visiting the USA” party has gotten a little repetitive, even if I agree that now isn’t a good time to visit the USA. But that’s beside the point. 

Anyway, I said I was sick of politics. And I realize that comparisons to Nazi Germany are pretty much beating a dead horse at this point. They’ve become cliché by now. But I’d imagine the German people were probably sick of politics in 1938. But that doesn’t mean politics were sick of them.

It’s that realization that keeps me glued to the news every single day. I’m here for the chaos, as much as I wish I were not. This could have been avoided, of course, if American voters were okay with a perfectly qualified black woman as President. But we weren’t, collectively speaking, so this is what we get instead.

The strikes on Iran are a serious crime. Trump appears to have contacted Republicans in Congress and not Democrats, but the important part is that he did not receive any Congressional authorization for this act of war. He walked right through any checks on his own power, not that such checks exist when the GOP is determined to delegate their power to Trump. Seriously, I get that they don’t care about democracy or the well-being of the country, but even I am stunned by how little they care about their own power. 

In practical terms, I don’t think this is World War III. At least, not yet. Some would argue that Democrats should saddle Trump with starting World War III in the hopes of tanking his approval ratings, but I’m not certain that will work. And even so, does it matter how low his approval ratings get? We have three and a half more years of him regardless because that’s how the idiots voted.

Yes, tensions will increase in the Middle East. Members of the American military stationed there are likely to face heightened threats to their safety. But none of America’s former allies are likely to join them in this fight. Russia is busy with the genocidal war they started in Ukraine. China has no desire to rock the boat. And India and Pakistan are more concerned with each other than what’s going on in Iran and Israel.

In short, I don’t think this conflict can reasonably be expected to escalate into what an objective observer would call World War III. I simply don’t. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a major “crossing the Rubicon” moment.

If an authorization of military force does eventually pass a la Iraq (which is admittedly doubtful because, again, Congress doesn’t care about their own power) Trump might use a state of war to justify cracking down on protests at home. Our insanely inebriated Secretary of Defense Pete Kegseth has refused to rule out ordering the military to fire on peaceful demonstrators. If he’s not willing to say “absolutely not”, the answer is probably “absolutely yes.”

Moreover, by all accounts, Trump didn’t join the war because he felt Iran was a threat. He joined the war because he was triggered by Elon Musk humiliating him. And that’s incredibly frightening, because it shows how petty and impulsive he is.

Seriously. Who’s to say that he won’t do something even more insane next time his ego takes a hit? I realize that there’s a world of difference between striking military targets (with very few civilians present) in a country that’s long been an enemy of the United States, as opposed to randomly bombing cities in a country that used to be our closest ally. But given that Trump keeps calling Canada the “51st state”, it’s at least conceivable he might actually follow through on these threats.

Of course, I think it’s very likely that this conflict is going to be forgotten by the average American within a month. After a week or two, I don’t think most people will even remember that we struck Iran on June 21 (June 22 local time), even if our involvement in said conflict escalates significantly. It’ll be memory-holed just like mass shootings so often are in this country. And that’s by design.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not convinced that I am. Consider the recent Los Angeles unrest, in which people protested against Trump’s deportations and Trump called in the military. Another Australian journalist (not the same one who got deported while trying to visit friends in New York) was shot with a rubber bullet. It seemed like an enormous escalation at the time, but now nobody’s talking about the Los Angeles unrest anymore, nor the fact that the National Guard was sent in. But guess what?

That was two weeks ago.

Two Democratic lawmakers, state legislators from Minnesota, and their spouses were shot in their own homes in the middle of the night, with one of the couples dying. A few disgusting Senators, such as Mike Lee of Utah and Bernie Moreno of Ohio, spread conspiracy theories and mocked the assassination. As insane a milestone as that is, yet another “crossing the Rubicon” moment if that phrase still has any meaning, most people aren’t paying attention anymore. Guess what?

That was nine days ago.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m deeply concerned about our new involvement in Iran. And I say that sincerely, unlike a certain Senator from Maine. But compared to what’s already happened, and compared to what will surely come next week, it’s hard to give it too much oxygen. 

We’re in for a wild ride, folks.

On Community And Loneliness

It’s no secret that we need community in order to properly function.

Okay, that’s not exactly ground-breaking, but it’s true. The effects of loneliness on one’s mental and yes, physical health are well-documented. According to a report from the U.S. Surgeon General at the time, Dr. Vivek Murthy (back when we still had qualified people in charge before the voters had to ruin it again), chronic loneliness can be as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Think about that for a moment. Being lonely on a long-term basis might be as hazardous as smoking almost a pack of those cancer sticks daily. Even if the smoking rate has declined pretty quickly in America, the loneliness rate has, if anything, risen. There are a number of reasons for that, not all of them unique to the USA.

Today I walked to a nearby park and participated in an exercise class with a handful of other people. Let me tell you: Although most of them were probably at least twenty years older than me, they’re fit. I struggled to keep up with them. Now my arms are a tiny bit sore, but it would be well worth it even if the after-effects were far worse.

Obviously, exercise such as this is good for you. Unless you live in Tehran, that is. But in all seriousness, people who stay active, especially the older they get, are more likely to live longer, healthier lives when all else is equal. Again, that isn’t a revolutionary observation. 

However, what occurred to me more than once as I was lifting weights and jumping over hurdles is how much of a community this exercise class was. You could pay a small fee for each session, but many of the same people go there every week, to the point where they consider one another good friends. And yet somehow, it didn’t feel “cliquey” the way some friend groups do, even when the preponderance of the members are on the wrong side of middle age.

If we are to believe that chronic loneliness is this dangerous for your health, then it might be a reason why the average life expectancy in the USA lags other wealthy nations. Obviously, there are other factors at play here, such as income inequality, a higher obesity rate, and the lack of universal health insurance. Perhaps these factors are interrelated, but the point is that loneliness is not the only reason our health outcomes aren’t what they could be. That being said, I think it’s a significant enough factor that it deserves to be discussed more, particularly in light of the way our infrastructure lends itself to social atomization.

Stock image of suburban tract housing (from iStock). This could be Anywhere, USA, but wherever it is, it’s very hard to have spontaneous community here.

I want to be clear that loneliness is not unique to the United States. Like obesity, it might be worse here, and there might be more systemic factors leading to it than in, say, most of Europe, but there are plenty of lonely people in other countries too. 

Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labour Party gave a controversial address that’s often referred to as the “island of strangers” speech. Now, I’m not going to delve too deeply into this, because it's about glass houses and whatnot. However, while I do not know if this line was meant as a dog whistle, quite a few progressives interpreted it as such.

I read a fascinating article, which I’m going to link here, about the very real issue the Prime Minister brought up; namely, a lack of social cohesion. People aren’t spending as much time with one another as they used to, and many feel lonely or like they don’t know their neighbors as a result. 

This is a legitimate problem, but as the author of the linked article argues, immigration isn’t the cause of it. A national identity can change over time; just because someone is British by choice instead of by chance doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t be considered part of British society. It’s a different world than it was some decades ago.

Rather, the author points out that numerous community centers, locations that might be considered “third places”, have closed in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. A public service union in the UK is quoted as saying that roughly two-thirds of council-run youth centers had closed in England and Wales since 2010, largely due to funding cuts. If Prime Minister Starmer truly wanted to alleviate this problem, he might be wise to push for increased funding for such programs. 

Again, I realize that I’m one to talk, given that I’m from the USA and the problem of societal alienation is likely even worse here. There’s a reason young men outright voted for Trump in last year’s election. And most of the United Kingdom is a pedestrian paradise relative to most of the United States. Car dependency isolates people, particularly those who don’t or can’t drive. 

The latter group frequently includes the elderly. Once your doctor advises you to stop driving and you give up your license, your quality of life is going to drop precipitously if you live in a car-dependent place. Now, no country is perfect about integrating the elderly into society; even the Netherlands, every urbanist Redditor’s favorite country, isn’t amazing in this regard. But not having other transportation options is going to exacerbate loneliness for old people who can’t drive anymore. If you didn’t or couldn’t save for a retirement community during your working years, tough luck. 

And even if you can afford to live in such a place during your “golden years”, it’s mostly other old people you interact with. That seriously hinders one’s chances for intergenerational friendships, which have many benefits.

In any case, note the earlier statistic about youth centers, which are presumably places for relatively young people to get to know each other. They’re withering away in both the UK and USA.

As a current 25-year-old, I’m well aware that a person’s twenties can be a very formative decade indeed. The habits one sets or keeps now will very often matter many years down the line, both in terms of your actual well-being and the habits you keep holding in later stages of life. If you eat healthily in your twenties, you’re more likely to keep doing so in your forties. Again, that’s not rocket science.

I found it notable that the crowd at the aforementioned exercise class skewed on the older side. It could be that people under age 40 were too busy looking for a job in today’s economy and didn’t have time to attend a Saturday morning exercise class. Or maybe it was just this week and it’s not necessarily representative of what happens every week. Sure. It’s possible.

But exercise classes aren’t the only community event that’s mostly older people. Whenever I’ve phonebanked for Democratic candidates, most of the other people on the Zoom call look to be over 60. From what I’ve heard, it’s the same way at in-person civic gatherings. Hell, say what you will about religion, but churches have served as a “third place” before, and as Reddit will love to tell you, nobody under 60 goes there regularly anymore. And church attendance is one institution that’s declined a lot faster in Europe than in the USA.

We’re constantly told that young people are our future leaders. Strictly speaking, this is accurate. But in the age of online socializing and declining community engagement in general, political leaders in the United States and elsewhere haven’t been fostering the policies necessary to make sure today’s young people have community. 

This matters for two reasons. One is that if young people, who’ve already lived through a decade of Donald Trump in some of their formative years, grow accustomed to a lack of social cohesion, that’s going to make us a world of strangers. It will seriously damage the community. In some ways, we’re already there. 

The other reason is that if young people are used to isolation, they’ll eventually be old people who are incredibly lonely. Worse yet, if former Surgeon General Murthy is right about the health hazards of loneliness being as serious as he said they are, many of them might not grow old. 

Let’s not let that happen.

