In this video, posted in November, New Yorker writer and author David Owen tells how Jane Jacobs’ classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, influenced him in the writing of his own Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability.

This timeline, first posted in October, charts the remarkable transformation in the lives of American women from 1960 to the present — the subject of Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed.

1960
The birth control pill goes on sale, yet thirty states still have laws restricting the sale or advertising of virtually anything related to birth control.

1964
Representative Howard Smith of Virginia adds women to the minority groups to be protected from discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in order to obstruct the act, however in doing so the Civil Rights Act passes with the amendment intact and is signed into law due, in large part, to Rep. Martha Griffiths from Michigan and Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine—the only woman in the Senate f or most of her career. … (Read the full post.)

In this video, posted in November, legendary newspaper editor Sir Harold Evans describes how he came by his passion for crusading journalism. Evans’s recently published memoir is My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times.

In his important and influential book Last Child in the Woods, child advocacy expert Richard Louv argues that today’s kids are increasingly disconnected from nature, a condition he explicitly connects to such alarming trends as the rise in childhood obesity and attention disorders, and what he calls a “culture of depression.”

Among the findings:

- Children today spend much less time playing outdoors than they did a generation ago
- Children at eight years old can identify 25 percent more Pokemon characters than wildlife species
- Children between the ages of six months and six years spend an average of 1.5 hours a day with electronic media, and youths between the ages of 8 and 18 an average of 6.5 hours a day

Last Child brings together research and indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children — and adults. His solution, essentially: get kids — and yourself — out into nature!  Louv suggests plenty activities and games to get kids engaged once they’re out of the house. Herewith, a list of activities Louv suggests. For a more complete list see the “Field Guide to Last Child in the Woods,” in the book.)

On his website, where this abbreviated list appears, Louv writes:

Many of the activities presented here and in the book are adult-supervised, but it’s important to remember that one of the most important goals is for our children to experience joy and wonder everyday, and for them to be encouraged to create their own nature experiences. As they grow older they will expand the boundaries of their exploration.

1. Invite native flora and fauna into your life. Maintain a birdbath. Replace part of your lawn with native plants. Build a bat house. For backyard suggestions, plus links to information about attracting wildlife to apartments and townhouses, see the National Audubon Society’sInvitation to a Healthy Yard. Make your yard a National Wildlife Federation (NWF) Certified Wildlife Habitat.

2. View nature as an antidote to stress. All the health benefits that come to a child come to the adult who takes that child into nature. Children and parents feel better after spending time in the natural world-even if it’s in their own backyard.

3. Help your child discover a hidden universe. Find a scrap board and place it on bare dirt. Come back in a day or two, lift the board, and see how many species have found shelter there. Identify these creatures with the help of a field guide. Return to this universe once a month, lift the board and discover who’s new.

4. Revive old traditions. Collect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn. Make a leaf collection. Keep a terrarium or aquarium. Go crawdadding-tie a piece of liver or bacon to a string, drop it into a creek or pond, wait until a crawdad tugs.

5. Encourage your kids to go camping in the backyard. Buy them a tent or help them make a canvas tepee, and leave it up all summer. Join the NWF’s Great American Backyard Campout.

6. Be a cloudspotter; build a backyard weather station. No special shoes or drive to the soccer field is required for “clouding.” A young person just needs a view of the sky (even if it’s from a bedroom window) and a guidebook. Cirrostratus, cumulonimbus, or lenticularis, shaped like flying saucers, “come to remind us that the clouds are Nature’s poetry, spoken in a whisper in the rarefied air between crest and crag,” writes Gavin Pretor-Pinney in his wonderful book The Cloudspotter’s Guide. To build a backyard weather station, read The Kid’s Book of Weather Forecasting, by Mark Breen, Kathleen Friestad, and Michael Kline.

7. Make the “green hour” a new family tradition. NWF recommends that parents give their kids a daily green hour, a time for unstructured play and interaction with the natural world. Even fifteen minutes is a good start. “Imagine a map with your home in the center. Draw ever-widening circles around it, each representing a successively older child’s realm of experience,” NWF suggests. “Whenever possible, encourage some independent exploration as your child develops new skills and greater confidence.”