Another Wild Week

A meme featuring characters from “The Adventures of Tintin” lamenting that it’s only Wednesday. Image taken from a Xitter thumbnail.

For those of you who may have already forgotten (or more likely, hadn’t heard to begin with), my birthday was last week. I turned 25. And I actually wrote a deeply existential essay about it in order to celebrate this milestone. 

As it turns out, that essay would end up being appropriate for more reasons than one.

In the early hours of June 12, a plane crashed in India. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, operating as Air India Flight 171, was from Ahmedabad and was flying to London-Gatwick. At least, it was supposed to fly there before crashing into a medical school’s residence hall. There was only one survivor on the plane, and I can’t imagine how much going through something like that must fuck with you. 

I mean, this man literally saw well over two hundred people die suddenly and violently right before his eyes. And he jumped out of a window to escape it. I don’t know how you live through that without permanent psychological scarring.

For a world already questioning the safety of air travel in the last few months, this is only likely to ignite further speculation. For the record, I don’t know definitively how much Donald Trump is to blame for all these aviation incidents the news is reporting on. I simply don’t, and I think we should be honest about that. 

However, what I’m pretty damn sure about is that if a Democrat were President right now (as cliché as that saying has become), the GOP would never let them hear the end of it. Indeed, I shudder to think of what they’d be doing to Biden if he were still in the White House. More on that later.

The following day, June 13, Israel launched missiles at Iran. Apparently Trump gave Netanyahu permission to do this, which makes it even more infuriating to me. “Harris the Hawk, Donald the Dove”...what a joke. The “Genocide Joe” crowd seems awfully silent now, and why shouldn’t they be? They should be ashamed of themselves! I certainly would be if I were responsible for Trump being back in the White House.

For the last several days, Iran and Israel have been trading missile attacks back and forth. Because we’ve been helping Israel shoot down the missiles headed for Tel Aviv, and because the Israeli attacks on Iran (unlike the ones on Gaza) have mostly hit military targets, civilian casualties have thus far not been very high. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still an enormous impact.

A map of live air traffic as of about 24 hours ago, courtesy of r/MapPorn.

Take a look at this map. Planes can’t fly over much of the Middle East because Iraq and Jordan closed their airspace. They also can’t fly over Ukraine for obvious fucking reasons, and haven’t been able to for several years. And of course, they’ve never been able to fly over Tibet due to the risk of depressurization and the fact that if the plane needed to descend to 10,000 feet, it would end up in the ground, as would everyone on it.

I feel horrible for air traffic controllers in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan at this point. They’re probably quite overwhelmed, and who knows how long we have until there’s a crash in the Caucasus thanks to this? We can put the blame at least partly on Trump’s hands if this does happen.

This war is sure to divide the world. Personally, I hate the governments of both Iran and Israel, but I just feel horrible for the civilians on both sides who are going to suffer (and in some cases die) for their governments’ genocidal ambitions. I don’t understand why that’s such a controversial take. 

And then, in the early hours of June 14, we received the news that a state legislative leader had been assassinated in Minnesota, along with her husband. They’d been shot dead in their own house. To those who are afraid to go out for fear of being caught in a mass shooting, well, you’re not any safer at home. At least not if you’re a public figure. 

Now, politically-motivated gun violence is not new in this country. Quite a few mass shootings have been classified as terrorism (which is a strategy, not an ideology). But this is the first time in a very long time that the victims have been elected officials, and I honestly wonder if the Democrats need to invest greatly in security for their candidates and representatives. This truly feels like a “crossing the Rubicon” moment.

And I’m being deadly serious. How many people who might otherwise have been bright, promising Democratic leaders will now rule out entering politics for fear that something like this might happen to them or their families? I’d imagine it’s more than any of us think right now, and that number’s only going to grow as the situation in this country deteriorates. 

In the immediate aftermath of this assassination (because let’s call it what it is, an assassination), Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Bernie Moreno of Ohio literally mocked it on Xitter. While Russ Feingold to Ron Johnson was probably the biggest Senate downgrade of the 21st century, it’s hard for me not to see Sherrod Brown to Bernie Moreno being a strong contender for the number two spot. I could make a naughty joke here, but I’m not going to, because this is no laughing matter.

Senators Lee and Moreno should resign. And if they refuse to resign, they should be expelled. At least, that’s what I would be saying if we lived in a sane country!

In reality, if Lee or Moreno were expelled (which will never ever happen, because their Republican colleagues probably all agree with them that this is funny), they’d both more than likely be replaced with people just as awful. And if anything, that might galvanize Republican voters more ahead of the midterms. I hate to say that, but it’s true. And I really don’t know how we’re going to deradicalize people in this country.

And then Trump had the military parade that same evening. I didn’t watch it; I didn’t want to contribute to its ratings, and quite frankly, I liked seeing him triggered. Images circulated online of Trump sitting at the parade looking exhausted and dejected. Honestly, those are hilarious. They say that only about forty thousand people (splitting the difference here) attended the parade, whereas millions went to “No Kings” protests. (Confession time: I chickened out of attending my local protest.)

Donald Trump looking disappointed. Image taken from the Hollywood Reporter.

In the midst of everything I’ve mentioned, there are still riots in Los Angeles. There’s still a war in Ukraine. There was still the recent G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies at which Donald Trump humiliated the nation he represented once again. On the bright side, Trump mentioned trying for a trade deal with Canada. And I don’t want to be a Pollyanna about anything, but if I was level 10 concerned about the United States invading its former ally before, I might be level 7 concerned now. 

That’s still way too high, of course. And the fact that everyone’s reaction isn’t “Of course we’re not invading Canada, what the hell are you talking about?!” speaks volumes about where we’re at.

And then, of course, there’s the heat advisory in interior Alaska. People are saying that it’s the first-ever heat advisory for Alaska, which is true but misleading. This is the first year that the Juneau and Fairbanks weather stations were able to declare heat advisories, so it’s not surprising that this week’s warning would be the first.

That being said, it’s still pretty alarming. Not only does it serve as further evidence, as if it were needed, that America is failing the whole world through our climate denial and resulting ecocide, but it’s a big problem for Alaskans right now. Temperatures are reaching the low 30s Celsius, or upper 80s Fahrenheit, this week.

Where I live in Massachusetts, a temperature like that is not crazy during the hottest part of summer, even if it’s slightly above average. But as we learned during the 2022 UK heat wave, places are built for a certain climate - Alaska’s homes are meant to keep the heat in. If we’re ever going to meaningfully adapt to the climate crisis, we’ll have to upgrade current housing at northern latitudes to more sustainably cool itself. (Will that ever happen here? Probably not. I know this.)

I honestly don’t know how I stay sane given everything crumbling around me. The craziest part is that in my day to day life, everything looks fairly normal. I don’t live in Los Angeles, admittedly. And I’m a white guy born in the USA, so ICE hasn’t come knocking on my door yet. I’ve traveled abroad twice since Trump took office again and had no problems getting back in, yet. 

That’s the eerie thing. Amidst all this turmoil, so many Americans barely know any of it is going on, because to many, everyday life seems normal. To some extent, I don’t blame people for tuning it out. 

Whether you’re religious, superstitious, spiritual, or none of the above, I think we can all agree. On a philosophical level, humans were not meant to contend with this much chaotic news at any given time. Perhaps social media truly has broken our brains. Like Icarus, we have flown too close to the sun. 

Haze Of Our Lives

It’s been a few weeks since the smoke started.

Now, from the standpoint of proximity to the actual fire, I’m one of the lucky ones. My hometown in Massachusetts was not evacuated, mainly because the actual fires are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The people of Flin Flon, Manitoba, a small town of about 5,000 people, were not so lucky.

Consider this: Two years ago, there were several days during which New York City’s sky was orange due to the smoke. The Big Apple briefly had the worst air quality in the world. In my Boston suburb, it wasn’t nearly that bad, but there were still a few days when we were advised to stay indoors if at all possible. Compared to 2023, Massachusetts air quality hasn’t been awful.

I say this not to minimize the tragedy that’s currently taking place. Several people have lost their lives as a result of these fires. It’s likely that a few orders of magnitude more people will lose their homes by the end of the fire season. I don’t want to be flippant about that.

Nor do I want to be flippant about the reason these fires are getting worse. Yes, forest fires have always been part of the ecosystem, and they are a natural cycle. There’s a reason why many indigenous peoples used controlled burns to prevent fires from reaching the areas in which they lived. Contrary to what Smokey the Bear once said, some fire is good.

As I write this article, I’m lying sideways beside a beach towel beneath the moderately strong sun. This is the same town beach at which I recently spent part of my 25th birthday. My right leg feels pretty tan, and I know intellectually that I might have given it a little too much sun. A mild sunburn is quite likely, and if I didn’t have a swim shirt on, my chest and back would itch like a motherfucker pretty soon.

Like fire, the sun is an essential ingredient of life on Earth. We need it to survive, unless you’re one of those progressive Norwegian scientists who can grow tomatoes in a greenhouse. In all seriousness, too much sun can be very dangerous. Hell, even looking too directly at the sun can cause severe eye damage. That’s no secret.

We keep hearing about how 2024 was the hottest year on record, and that May 2025 was the hottest May on record. And we’re sure breaking a lot of records, aren’t we?

Here’s the thing, though: The current hottest year on record may well end up being the coldest year of the rest of our lives. We will still have cold days and still have some blizzards, but the overall trend is clear to anyone paying attention. That’s why Jim “Senator Snowball” Inhofe, may he rest in piss, was so brutally mocked.

Trends are real, even when they’re inconvenient.

Earlier today, I went on Google Maps and used their air quality layer. Say what you will about Google as a company and their capitulation to Donald Trump on stupid naming disputes, but their maps are pretty awesome, which is why I keep using them. Anyway, I saw that my area of Massachusetts is back in the lime green zone after enduring a couple days of yellow air quality. It was never that dangerous for most people, but it was less than ideal by our standards.

A Google Maps view of air quality in North America and Europe. Hotter colors indicate higher levels of air pollution.

The “usual suspects” were not terribly surprising. Parts of several Canadian provinces (really, parts of all Canadian provinces) are on fire, so it’s no wonder that they have high AQI indices due to the smoke. There are also wildfires out west in my own country. 