8. Take a hike. With younger children, choose easier, shorter routes and prepare to stop often. Or be a stroller explorer. “If you have an infant or toddler, consider organizing a neighborhood stroller group that meets for weekly nature walks,” suggests the National Audubon Society. The American Hiking Society offers good tips on how to hike with teenagers. Involve your teen in planning hikes; prepare yourselves physically for hikes, and stay within your limits (start with short day hikes); keep pack weight down. For more information, consult the American Hiking Society or a good hiking guide, such as John McKinney’s Joy of Hiking.

9. Invent your own nature game. One mother’s suggestion: “We help our kids pay attention during longer hikes by playing ‘find ten critters’—mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, snails, other creatures. Finding a critter can also mean discovering footprints, mole holes, and other signs that an animal has passed by or lives there.”

10. Encourage your kids to build a tree house, fort, or hut. You can provide the raw materials, including sticks, boards, blankets, boxes, ropes, and nails, but it’s best if kids are the architects and builders. The older the kids, the more complex the construction can be. For understanding and inspiration, read Children’s Special Places, by David Sobel. Treehouses and Playhouses You Can Build, by David and Jeanie Stiles describes how to erect sturdy structures, from simple platforms to multistory or multitree houses connected by rope bridges.

11. Plant a garden. If your children are little, choose seeds large enough for them to handle and that mature quickly, including vegetables. Whether teenagers or toddlers, young gardeners can help feed the family, and if your community has a farmers’ market, encourage them to sell their extra produce. Alternatively, share it with the neighbors or donate it to a food bank. If you live in an urban neighborhood, create a high-rise garden. A landing, deck, terrace, or flat roof typically can accommodate several large pots, and even trees can thrive in containers if given proper care.

12. Raise butterflies-from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to emerging monarch. The website for Chicago Wilderness’s Leave No Child Inside initiative tells how to do it.

13. Collect stones. Even the youngest children love gathering rocks, shells, and fossils. To polish stones, use an inexpensive lapidary machine-a rock tumbler. See Rock and Fossil Hunter, by Ben Morgan.

Doctors Without Borders this week released its annual list of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Here’s the top ten list. For more detail, see here. An excellent related book, focusing on famine and the failures of the western aid system, is Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, available at PBC.

1. Unrelenting Violence Stalks Civilians Throughout Eastern DR Congo
2. Somalis Endure Violence and Lack of Access to Health Care
3. Precarious Situation for People in Southern Sudan and Darfur
4. Thousands Injured during the Final Stage of Sri Lanka’s Decades-long War
5. Civilians Suffer From Violence & Neglect in Pakistan
6. Politics of Aid Leaves many Afghans Cut off from Humanitarian Assistance
7. Civilians Trapped in Violent War in Northern Yemen
8. Woefully Inadequate Funding Undermines Gains in Childhood Malnutrition Treatment
9. Funding for AIDS Treatment Stagnating Despite Millions Still in Need
10. Lack of R&D and Scale Up of Treatment Plagues Patients with Neglected Diseases

It’s been widely reported that by 2042 whites will no longer be the American majority. Less well known is a parallel shift that sees people of color, especially immigrant populations, increasing in cities and suburbs, while more and more whites move to small towns and exurban areas that are predominantly, even extremely, white. These places are some of the fastest growing areas of the country and often top lists of the “Best Places to Live in America.”

Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America chronicles one (black) man’s journey into these monotone enclaves. Journalist Rich Benjamin spent 2007-2009 living in America’s new heartland, from Dixie County in Utah to Forsyth County, Georgia. What he comes back with is a smart, subtle look at the social and political implications of a growing phenomenon, filled with encounters that are revealing, sweet, shocking, and often hilarious.

As a primer to Benjamin’s book, here’s his definition of Whitopia, as well as a map of the most “Extreme” Whitopias in America today.

Whitopia (pronounced Why-tow-pee-ah)

A Whitopia has three characteristics:

1. An area that has posted at least 6% population growth since 2000.
2. The majority of that growth, often upwards of 90%, is from white migrants.
3. Possesses a je ne seis quois– an ineffable social charisma, a pleasant look and feel.

The Extreme Whitopias listed below are U.S. counties that are at least 90% non-Hispanic white; with a total population growth of at least 10%; and with at least 75% of that growth coming from non-Hispanic whites. We will be updating the map later this week with other Whitopias. In the meantime, see if your hometown made the list!