Over in Europe, the Po Valley of Northern Italy was in the yellow/orange transition zone. Being an industrial area surrounded on three sides by mountains, that makes sense. But I noticed that the south of France had worse air quality than northern France (which seemed odd to me thanks to air pollution in and around Paris, even if Mayor Hidalgo’s anti-car efforts have been laudable). 

I took to the Geography subreddit and asked why this was. And I received answers.

Some people said that dust from the Sahara Desert blew into the south of France, hindering the air quality there. That struck me as odd - that’s a pretty far distance for sand to be blown. Phoenix, the “perfect” American city, also has this issue with haboobs. Yes, that’s a silly name, but deal with it.

But then more responses trickled in. It was smoke from the Canadian wildfires, they said. Said smoke had traveled all the way from the remote areas of Earth’s second-largest country geographically to some of Europe’s population centers. The winds carried it across the Atlantic, they told me.

This serves as a sobering reminder that we’re all interconnected in this world. The wildfires in Canada affect air quality not just in Canada and the United States, but also a lot further afield. I also remember reading that one reason South Korea struggled with air pollution was because of industrial activity in nearby China. And speaking of China, that country (along with India) is often cited as an excuse by people who don’t want to do anything about our greenhouse gas emissions. 

But here’s the thing. It’s total whataboutism. Whether or not China truly is a climate villain (and I posit that they are not; their renewable energy revolution is palpable, whatever you can say about their government’s human rights record), that doesn’t change our moral obligation to act. We must, in the words of Bernie Sanders, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. If not, the fires are only going to get worse.

Of course, we’re not doing that right now. Donald Trump is President of the United States. He’s not only pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord (which, in all honesty, doesn’t mean much in practical terms since it has no enforcement mechanism), he’s also signed numerous executive orders to drill for fossil fuels on public lands and roll back Biden-era renewable energy incentives. 

Will it completely halt progress toward renewable energy? Probably not. And let’s be honest: Even if Kamala Harris had won, I don’t foresee any new climate legislation being passed with what would still probably have been a Republican Senate. One election wouldn’t have solved this problem. Additionally, it’s not like 1.99°C of warming is “everything’s fine” and 2.01°C is “absolute doomsday” - it’s more nuanced than that. But that’s a topic for another day.

Make no mistake, however: The election of Donald Trump as President was a giant leap in the wrong direction.

That’s the thing about the 2024 election. If it was just about domestic policy, that would be one thing. Gun violence is a massive red stain on this nation, but at least it mostly only affects Americans (the occasional unlucky foreign tourist notwithstanding). But when it comes to the climate crisis, what the United States does carries a massive impact on the rest of the world. Because of Trump, the climate crisis is going to get a lot worse. 

We had no right to elect Donald Trump, and in my opinion, other countries would have every right to invade us if they so chose. 

Yes, the rain may have washed away the smoke for now. But it’s not going to wash away my guilt by association. It’s not all of our fault, but it is all of our responsibility.

Fuck, I hate this timeline!

My Best GeoGuessr Plays: Version 1.0

In case you didn’t know, I play a lot of GeoGuessr. It’s my favorite game. And again, if you weren’t aware of how the game works, it’s pretty simple. You’re given imagery from Google Street View and you have to guess where you are. 

There are many clues one uses to play the game. The most obvious one is to pay attention to which side of the road cars are driving on - roughly 70% of the world’s countries and people drive on the right, but knowing which countries drive on the left can really narrow down your guess. Another big one is to look for signage - if you can tell languages apart when you come across a directional sign, that goes a long way to guessing the country or sometimes region.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to be showcasing a few of the most notable rounds I’ve played in which I either recognized a location with insane accuracy or learned a valuable lesson. Here we go.

Google Street View imagery of rural eastern Colorado, USA with the GeoGuessr interface.

In this round I played roughly two months ago, I spawned in a decently arid region. I could tell based on the sprawl that I was in the United States - I believe I saw a “SPEED LIMIT” sign at one point, which is important because Canada’s speed signs say “MAXIMUM” instead. 

The landscape brought to mind the High Plains, and the grain elevators resembled those frequently seen in America’s agricultural regions. Of course, it’s mostly factory farms these days rather than family-owned ones, but that’s beside the point. Very often, the USA is a difficult country to region-guess because so much of it looks the same.

That was not the case here once I saw a sign for “Kit Carson”. Based on my extensive time spent studying county maps of the United States for fun, I happened to know that there is a Kit Carson County in eastern Colorado. I placed my marker there, an act colloquially referred to as “plonking”, and hoped I would get lucky. As it turned out, I did get lucky, because I won the round and, if I remember correctly, the game.

Google Street View imagery of Dublin, Ireland within the GeoGuessr interface.

This one was wild.

As soon as I spawned, I saw that the city looked decently familiar. In fact, it was almost too familiar. Exploring the neighborhood on Street View, I noticed the facade of a building called the “Liffey Trust Centre”, and that’s when I knew the city. There is only one River Liffey.

As soon as I figured out where I was, I audibly exclaimed “Holy hell!” because I had literally flown back home from Dublin the previous day. I’m not kidding. I had walked these streets a mere two days before, including an area of Dublin’s Docklands section. While I did not see the Liffey Trust Centre, which Google Maps tells me is an apartment complex, I was a mere 100 meters away from it at most. 

In all probability, this was just an insane coincidence. Perhaps the game has some way of knowing where my computer has been, but that almost seems doubtful given that my IP address varies depending on what Wi-Fi network I connect to. It is possible that Big GeoGuessr, much like Orwell’s Big Brother, is always watching me no matter where I am. The algorithms know who you are, and that’s not a conspiracy theory - that’s public information. Still, it was pretty insane seeing Dublin on my interface so soon after returning from a trip to that very city, especially considering that urban rounds become a lot less frequent in duels the higher you climb in the rankings.

Google Street View imagery of Burgas, Bulgaria with the GeoGuessr interface.

Here is possibly my most impressive guess to date.

As stated at the start of this post, a truly informed play in GeoGuessr must involve looking at several clues. It’s not always enough to see an Internet domain or national flag. In this case, I saw neither.

The first thing I noticed was a series of austere high-rise apartment buildings that are informally referred to as “commie blocks.” This told me I was likely in Eastern Europe or Central Asia, a hunch that was further confirmed when I saw signs in the Cyrillic alphabet that’s used in languages such as Russian. 

However, the roads were a lot better maintained than what I’d expect in Russia or especially Ukraine. While I’m not great at telling when the street-view imagery was taken, that would have been another clue. For obvious reasons, Google Street View hasn’t updated its coverage of Ukraine or Russia for several years.

My final clue was the vegetation. The trees reminded me of the time I visited Greece some years ago, evoking Southern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. However, the specific type of apartment buildings I saw made me believe I was in a formerly communist country. And the height of said buildings implied a city of some size. 

I guessed Burgas, which is the fourth-largest city in Bulgaria and a semi-popular tourist destination on the Black Sea coast. As it turns out, I ended up plonking less than a mile from the flag, being rewarded with 4,997 points out of a possible 5,000. I can’t even tell you how satisfying that was - that would be the highest single-round score I’ve ever achieved in a duel if not for…

Google Street View imagery of Nuuk, Greenland with the GeoGuessr interface. 

I’d seen images of Nuuk, the only settlement in Greenland that can honestly be called a “city”, and the apartment buildings somewhat resembled motels. The flag painted on what might be a bus stop also jumped out at me - I’ve seen a few people fly the Greenlandic flag in protest against Trump’s threatened annexation of the world’s largest island. (Which, to be perfectly clear, I denounce this one hundred percent.)

As you can see in the image above, an indigenous woman is painted on the side of the apartment complex, and I knew from prior knowledge that most of the Greenlandic population is indigenous. The vegetation (mostly lack thereof) also reminded me of the Arctic.

After that, it was just a matter of locating Nuuk on the map. I felt confident it was Nuuk because nowhere else in Greenland could possibly be that densely populated. As such, I was rewarded with 4,998 points, two shy of the maximum, and felt quite proud of myself.

Overall, GeoGuessr has been an immense asset to my fascination with geography. Sometimes, when you feed a hyperfixation too much, it spins out of control - that’s definitely the case here. 

Thank you for reading. 

Birthday Musings

Today is my 25th birthday, and I’m lost in a cascade of emotions, to say the least.

Some of the facts are clear. I am now closer to thirty than I am to twenty. That is a sobering thought, to be sure. From here on out my metabolism is going to slow down, if it hasn’t done so already. Eventually, once I reach my forties, my 6’3” frame is going to gradually shrink and my posture will get worse. Supposedly my frontal lobe is now fully developed, but people don’t have to stop learning once they reach twenty-five.

I’m going to get a handful of presents. I didn’t request anything in particular besides a cake; once you attain a certain age, birthdays don’t feel as monumental. But this one, my “silver birthday”, is somewhat different.

When I woke up this morning at about 5:30 AM, still recovering from the jet lag I experienced upon my return from Ireland, I came across the horrific news about Air India Flight 171. And I want to be careful talking about this, because it’s a horrendous tragedy. But hundreds of people have been confirmed dead, including all of the 242 passengers and crew. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which was scheduled to fly from Ahmedabad to London-Gatwick, crashed shortly after takeoff. 

At time of writing, we don’t know precisely why this crash happened. Transportation safety boards will review the circumstances and come to their conclusion, and hopefully changes will be made to ensure this doesn’t happen again. 

More importantly for the purposes of this post, it’s made me think about how fragile life can be. One day, you’re here - the next day, you aren’t. 

If you’re lucky, it’ll be after a long life, with loved ones by your bed, passing peacefully in your sleep. Maybe you’ll go quietly with very little pain - to the extent that there can be a “good” way to die, it’s something like that.

Now, I want to make one thing clear: I’m not a particularly philosophical person. I don’t spend a lot of time pondering the secrets of the universe beyond what science can reveal. Perhaps I’m a science enthusiast, because it’s always cool to discover what innovations will be unleashed as long as RFK Jr. doesn’t take them away from us. Even with the increase in obesity (which isn’t exclusive to the United States, even if it’s worse here), it’s not like a third of the population dies before age 5 anymore. 

I’m not particularly spiritual either. That’s not to say I haven’t considered questions of faith and similar matters, what in more technical terms is called philosophy of religion. I’m well aware of the problem of evil, and I have at least passing knowledge of theodicy, the subset of philosophy and/or religious apologetics used to explain away said problem of evil. I do not personally pray or go to church, and in general I live my life as though God’s not real. At least, I’d like to think I live to the fullest.

 Truth be told, I don’t pay as much attention to arguments for and against the truth of religious claims as I used to. I find I’m happier when I don’t give it much thought. 

But this milestone, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day I was cut from my mother’s womb, has forced my hand.

There is what some call the “genetic lottery of birth.” I’m not talking about how where, when, and to whom you are born plays a role in your life’s circumstances. That’s obviously a factor, but it’s not the only factor, particularly in an age when the world is more connected than ever.

Rather, I’m referring to how our personalities end up in bodies. How is a “soul”, for lack of a better word, matched with a body and brain? Even if all that I am, all that might be called a soul, is ultimately a product of this meat computer we call a brain, none of us are privy to how this process works. Does the universe have its own Random Number Generator? Is there any order in all this chaos?

I don’t know. In all probability, none of us on Earth will figure it out in my lifetime. I’m not going to parrot one of those arrogant religious activists who say science can’t answer that, because maybe it can one day. I just don’t know when that day will come. I likely won’t be around to see it.

There’s another matter, which is that of the afterlife. 

I don’t mean to wave away the legitimate reasons many people think there probably isn’t one. Often they point to how traumatic brain injuries can radically change a person’s personality, or how there’s no activity in the brain upon a person’s death. Personally, in the latter case, I don’t see how the absence of evidence is necessarily evidence of absence. Why would a person’s soul have to be physically within their body?

Personally, I don’t know what to believe, or even what I want to believe, with regards to what happens after you die. I’m aware that from a scientific standpoint, it’s very difficult to justify a belief in heaven on empirical evidence alone. And we can have a conversation about whether even eternal bliss would ultimately be less than ideal. Anyone who’s watched The Good Place all the way through (spoiler alert) has probably considered that forever is an unimaginably long time, even if you spend it in the titular paradise.

If I end up in an afterlife, I want something to work toward. It’s said that death is the ultimate motivator; we are incentivized to do whatever we need or want to do now, or at least soon, because one fine morning we won’t be able to. And the world will move on without us, and the people we loved most won’t have been able to hear I love you one last time. 

Again, empirical evidence for an afterlife is incredibly spotty at best. I do not deny that. But there are two reasons I hold out some hope.

One reason is because pretty much every ancient culture came up with something we might consider a religion. Of course, given the many differences between each form of mythology, they can’t all be right about every detail. For all I know, none of them were right about any details. Still, there were plenty of commonalities between many of these belief systems, such as ideas about how the world was created and what happened after you died. And this happened at a time when these civilizations rarely if ever interacted with one another except maybe to go to war. If prehistoric cultures agreed on some spiritual matters, then I think it’s at least conceivable there’s something to it. 

The other reason is because I feel I have to.

I live in the United States, a country where a disproportionate number of people die young. Gun violence in particular is an enormous injustice, a stain on this nation, and even if we were to pass gun control (which I have no serious expectation will ever happen), the children at Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, Robb Elementary, Apalachee High, and so many others aren’t coming back. 

A lot of the media coverage around school shootings centers around the gun control debate (as it should, even if that debate is pretty much over), but what many people don’t fully appreciate is how much these kids missed out on. Their lives were cut incredibly short. In the case of Sandy Hook, it took just minutes of a mentally ill young man’s time to take the lives of twenty literal children, and that just feels so profoundly unfair.

And look: I realize that the world has no obligation to be perfectly fair to us, not remotely. Put more bluntly, wishing it doesn’t make it so. This “argument” for an afterlife isn’t exactly philosophically satisfying, let alone scientifically rigorous. It’s not going to convince any logically mindful person who doesn’t already fervently want to believe. And honestly, I’m not sure I believe it. 

But with how fucked up the world has been lately, particularly the United States, I really hope there’s something else out there. Maybe not eternal paradise, because that might well have its own problems. I just really hope there’s a possibility that somehow, somewhere, things can be made right.

Happy birthday to me, huh?

Destination X: What I Needed

Promotional image for NBC’s “Destination X.” Image taken from IMDB.

Now, I’m not normally the type to watch a lot of TV. Usually, I don’t have the attention span for such shows, a consequence of how much time I’ve spent scrolling through social media. It’s affected all of us, and not in a good way.

That being said, one show seemed like it might be an exception. I received an ad for it on Paramount Plus yesterday, which serves as evidence that the advertisers know, by and large, who I am and what I’m interested in. Of course, that’s not a conspiracy theory - it’s public information. Anyone who pays attention to current events knows how these algorithms work. And yesterday I submitted to them.

At any rate, as soon as I saw a commercial for NBC’s Destination X, I knew I had to give it a watch. I am, after all, an avid GeoGuessr player and geography fanatic. 

The premise of the show is what I’d describe as a combination between Big Brother and GeoGuessr. Basically, ten strangers (though two more contestants are apparently added in the third episode, which doesn’t seem fair) are on this giant bus where the windows are all blacked out. In other words, the contestants have little to no way to tell where they are going. And guess what?

Meme from iFunny with the caption “THAT’S THE POINT!”

The show is hosted by a guy named Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Apparently he was an actor on this obscure show called The Walking Dead. I doubt you’ve heard of it. Anyway, he’s still quite an engaging presence on Destination X, though more on that later.

Now, the first thing I noticed upon searching for this show on Google was that the reviews were pretty middling. As of the moment I searched for it, only about half of Google users liked the show. I’ll admit that at first, I was fairly skeptical that I’d enjoy a TV series that had received such mediocre feedback.

After a few minutes, though, I was in full-on “fuck the haters” mode. Like, seriously. I couldn’t believe so many people disliked Destination X. It’s the perfect show for me, though I’ll acknowledge it might not be perfect for everyone. You need to go into it with a certain mindset.

The cast consists of twelve strangers, all but one of whom live in the United States. There’s one guy, Rick, who lives in Ontario, but he’s apparently originally from Seattle. If he’s one of the people who moved to Canada to escape Trump, I don’t blame him. In all seriousness, of the original ten players, only one could be considered previously famous - Josh Martinez, a former winner of Big Brother.

As an avid, longtime viewer of The Amazing Race, I was eager to check out this travel competition series. That’s a genre I need to search for more members of. According to their cast bios, the contestants are quite well-traveled with the exception of “Biggy”, a dad-gum likable fish out of water from Tennessee. Lots of them have been as far afield as Australia. And you know why I found that shocking upon reading these bios?

These contestants are idiots.

Okay, I’ll admit that’s not the kindest framing. Even if network TV ratings are a fraction of what they used to be, the fact remains that lots of people are watching. The contestants are quite brave for putting themselves out there and exposing their actions (and knowledge, or lack thereof, of European geography) to public scrutiny. I don’t mean to imply that being a public figure in this capacity doesn’t take guts. It does.

If the Facepalm subreddit wasn’t 85% Donald Trump these days, Destination X would be a perfect exhibit for it. I don’t want to spoil too much for readers who might watch, but for people who are as well-traveled as their bios say they are, the contestants sure seem to know very little about what’s almost certainly the world’s most tourist-friendly continent. 

And I know: It’s easy for me to say that, given that I’m obsessed with geography to possibly an unhealthy extent. Maybe I should give these players the benefit of the doubt given that there’s lots of pressure being in front of a camera, not to mention the isolation of being on that blacked-out bus for so long with only each other for company. I don’t want to minimize the fact that reality TV sets are built to break people (again, that’s the point), but I can’t tell you how many times I cringed during the first episode.

Like, it’s no wonder I wasn’t recruited for Destination X. I’d win every single season, and I hope to Arceus that there will be more seasons, because it’s entertaining as hell. I love watching these surprisingly ignorant recruits, including a Coachella grandma, a professional bird-watcher, and an aww-shucks sports bettor, clash over who got which clues to their destination. And yes, I’d bet 100 to 1 that the majority of these players are recruits. 

I guess I should explain how you get eliminated from this show. Well, at the end of every episode, after some people earn clues through challenges and some do not, five players are sent to the dreaded Map Room. As far as I can tell, the Map Room is on the same bus as the contestants’ living quarters. I’ll probably get cancelled for the Harry Potter reference, but this bus must have an Undetectable Extension Charm or whatever it was called in the books. There’s no way the Map Room could fit on it normally.

Each player sent to the Map Room has two minutes to place an X on a map of Europe in a specific location. Ultimately, in the words of the host, they’ve only got to answer one question: Where the hell am I? And whoever “plonks” their X furthest from the actual location must get off the bus, which means they’re eliminated from the competition.

Now, as stated above, this show’s reviews on Google did not inspire the most confidence. But again, fuck the haters. This is amazing.

Seriously, this is the show I needed. After several months spent doomscrolling for hours a day, I could really use a show that’s just intellectually stimulating enough to pay attention to while also being a total hot mess from the standpoint of trashy reality TV drama. Like, it’s a total fever dream. 

The contestants aren’t the only characters here. As stated above, Destination X is hosted by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, a man I’d never seen on TV prior to yesterday, but who ends up being an amazing host. NBC chose perfectly for the role, and I couldn’t laugh harder at how playfully sadistic Morgan sounds when conversing with the contestants. He’s turned Europe into a giant game board, and the players only see what I want them to see. Those are his words, not mine.

Another factor that made me snort was how this show is put together. The production value is through the roof, but not in a way that makes Destination X feel refined or scripted. Rather, the production value is so over-the-top that it loops around to being cartoonish. Whether it’s the host riding in on a motorcycle, or the montages of people donning their high-tech VR goggles and having their vision switched off, it feels so excessive. But again, it’s so breathtakingly entertaining that you won’t care how cheesy it is. I promise.

I can’t tell you how much I needed Destination X. Twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t even know this series existed, and now I’m obsessed. New episodes drop Tuesday evenings (in EST) on NBC, but you can also watch it on several streaming platforms including YouTube TV and Peacock. 