View Extreme Whitopias in a larger map

In Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies, Michael Signer explains how humanity’s urge for liberty can give rise to dark forces that threaten that very freedom, and allow the demagogue to rise and flourish. He ranges through history, introducing us to a varied cast of characters, from the brutal general Cleon in ancient Athens, to the bloody leaders of French Revolution, America’s own Huey Long, the 20th Century’s totalitarian leaders, Senator Joe McCarthy, down to George W. Bush and Moqtada al-Sadr. Some are demagogues some not. (Bush, by the way, was not.)

Though Signer argues that George W. Bush was not a demagogue, he does maintain that US foreign policy has, often inadvertently, created the conditions for demagogues to emerge in other countries, to the detriment of US national security intrests. (Iraq is a case in point.) Time to rethink. “At this time in our history, we most urgently need conceptual goals that will help describe the state of the world our foreign policy hopes to achieve,” Signer writes, adding that these goals need to encompass the list below. “These conceptual goals are like facets of a prism through which we can view the world, rather than a to-do list of specific policies. However, this doesn’t mean policy isn’t important. On the contrary, constitutionalism will matter only if it leads to practical steps.”

1. Conceiving of other countries as composed of individuals, grouped into peoples, who each have hopes, dreams and responsibilities for the direction of their nations.
2. Communicating directly with the peoples of the world and understanding that a rapport with them undermines demagogues and redounds to our national security interest.
3. Equipping people across the world with deep, enduring constitutional values through sweeping new educational and informational campaigns.
4. In every country, placing the highest priority on an educated people’s judgment of their own abilities and importance, as against the state and centralized authorities.
5. Creating the sense that the most value for a democracy comes from a boundless, limitless sense of individual possibility.
6. Cultivating among citizens of the world, and society at large, the sense of revolution as a constant restoration of their natural right to freedom.
7. Generating the recognition that each citizen can always create something new–a word, an idea, an action–for which she is responsible, and that the government must respect for that reason.
8. Cultivating a common understanding among the peoples of the world that anyone who would use the people’s approval to create powers that transcend the people themselves does democracy the greatest harm and must be stopped.

In his important and influential book Last Child in the Woods, child advocacy expert Richard Louv argues that today’s kids are increasingly disconnected from nature, a condition he explicitly connects to such alarming trends as the rise in childhood obesity and attention disorders, and what he calls a “culture of depression.”

Among the findings:

- Children today spend much less time playing outdoors than they did a generation ago
- Children at eight years old can identify 25 percent more Pokemon characters than wildlife species
- Children between the ages of six months and six years spend an average of 1.5 hours a day with electronic media, and youths between the ages of 8 and 18 an average of 6.5 hours a day

Last Child brings together research and indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children — and adults. His solution, essentially: get kids — and yourself — out into nature! Louv suggests plenty activities and games to get kids engaged once they’re out of the house. Herewith, a list of activities Louv suggests. For a more complete list see the “Field Guide to Last Child in the Woods,” in the book.)

1. Revive old traditions.

Colect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn. Make a leaf collection. Keep a terrarium or aquarium. Go crawdadding—tie a piece of liver or bacon to a string, drop it into a creek or pond, wait until the crawdad tugs.

2. Adopt a “sunny day rule.”

One father reports: “Even though it causes dissension and complaining at first, I’m serious about it. If it’s raining and cold outside, they know I’m no Captain Bligh. I’ll let them watch TV. But if it’s a beautiful day, there’s no excuse for growing roots on the sofas. Outside with you, I tell them. Go! Go build something!” (www.familyeducation.com) Or even when it does rain, pour outdoors. Show your kids the joys of puddle-stomping, ditch-damming, leaf-boating. After all, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.

3. Go for gross.

“Our last trip to the beach was a naturalist-led hike sponsored by the YMCA,” says Amy Pertschuk, who, with her husband, is raising two small children on a houseboat in Sausalito. “But my son and his friend spent the better part of the day doing something even better: collecting slimy seaweed. They decorated a driftwood house with it. If seaweed is not readily available, substitute anything so yucky that you have to hook it with a stick and carry it three feet ahead of you. Bring a change of clothes.”

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In Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski explains how recent presidents have badly damaged America’s image and role in the world. In Brzezinski’s assessment, these presidents–George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush–have had to contend with major shifts in the system of international relations and power politics, a period during which the United States, having emerged from the Cold War with unprecedented power and prestige, managed to squander both. Read the book to learn how. Here, though, is Brzezinski’s list of the major developments that his three American presidents had to grapple with, and which have shaped the world that the current president, Barack Obama, now confronts.