At time of writing, two episodes are available for your viewing pleasure. And I highly recommend you take advantage of them. If you want to watch something related to geography (or just love looking at European scenery in both highly populated and pastoral regions), Destination X is for you. Even if you’re not in the mood for something incredibly intellectual, this is one of the messiest shows I’ve ever seen, in a good way. It’s such a train wreck that you might just love it.

Ireland Impressions

NOTE: If this essay feels disjointed, that’s because it was written over a three-day period and not in one sitting. My apologies.

Hello. Again, it’s been a while. Far longer than it should have been since I wrote one of these up. And there really is no excuse for this - rather, there is a reason.

The way I see it, an “excuse” and a “reason” are two different things. An excuse means you’re trying to dodge responsibility for what happened, whereas a reason means you’re admitting what you did was wrong, you’re just explaining why you did it. But that’s beside the point.

My reason is that I recently traveled to Ireland. This is my second international trip of the year, which also makes it the second international trip since Donald Trump took office. As I wrote this section, I was scheduled to fly home the following day and I’m thankful the airport has U.S. preclearance. If I’m to be rejected at customs, I’ll be denied boarding rather than detained and possibly sent to El Salvador.

In any case, I think I should talk about my trip. 

The purpose of travel, as the immigration agent asked upon our arrival in Dublin, was tourism. It was to celebrate my sister’s graduation from college, so all four of us went. My sister selected the destination based on its literary history, particularly James Joyce (whose most famous work is perhaps Ulysses. More on that later.)

And let me tell you, Ireland is a special place. From the moment the clouds cleared to reveal the northern suburbs of Dublin that lie in the airport’s flight path, I knew I was going to enjoy this vacation. 

Aerial view of some Irish seaside town on the approach to DUB. OC photo taken June 1, 2025.

One of the obvious differences in Ireland is that they drive on the left side of the road. My mother announced she’d take the passenger seat of our rented car, then opened the front right door to reveal the steering wheel. All four of us burst out laughing at that very moment.

As an avid GeoGuessr player, seeing the Irish road signs was quite a treat. The YIELD signs have thicker text than those in America, and the directional signs are bilingual, featuring Irish Gaelic text in italics beside the standard English text. Another way to tell the UK apart from Ireland, of course, is that British signs say “GIVE WAY” rather than “YIELD”. 

Now I’ll talk about some things I noticed in Ireland that, while not exactly culture shock, qualify as notable societal differences with the United States.

I’ll start with the food. For all the talk about how American restaurant food has massive portion sizes, is massively processed, and is therefore massively bad for you, I think I ate less healthily here than I have at home. Of course, part of that is likely because I was on vacation and therefore saw fit to indulge. Additionally, pubs aren’t the only type of restaurant in Dublin, even if they are what the Irish capital is most famous for.

After nearly a week here, what I crave most of all are vegetables. I’m sure there are plenty of veggies if you actually look for them, but I didn’t have too many this week.

And speaking of the portion sizes, it is true that they don’t give you as many fries with your burger as you’d get in the States. However, the burger itself was bigger than most burgers I’ve had on the other side of the pond. The patty was thicker than a hockey puck, and the bun was taller too. It was rather unwieldy to eat, but still delicious.

Again, I’m not naïve to the fact that American food is still worse for you. I’m well aware that the United States is more obese than Ireland on average. But I’ve lived in the USA for my whole life, and your needs as a tourist are generally different from your needs as a resident. 

Of course, like I said above, Dublin has plenty of other restaurants besides pubs. I just didn’t go to many places that would qualify as “other restaurants besides pubs”.

Another cultural difference I noticed was related to renewable energy.

It’s no secret that the United States is not the most environmentally conscious country in the world. Donald Trump is President, and that’s not something that “happened” to us - we, collectively, chose him. At least at that moment in time, there was a preference for a convicted felon and climate denier against a perfectly qualified black woman with more sensible environmental policy, as sad as that is.

The EU is different. As I’m writing this from my hotel lobby in Dublin, it’s very likely that several of the city’s buses have driven by. A massive percentage of these buses, possibly half or more, advertise themselves as producing zero emissions. And I believe it. In addition, when visiting the village of Cong, I was able to spot a gas station. It was priced at about €1.75 per liter, which, if I’m doing my math correctly, equates to over seven dollars a gallon. In the USA, I’ve rarely seen gasoline cost more than $4/gallon. This of course means that gas is taxed more heavily in Europe than it is on my side of the pond.  

Now, I’ll admit that this isn’t really a “culture shock”. After all, in a perfect world, all of us would care about the climate crisis and protecting the environment. But we don’t live in a perfect world. I was pleased to see that the EU is taking significant measures to make things better. And it’s refreshing to visit a place where every politician treats climate change and humanity’s complicity in it as fact.

Another thing I noticed during my time in Dublin was how much it seems to have changed in recent years. While it was my first visit to Ireland, I still found it notable that there were many ethnic restaurants. 

It may not be quite as multicultural as London, but Ireland, once a country that legions of people emigrated from, has become a popular country for people to move to. One day, they should have an immigration museum in addition to their emigration museum. 

I’m not going to say Ireland is perfect in terms of welcoming foreigners. No country is. But when I visited the Guinness factory in Dublin, the exhibit mentioned how progressive the company has historically been. (Admittedly, since it’s the company museum, one shouldn’t take that uncritically). A contemporary employee was quoted as saying that, while a Korean BBQ joint next to a 200-year-old Irish pub might seem disjointed, it works. 

I think that’s an exhibit in how the components of a national identity can change. For much of the last 200 years Ireland was an unattractive immigration destination, to say the least. But that isn’t really the case anymore. Irish national identity now includes people who are Irish by choice rather than by chance. 

Again, I’m one to talk - I live in the USA. But most Irish people (and Brits) probably do not agree with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s controversial “island of strangers” speech. Indeed, the people of Ireland were among the friendliest of any place I’ve visited - more on that later.

Now, in case you didn’t know, there’s quite a lot of interesting places to visit in and around Dublin. One such area is pictured just above - the James Joyce Tower in Sandycove. Admission to the tower is free, though you can purchase souvenirs from the gift shop. The tower is known for being where James Joyce lived for six days, and is the setting for the opening pages of Ulysses. My sister, a major fan of Joyce’s, seemed to be in heaven.

Sandycove, which is not to be confused with one of the most horrific days in American history, reminded me of a combination between Cape Cod and San Francisco based on its geography and architecture. There’s a well-known swimming hole in Sandycove known as Forty Foot, which was featured on The Amazing Race 35. 

While walking around Sandycove and the neighboring town of Dun Laoghaire, I was struck by the realization that if I were ever to move to Ireland, this is the sort of place I’d want to live in. It’s a suburb of Dublin with numerous parks and amenities thanks to its mixed-use zoning. I’m sure it’s among the most expensive places to live in an already high-cost-of-living country, but if you can afford it (a big if), it’s probably amazing. Especially because it’s so close to the city!

Speaking of James Joyce, it was during my visit in Ireland that I learned about Bloomsday. No, that isn’t a typo. Instead, it’s a national (or at least local) holiday held every year on June 16, which is the date on which Ulysses takes place. On that day, particularly devoted Joyce fans partake in celebrations at the novel’s portrayed locations throughout Dublin. Some of the most fanatic Joyce readers even walk the whole way as a form of “pilgrimage”, for lack of a better word.

My main anxiety concerning this trip, other than possibly being detained at customs on the way back into the United States, was the way I would be perceived abroad once people learned what country I lived in. It’s no secret that America’s international reputation is in the shitter, and it’s sadly well-deserved. Domestic issues like expensive health care and gun violence are one thing, but when it comes to threatening Canadian sovereignty and doing nothing about climate change, we had no right to elect Donald Trump. Especially when our economic recovery was pretty good under Joe Biden!

So yeah…considering all that, the Irish people had every right to curse us out at any opportunity. It does not matter that I did not personally vote for Trump - the fact that I still need to pay taxes to his administration is bad enough. 

Fortunately, the anti-American sentiment I anticipated largely did not materialize. As stated above, Ireland’s people are some of the kindest out of the 16 countries I’ve visited. In fact, most of them didn’t even bring up Donald Trump unless I mentioned him first. 

Of course, it needs to be said that I took every measure to preempt any animosity centered around my nationality. For instance, I always said “Boston” before I said “USA” when asked where I was from. It’s my general sense (and a group of Canadian tourists I met in a small yet famous village confirmed) that Boston has a better reputation than most American cities. 

Seriously, even other tourists were quite upbeat. My memory is that I met a group of travelers and asked them where they were from (answer: Ottawa, Canada). I then said I was from Boston and was like, “I don’t know what to say right now…but I hate Trump” or something to  that effect. As I figured, however, they get that a lot whenever encountering American tourists, and one remarked that Boston isn’t a MAGA place. After that, I asked one of them to take my photo in front of the statue of an actor from The Quiet Man.

On the whole, the Golden Rule still applies whenever you’re a tourist, even if you’re an American tourist. You treat locals the way you would like to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot - it’s as simple as that. Don’t tell locals you’re Irish just because your great-great-great-grandfather escaped the country during the potato famine of the late 1840s. In general, Europeans care a lot less about which country’s blood you have, and why shouldn’t they - the last time they got obsessed over that, it didn’t exactly end well.

Oh, and whatever you do, don’t wear a MAGA hat. Truth be told, most Americans who visit Europe probably lean left of center (as the right-wingers tend to think the USA is the best country in the world and why would you visit anywhere else), but if you do support that asshole, you’d be wise to keep it to yourself when you’re in a country that’s far less sympathetic toward Donald Trump. 

If I ever go back to Ireland (and I’m likely to one day), I would want to spend more time on the country’s west coast. I might not visit the Cliffs of Moher, since they’re incredibly touristy (even if it’s for a good reason), but I would always relish the opportunity to drive around those impossibly verdant hills and mountains. Seriously, there’s a reason they call it the Emerald Isle.

If you wish to see photos from this trip, follow me on BlueSky at @snowlabrador.

Trump TV

By all accounts, it’s been a pretty insane couple of days. The FDA announced recently that they would not recommend COVID boosters for people under age 65 unless they were considered to be at high risk. Yes, this is really happening. I’m glad I was able to get an impromptu booster yesterday, and some other people probably will as well. 

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Sewage, promised that if we wanted vaccines, we would still be able to get them. He said this under oath. And yet, he was lying, just like many people warned he was. He’s taking away our freedom of choice, and as a result, there will be many otherwise preventable hospitalizations and deaths. I left a comment on the regulations.gov page, but who knows if that’ll do anything. Still, it’s worth a shot.

In the last week or two, Trump announced that he was going to receive a $400 million plane from Qatar to use as Air Force One. Again, this is really happening. As brazenly corrupt as this is, the most worrying part is that the Qatari jet is almost certainly bugged seven ways from Sunday. It’s literally an intelligence nightmare on par with Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard. At this point, you might as well give Vladimir Putin a Cabinet position - for all intents and purposes, he’s already President.

And to those who say Putin must have something on Trump, I understand why you’d think that, but there’s still a gaping hole in this theory. 

We already know lots of horrible things about Trump given how his first term ended and the fact that he was convicted of thirty-four felony charges. I’m not naïve to Trump’s admiration of Putin and how dangerous that is. But my issue with the blackmail theory is this: What could Putin POSSIBLY have on Trump that’s so much worse than what we already know? And, more importantly: Why is he so scared of that secret coming out when he’s proven to be Teflon Don otherwise?

No. I think it’s more likely Trump simply loves Putin and wants to be just like him. That’s incredibly dangerous, of course, and I don’t want to minimize that. Other countries are going to stop sharing intelligence with us pretty soon, if they haven’t already. And we’re going to see more terrorist attacks.

In the midst of all this chaos and outrage, it would be nice if we had a mainstream media that did its job. It would be nice if they called out the Trump administration for all their horrendous acts, as well as the American public for electing that man not once but twice. But that’s not the world we live in.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock lately, former US President Joe Biden was recently diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of prostate cancer. In my view, it makes the saga last year surrounding efforts to remove him from the race seem even more tragic in hindsight. There have obviously been many questions about how this wasn’t detected sooner - after all, Biden has the best healthcare in the world. 

To be sure, this certainly warrants some discussion in the media. The issue is that it’s all the media is talking about. I’m not going to link to CNN, which has basically become Trump TV at this point thanks to all the “sane-washing” it does, but they’ve been running segment after segment about how the Democrats covered up Biden’s health. As if it’s remotely equivalent to everything Trump and the GOP have done!

Yes, the Democratic Party tried to hide Joe Biden’s decline from the general public. But quite frankly, I don’t care about that anymore. Biden isn’t President anymore, and he’ll never be President again. He’ll be lucky to live out the rest of the year. The point is, he should be politically irrelevant at this point, and he probably would be if the media stopped talking about the cover-up. This could lead into a rant about the Democrats’ age problem, but I won’t go there right now.

Of course, it needs to be said that this is far from the only example of the media sabotaging the Democratic Party. Consider how much they sane-washed Trump during the leadup to the 2024 election. It’s no secret at this point that they desperately wanted to return to the White House for the sake of ratings.

Donald Trump, of course, is a ratings machine. Whether you love him or hate him, you have to pay attention. The idea that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” was basically the modus operandi of his 2016 campaign, and he keeps grabbing your attention with insane threats, such as that to make Canada the 51st state.

Speaking of that particular threat, CNN is totally broken at this point. Or maybe broken is the wrong word - it’s working exactly as they want it to. Again, I’m not going to give them any more traffic through this blog (however small that amount of traffic might be), but I remember that they talked about Trump’s 51st state comments as “Trump eyes territorial expansion.” This is sane-washing of the highest order. 

Honestly, there’s a word for what Trump proposes. There’s a word for forcibly annexing a country with the intent of conquering it and making it part of your own country. The word is invasion.

If you want to know what an invasion entails, look no further than Ukraine. Now, I’m aware that media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a fraction of what it once was. During the first few days and weeks of the war, Ukraine was everywhere. You couldn’t escape the news about Snake Island, or the siege on Mariupol, or the numerous other war crimes Russian forces have committed the last few years. 

Now, of course, this conflict has faded into the background, especially since the October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war against Hamas (and genocide in Gaza) soaking up all the attention. But the war in Ukraine, now well into its fourth year, is still going on, and still just as bloody as ever.

The point is, war is brutal, especially when civilians are targeted like what Russia and Israel are doing. Trump’s proposing doing exactly this to Canada, because they will fight back. Canadians are proud of one thing above all, and that’s not being Americans. It’s hard to blame them when they’ve got universal health insurance and sane gun laws. 

Will Trump actually invade Canada? Who knows. It’s a joke until it isn’t. But it’s incredibly irresponsible of CNN to use the euphemism of “territorial expansion” to describe such an unspeakable crime. 

So, if we have a mainstream media that’s totally in the tank for Donald Trump, what’s the solution? That’s where I come in.

I haven’t been as consistent in writing this blog as I should be, but I’m here to deliver the news as I see it. I might not have a fancy journalism degree, but you don’t need one in order to tell people what they need to know. Your “I Can” is more important than your IQ, isn’t it?

The mainstream media, CNN et al,  is Trump TV. They sanitized everything he proposed, and they continue to do so. Independent, alternative media is the way forward for our country. It’s the only way we’ll convince enough people that they were destructive fools for giving Donald Trump another term in the White House.

Lessons From The Scale

Hello again. It’s me. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Let me just say that it’s been an eventful few weeks since this blog went offline. I felt like bringing it back, though, so here we are. After a rebrand, I’m going to make The Lion’s Lair better than ever before.

Anyway, the other thing that’s different in my life is that I received a sobering health diagnosis. I’m not an old man by any means, but being slightly pudgy has already started catching up with me. My doctor recommended that I lose about ten pounds.

At first, it was a little hard to accept the news. Most people don’t want to accept that they aren’t as healthy as they thought they were. There’s a reason that Sacha Baron Cohen segment with Bernie Sanders, in which Cohen played a man previously oblivious to his horrendously unhealthy lifestyle, was so funny.

When I told my mother about what the doctor’s note said, she talked to me at first as though I were a sick puppy. I’m sure she didn’t mean it this way, but I wanted my other family members to know that I’d rather not be talked to like I have cancer. The fact is, I do not have cancer - at least, I don’t think I do.

I realize that compared to many people who struggle with the size of their waistline, I had a relatively mild amount of weight to lose. I also realize that I'm not at my goal weight yet.However, I want to share my insights anyway. These aren't necessarily revolutionary conclusions that will put scientists to shame - at least, not for many people who’ve lived this struggle. But here's what has helped me the most.

You Get Used To It:

After a few weeks of not eating excessive portions, I get full a little faster than I used to. Previously I might have eaten two or three large plates of food without hesitation, but now my portions are a decent bit smaller. I don’t know if my stomach has shrunk, or if that only happens to people who have bariatric surgery. And obviously, bariatric surgery isn’t recommended for people who are only moderately overweight - it’s a drastic step that, contrary to popular belief, is not an easy way out. I'm by no means depriving myself, of course; any fad diet suggesting to eat extremely little is not to be trusted. The most important reason is because…

It's Not A Diet, It's A Lifestyle:

The word diet, for many people, has the connotation of a temporary restriction on your caloric intake. For better or worse, it doesn't work that way. If you want to keep the weight off in the long term, you need to view it as a permanent lifestyle change.

This doesn’t mean you can never have pizza again. In fact, I’ve noticed that if you allow yourself to indulge once or twice a week, it’s a lot easier to keep these habits up in the long term. If you crave pizza, maybe make it an occasional treat instead of eating it every other night. I’ve personally started only eating dessert on the weekends, if at all.

That's the main reason why fad diets are to be avoided - the changes they suggest aren't realistic to maintain for life. And you want to maintain this for life, for which it's helpful to realize that…

It's Not About What You're Giving Up:

If you are to maintain your lifestyle changes for, well, life, it's best to have a certain attitude. Don't look at your new lifestyle as giving up what you love. The only thing you're renouncing is the extra pounds (or kilograms for non-Americans). In all seriousness, there are plenty of healthy foods that taste delicious. 

One of the hardest parts of losing weight is finding time to cook for yourself, but if you see this journey as an opportunity to find new recipes with healthier ingredients, it'll be far more enjoyable. Sweet potato fries taste at least as amazing when you cook them in the air fryer, and they're a lot better for you than when you get them at a restaurant. It's not about giving things up; it's about finding better ways.

Don't Obsess Over The Scale:

I know. Ironic, right? Before officially starting my weight loss journey maybe two months ago, I often weighed myself every single day. This made it easy to overreact to what basically amounted to a daily fluctuation. This may be controversial here, but I advocate for weekly weigh-ins rather than daily. This way, I believe you'll have a more accurate view of whether you're on track to meet your goal. I'm the sort of guy who likes instant gratification, but this isn't the sort of process that gets you instant gratification. As mentioned above, the weekly weigh-ins also allow you to treat yourself once or twice a week, which is okay as long as you eat healthily the rest of the week (and also makes it easier to maintain the lifestyle in the long term).

Finally, it's easier to eat zero potato chips than one. This is a lesson many of us have learned the hard way, but it's true. Potato chips, like many junk foods, are designed to be addictive. People don’t always think of unhealthy foods as being akin to drugs, but it can be an addiction just like any other. 

Indeed, the difficult thing about a food addiction as opposed to one for alcohol or nicotine is that you need some amount of food to survive. If you’re trying to quit smoking or conquer alcoholism, you can simply quit. It might not be pleasant, which is why I’m glad I don’t smoke or drink in the first place. But food is a biological necessity that you can’t break up from; forging a healthy relationship with it is essential to success.

Again, I'm not pretending to be an expert on everything to do with weight loss. I’m not naïve to the fact that this is a difficult journey for the vast majority of people who attempt it. But this is my personal blog, and I’m just sharing what I’ve observed over the last few weeks.

As of the day I write this post, I’m about 6 pounds down compared to my weight on the morning of my diagnosis. I’m not at my goal yet, but I’m getting there. Say what you will about Andy Grammer’s musical style, but his song “Workin’ On It” has basically become my anthem over the last couple of weeks. 