Major developments reshaping the world system (1990-2006):

1. The Soviet Union is forced out of Eastern Europe and disintegrates. The United States is on top of the world.
2. The U.S. military victory in the first Gulf War is politically wasted. Middle East peace is not pursued. Islamic hostility toward the United States begins to rise.
3. NATO and the European Union expand into Eastern Europe. The Atlantic community emerges as the predominant influence on the world scene.
4. Globalization is institutionalized with the creation of the World Trade Organization, the new role of the International Monetary Fund with its bailout fund, and the increased anti-corruption agenda of the World Bank. “Singapore issues” become the foundation for the Doha Round of WTO negotiations.
5. The Asian financial crisis sets the foundation for a nascent East Asian regional community, to be characterized either by Chinese dominance or by Sino-Japanese competition. China’s admission to the WTO encourages its ascent as a major global economic player and a center of regional trade agreements with politically more assertive and impatient poorer countries.
6. Two Chechen wars, the NATO conflict in Kosovo, and Vladimir Putin’s election as president of Russia contribute to a rise in Russian authoritarianism and nationalism. Russia exploits its gas an oil resources to become an assertive energy superpower.
7. Facing a permissive attitude from the United States and others, India and Pakistan defy world public opinion to become nuclear powers. North Korea and Iran intensify their covert efforts to acquire nuclear capabilities in the face of inconsistent and inconsequential U.S. efforts to induce their self-restraint.
8. September 11, 2001 shocks the United States into a state of fear and the pursuit of unilateral policies. The United States declares war on terror.
9. The Atlantic community splits over the U.S. war in Iraq. The European Union fails to develop its own political identity or clout.
10. The post-1991 worldwide impression of U.S. global military omnipotence and Washington’s illusions about the extent of America’s power have been shattered by U.S. failures in postvictory Iraq. The United States acknowledges the need for cooperation with the European Union, China, Japan, and Russia regarding major issues of global security. The Middle East becomes the make-or-break test case of U.S. leadership.

In his National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin, set in New York City in 1974, author Colum McCann offers a portrait of the country’s most iconic city at one of its lowest points. Writing of a decade when nearly one million residents would flee amid rampant crime, McCann’s New York is far adrift from the shining nexus Joan Didion had found a few years earlier, and one that today’s younger New Yorkers know only, if at all,  through movies like Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and The French Connection. Apartments are guarded by razor wire. Muggings are indiscriminate. A monk, Corrigan, one of the book’s main characters, shoots heroin in his housing project bathroom and ministers ineffectually to the local prostitutes.

Let the Great World Spin is a story told through vignettes, and the scene shifts from the Upper East Side to the South Bronx to the financial district and points in between. Here are two passages that give a flavor of McCann’s descriptive evocations of New York’s seedier side, 70s vintage.

I’d been in the South Bronx a week. It was so humid, some nights, we had to shoulder the door closed. Kids on the tenth floor aimed television sets at the housing cops who patrolled below. Air mail. The police came in, clubbing. Shots rang out from the rooftop. On the radio there was a song about the revolution being ghettoized. Arson on the streets. It was a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes. I had to get out. The plan was to look for a job, get my own little place, maybe work on a play, or get a job on a paper somewhere. There were ads in the circulars for bartenders and waiters, but I didn’t want to go that way, all flat hats and micks in shirtsleeves. I found a gig as a telemarketer, but I needed a dedicated phone line in Corrigan’s apartment, and it was impossible to get a technician to visit the housing complex: this was not the America I had expected. (p. 32)

Lunch had been made for them at the hold folks’ home, but Corrigan went across the road to the local bodega to buy them extra potato chips, cigarettes, a cold beer for Albee. A yellow awning. A bubblegum machine sat triple-chained to the shutters. A dustbin was overturned at the corner. There had been a garbage strike earlier that spring and still it wasn’t all cleaned up. Rats ran along the street gutters. Young men in sleeveless tops stood malevolently in the doorways. They knew Corrigan, it seemed, and as he disappeared inside he gave them a series of elaborate handshakes. He spent a long time inside and came out clutching large brown paper badges. One of the hoodlums back-slapped him, grabbed his hand, drew him close.

“How d’you do that?” I asked. “How d’you get them to talk to you?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” …
“You’re not worried? You know, a gun, or something, a switchblade?”
“Why would I be?” (p. 33)