Different people have different stumbling blocks on this road. I read this AskReddit thread a while back about the hardest part of eating healthily. While some people gave cynical answers like “living in the USA”, the one I related to most was the difficulty of cooking every single meal. But it’s made me more passionate about food, as I become more intentional about what I use as fuel.

The reward is very handsome indeed. At merely 6 pounds beneath my starting weight, walking long distances already seems to put a little less strain on my knees. Family members and a few friends have also said I look a little leaner. I cannot tell you how gratifying that feels and how fervently I wish to remain on this path toward a healthier body. 

Thank you for reading.

Finding Better Ways

Wouldn’t you love a lawn like this? Image taken from the American Meadows website.

Sometimes I go back to a quote from the Australian and American journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks. Even if I didn’t finish her novel Horse, I still admire Brooks a great deal, especially for this one quote about climate change. 

I’m not naïve to the fact that climate change is a crisis. I’m well aware that my country’s President is effectively taking a flamethrower to the planet, and will try to cut whatever green energy programs he can. But there’s one answer Geraldine Brooks gave in this 2022 interview with the New York Times that really stuck with me.

Brooks was asked what subject she wished more authors would write about. Her response was as follows: 

We have to reframe the story of climate change so that it is not only about renunciation and loss, but also about possibility and joy. A wild lawn full of bees and wildflowers is more beautiful and less work than a dull expanse of toxic ChemLawn; a sunlight-powered electric car happens to be a more sporty drive than a gas vehicle, and a pre-owned treasure discovered while socializing with neighbors at the local Dumptique brings more satisfaction than a plastic tchotchke one-clicked on the internet. It’s not about giving things up but finding better ways.

There’s something beautiful about this. Whenever we read or listen to news about climate change, we’re confronted with statistics about what we are losing; species are going extinct, glaciers are melting, entire major cities might become borderline uninhabitable by century’s end or sooner. I don’t mean to minimize the tragedy that these losses are, nor do I believe Brooks intended to do so.

In my personal life, I’ve noticed these “better ways” showing up. For instance, my father now drives a Rivian, an electric vehicle he’s a major fan of. If climate change did not exist, there wouldn’t be such a demand for these vehicles. My hometown still holds a weekly farmer’s market during the warmer months, and it’s a popular gathering place at a time when “third places” are receding quickly. Without minimizing the bad things that will happen (and are already happening) as a result of the climate crisis, we can find our silver linings, as small as they may be.

I can connect this to my personal life. Now, I’m not going to get too specific about what prompted this recommendation, but my doctor recently advised me to lose about ten pounds. I’m not obese by any means, but I would likely be healthier if I were about ten pounds lighter. So that’s my new goal.

In an era when many of us spend hours doomscrolling, you might think I’d be panicking about my diagnosis. But I decided early on that I wasn’t going to spend hours and hours researching potential complications of my condition. 

My reasoning is fairly simple: All that’s going to accomplish is stressing me out more. Losing ten pounds is the best way to ensure my condition does not progress, and knowing what might happen if I don’t lose that weight doesn’t change the objective. It would have no bearing on my success or lack thereof. Therefore, I need to have the right attitude toward my goal.

Of course, no conversation about my weight or efforts to lose it would be complete without talking about American cuisine. Honestly, I don’t need to tell you about its reputation. Fast food restaurants and stores like Dollar General have taken over the country, to the point where that’s what most people think when they hear the words “American cuisine.”

And if you ask me, that’s a shame. Indeed, that’s putting it mildly. Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of preventable death in this country, and our food is to blame. But it’s not just the food itself, but the inequities involved.

You see, Dollar General has a very specific and insidious business model. They build stores in impoverished communities - as the Wendover Productions video linked above mentioned, even many tiny towns with no restaurants have a Dollar General. Their business model is to run local grocery stores out of business by offering low prices. But ultimately, it’s more expensive to be poor. 

Terry Pratchett’s “boot theory” is one of the most prominent examples of this, but it’s also relevant to food, especially in the United States. If you’re affluent, you can afford plenty of fresh, healthy food (and you’re more likely to have time to cook it), a gym membership or home gym, a nutritionist if necessary, Ozempic if absolutely necessary, or bariatric surgery in extreme cases. If you’re poor, that’s much more difficult. Additionally, if you don’t have enough money for healthy food, you might have to purchase food that’s cheap at time of purchase, but in the long run (at least in the USA) you’re likely to incur more health care expenses sooner.

Relevant to the issue of climate change, however, is the amount of carbon emissions that come from transporting food. Some estimates suggest it’s as much as 20 percent of overall food-related emissions globally. That’s why we’re often told we should buy and consume what’s grown locally and in season. But that’s not possible for everyone.

In addition to our reputation for being obese, Americans have a reputation for not caring too much about the environment. In many cases, this reputation is well-earned; we do in fact have a climate denier as President, and he did win a free and fair election. Yes, he really did.

But again: If you’ve got enough money, you can afford to eat expensive, locally-grown food. If you don’t, you can’t, at least not as often. This leads me into my next point, which is that “American cuisine” is a tragedy. Not just because of how famously unhealthy it is, but because of what it could be.

USDA plant hardiness zones in the United States as of 2023. With such a diverse range of climate conditions, shouldn’t we have a more diverse cuisine?

It’s no secret that, as much as many American cities look nearly identical to each other, its natural environment is one of the most varied on Earth. Our national parks, for instance, are famous the world over. And we have nearly every climate type on Earth within our borders.

We probably have the best geography of any country from the standpoint of growing a wide variety of food to feed the population. If you look at the cuisine of many other countries, it’s dictated by the climate, since a country’s climate dictates what can grow naturally there. You can’t grow tomatoes in Norway (at least not outdoors), but you can in California - in fact, they grow in abundance!

With all this variety, with so many climate and soil types that can support so many different delicious, nutritious staple foods, it is criminal that we made ourselves known for McDonald’s. Like, that’s a tragedy.

It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way.

Now, back to my personal life. A few years ago, my family bought an air fryer, and I maintain that’s one of the best three-figure purchases we have ever made. Because we’re all trying to eat more healthily, it’s best to limit our intake of potatoes fried in oil. But lots of us, particularly my father, still crave sweet potato fries.

Here’s the answer: Buy some sweet potatoes. Peel them, then chop them into your preferred size and shape. Put a small amount of olive oil on them, as well as salt and pepper if that’s what you prefer. Toss them in the air fryer for about ten minutes, and voila! They taste at least as amazing (maybe even better with the satisfaction of having made them yourself), and they’re far healthier. 

Incidentally, The Damage Report recently covered a story about how McDonald’s, Donald Trump’s favorite restaurant, has seen a decrease in revenue. Host John Iadarola speculated that this may be because prices at the restaurant have risen. Previously, the main selling point of McDonald’s was that it was cheap (at least, at the point when you eat it), but without that, is it still worth buying Mickey D’s? 

It’s been just under a week since I received my diagnosis and resolved to lose ten pounds, but I already feel like I am more passionate about food than I used to be. Isn’t that funny?

Geraldine Brooks’ quote rings true for me. I’m not giving up oily, greasy sweet potato fries - I’ve found a better way to enjoy them. I’m not giving up the enjoyment of delicious food - I’m becoming more cognizant of what I’m putting into my body. And, though my weight loss journey has only just begun, I think my attitude is important. I’m not naïve to the fact that I should lose weight, far from it. But I’m putting a positive spin on it as much as I can.

It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle. The key word there is life. The changes you make to your habits should be things you can change for life. And to accomplish that, it’s ideal if you don’t look at what you’re giving up, but instead think about what you’re getting in return.

“Americans Don’t Want Walkable Cities”

The title of this essay is an argument you’ll frequently hear from well-meaning people. Both Europeans, who generally live in communities that more closely approximate what Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo calls a “15-minute city”, and Americans, who very often live in car-dependent suburbia, will say this. 

Americans have a reputation for being fat and lazy. And people who say this aren’t entirely wrong, but in some ways you could call this a “chicken or the egg” situation. Are many Americans obese because they protested against walkable cities, or is the lack of walkability (as well as diet-related factors) making us fat and lazy?

I tend to think the latter is closer to the truth. But again, both these possibilities can reinforce one another in a sort of “doom spiral”.

The argument is that because Americans don’t want to walk anywhere, their cities aren’t built for that. Because we’re not environmentally conscious, we like our gas-guzzling vehicles and getting stuck in traffic on the freeway. 

To be clear, the Republican Party in the USA is the only major political party to deny that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, or even that it exists at all. I’m not going to dispute this. However, the problem of walkability (or the lack thereof) isn’t strictly a “left versus right” issue. 

In this essay, I attempt to refute three common arguments that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable.

The first argument, which is probably especially poignant if you’re an American over age 30, is that many people in my country look back on their college years with considerable nostalgia. If you’re from Europe or any other place that has walkable cities, you might find this ridiculous. After all, earning a post-secondary degree is a stressful process that for many involves late-night cram sessions, research papers, and high-stakes exams that can make or break your grade. This isn’t unique to the United States at all.

What is far more unique to the USA, however, is the way we design most of our cities.

Sprawling Detroit suburbs, taken from Reddit.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan. Image taken from Reddit.

Look at these two photos and tell me which looks like a more appealing place to live. Yes, some on the right demonize higher education and avoid sending their children to college on “principled” grounds. But not all of them. Not remotely.

It’s often been observed that when you grow up in an American suburb, you don’t get a whole lot of freedom. Until about age 16, there’s no chance for you to acquire a driver’s license, and until you have one, you can’t go anywhere on your own. Some of these suburbs have been described by Redditors as “luxury prisons”. In fact, some might literally rather live in one of those Norwegian prisons that look like college campuses - at least there, you have community even if you lack freedom.

Anyway, college. While you still have to attend classes, you generally have a lot more choice in terms of which courses to take than you did in high school, let alone middle school. More importantly, the majority of American college towns are built with students in mind, and not all students bring their own vehicles to campus. As such, they need other ways to get around, so the cities have these methods in abundance.

While the stereotypical American suburb inhibits chances to form a community, college is the opposite. There’s a reason Greek life is popular at American universities and why there’s so much emphasis on social events. 

Anecdotally, even as someone who grew up in a walkable suburb by this country’s standards, my parents kept hammering into me that I needed to join some club activities to make the most of the college experience. Even now, I regret not attending more such events due to my autism-induced lack of social stamina. But that’s a story for another day.

Cinderella mascot in front of the castle at Walt Disney World. Image taken from the Visit Orlando website.

Now let’s talk about something else. Although international tourism to the United States is currently in freefall, understandably so, one of the most popular attractions for such visitors (as well as millions of domestic tourists per year) is Disney World. And honestly, I see that as a national embarrassment. It’s far from the most important shame related to my nationality, but it’s still there.

I understand that Reddit is hardly a scientific source, but this thread from last year is just perfection. Disney World, after all, has a monorail connecting many of the parks and very little car traffic. Literally, when I looked up “are there any cars in Disney World” for this essay, most of the top results related to the movie featuring Lightning McQueen rather than parking.

But my point still stands. For many Americans in the middle class, Disney World is the ultimate family vacation. Personally, as someone who went there as a child, I have no desire to go back for a number of reasons. The food’s probably awful, it’s ridiculously humid and pretty hot all year round, and they say the lines for rides are insane these days. And that’s not an exhaustive list. 

Even so, plenty of people spend thousands of dollars on such trips. It’s not just the “Disney Adults” who make loving the mouse their whole identity. On some level, people want to spend time in a place where they don’t need to drive. Half As Interesting, a YouTube channel whose videos are narrated by Sam Denby of Wendover Productions, recently made an excellent video about how this transit does not extend outside of the resort’s boundaries to the actual city of Orlando. 

Disney World isn’t the only domestic tourist destination that’s notably more walkable than most places in America. There are also plenty of small towns all over the country that get seasonal visitors depending on what recreational activities are near it. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but most walkable small towns in the United States are in one or more of three categories.

1: Places built prior to the wave of suburbanization that came to the United States in the aftermath of World War II.

2: Places that get a lot of seasonal tourism, particularly from domestic visitors.

3: Places that have become prohibitively expensive for all but a relatively small percentage of the population to live in.

Of course, as stated above, these three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they frequently reinforce one another, and that leads into my third rebuttal to the claim that Americans don’t want walkable cities.

Corporate greed is very often blamed for many of America’s ills. Our for-profit health care system, for instance, is due to the greed of insurance companies. You won’t see me defending said system on this blog, that’s for sure.

 But not everything is a grandiose corporate conspiracy to swindle us. Sometimes it’s just supply and demand. If more people want a commodity than the amount of that commodity that exists, we should expect that commodity to become more expensive. (Yes, in a perfect world, housing would not be seen as a “commodity”, but rather as a “human right”, but that’s not the world we live in).

As stated above, many of America’s walkable communities, often referred to as “streetcar suburbs”, were built prior to World War II. By the USA’s standards, these are ancient places that existed before the advent of single-use zoning in the country. 

Commercial building beside a home in Roland Park, Baltimore. Like many modern-day “streetcar suburbs”, it’s unaffordable for most Americans. Image taken from the website for Long & Foster Real Estate.

Single-use zoning basically means that a given tract of land can be used for strictly commercial use, or strictly residential use, but not both. This is why so many American cities have suburbs where there are several square miles of homes that all look nearly identical to one another and you can’t walk to anything that isn’t someone else’s house who happens to live nearby. (And even then, if your subdivision has no sidewalks, you’re out of luck).

One of the most prominent streetcar suburbs in the United States is relatively close to me: Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. This sounds like it should be an ideal place to live if you don’t want the hustle and bustle of a densely urban neighborhood, but also don’t want to rely on your car for every little thing. There’s just one problem.

If you go to the Chestnut Hill, MA page on Zillow today, you’ll find that the cheapest real estate available is a one-bed, one-bath condo for more than half a million dollars. And that’s the bare minimum of what you’ll need. Even that’s out of the price range for probably more than half of Americans. Basically all of the single-family homes for sale in Chestnut Hill will run you a million or two, or more. 

Many of the other “streetcar suburbs” are just as costly. On some level, it makes sense that it would be expensive, because such neighborhoods have high demand and relatively low supply. But the fact that high demand exists would seem to imply that many Americans want to live in an area with accessible amenities.

Overall, the narrative that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable because they’re addicted to their cars is a convenient one. I can understand why many people believe it, and to some extent, some people here are addicted to their cars, and some are too lazy to walk anywhere more than a couple blocks away.

But to act like “car addiction” is universal among Americans misses the point. There are numerous factors that make our cities car-dependent, and keep our cities car-dependent, systemic issues that won’t be solved overnight. Public desire, including those conspiracy theories about “15-minute cities”, is far from the most important factor.

I’m under no illusion that even my relatively progressive home state is going to be as urbanist-friendly as, for instance, the Netherlands within my lifetime. But the myth that everyone in the USA, or even a majority of the American population, wants to live in sprawling suburbia, is just that. It’s a myth. And it needs to end. 

Los Angeles Is Paradise Lost

Let me paint you a picture of a certain city.

Imagine a community situated between the ocean and mountains, both of which provide recreational opportunities for residents and visitors alike. This geography significantly moderates the climate so that it’s warm, but generally not dangerously hot, all year round. For a plurality of the global population, this is considered the ideal climate.

Imagine that this community is highly multicultural. Settlers from Europe, and later immigrants from various parts of Asia and the Global South, have elected to make their homes here. Consequently, the city is home to restaurants featuring many cuisines from all over the world. If you ate out one meal a day and never patronized the same establishment twice, it would take you about 18 years to run out of restaurants.

Imagine that this city’s activities do not stop at dining, either. The city is home to many institutions related to the arts, as one of the “creative capitals” of the world. It’s also among the most high-profile cities in the global film industry, and many celebrities from all over the country (and some from other countries) live there on either a temporary or permanent basis.

If you are moderately informed about geography, you’ll probably have guessed that the city I’m referring to is Los Angeles, California. If so, you are correct. 

Everything I’ve said above is true of Los Angeles. It’s got ideal geography and what many people consider “perfect” weather (droughts and wildfires notwithstanding - we’ll get to that later). People from all over the world have lived there, and the culinary offers are wildly diverse. And of course, it’s home to numerous film studios and other cultural institutions that mean you’ll seemingly never run out of things to do.

Now, if I ended this post there, and the reader had no access to outside information, you’d probably come away with the impression that Los Angeles is the best city in the world. Doesn’t all that sound like paradise?

A beautiful picture of Los Angeles with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background.

Unfortunately, thanks to poor urban planning, it’s more like “paradise lost.”

A very smoggy view of the same city. Image taken from the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles is infamous for its car traffic. As my beloved YouTuber Not Just Bikes always reminds us, there is no solution to car traffic other than viable alternatives to driving. He’s argued that car dependency is bad even if you do enjoy driving - this video explains many of the reasons why.

Speaking of American cultural institutions, one such institution is the late musician Tom Petty (1950-2017). One of his most famous songs is “Free Fallin’”, which contains lyrical references to locations in Los Angeles such as Reseda and Ventura Boulevard. At one point, the song states that “there’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.”

Think about that for a moment. Obviously, this is an exaggeration to some extent - highways normally aren’t built right through backyards. Except sometimes they are.

You see, there’s a little something called “eminent domain” that allows the government to seize homes in order to use land for infrastructure projects. This Amnesty International article talks about how homes destroyed to make room for these highways have historically been in neighborhoods with large percentages of people of color. Even with all the fresh produce that grows abundantly in California’s Mediterranean climate, these disruptions can create “food deserts” for people in their neighborhoods.

We can have a conversation any time about how these highways reinforce racial injustice and how inequity is built into every aspect of this country’s infrastructure. But that’s a topic for another essay.

Traffic in Los Angeles is a nightmare specifically because public transit in the city is so lacking. People lose time in their commutes, but that’s not the only thing people lose as a result of car dependency.

Another casualty of Los Angeles’ less-than-ideal urban planning is its air quality. A few days ago, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was once again ranked as the smoggiest city in the United States. Apparently, it has been that way for many years running. This is, in large part, thanks to the numerous cars on the road. And smog isn’t just unpleasant to look at - it can exacerbate asthma for those living with that condition, cause babies to have low birth weight, and even contribute to lung diseases like cancer and COPD in the long run. 

One band from California, Red Hot Chili Peppers, has been fairly active in the environmental movement. They’ve got a song called “Black Summer” about the 2020 Australian bushfires and climate change more broadly. It’s a beautiful song, as disturbing as it may be, and bassist Michael “Flea” Balzary has stated that after it rains, Los Angeles is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And he might be right about that, except that rain is increasingly hard to come by as the region’s water security takes a nosedive. 

And of course, with the lack of rain, the risk of wildfires increases exponentially. As we saw earlier this year with the fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, cities are not immune to the devastation that such disasters can bring. 

Now, I’m not going to say that climate change is exclusively Los Angeles’ fault. It is true that a significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions are from the transportation sector, and planes and cars generate far more of these emissions than trains and bicycles. That’s no secret. Furthermore, even cities with far better public transit networks, such as those in the Nordic nations, are going to have to deal with the ramifications of the climate crisis. Indeed, they already are.

But the United States is far and away the world’s most massive climate villain. You can argue that many other countries aren’t doing enough to switch to renewable energy (or as Bernie Sanders says, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels). But at least they accept that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

For instance, at time of writing, tomorrow is the Canadian general election. The Liberals, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, are broadly seen as favored, having pulled off a 30-point comeback that few people besides myself thought plausible. But even if the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, were to win a plurality of seats and make Poilievre Prime Minister, Canada isn’t going to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. 

Anyway, look at cities in the Nordic countries. Not only are they far more sustainable, but their climates are far colder. I’m sure that if anyone from Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden is reading this, they’ll contend that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. But lots of people I know would dislike the long, dark winters, even if those countries have very broad social welfare programs.

Ultimately, if there’s nothing else you take away from this column, I want to reinforce that Los Angeles is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of urban planning. It had the potential to be a paradise on Earth, but instead it’s paradise lost. Like Joni Mitchell once said, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot - it shows.