Brad Weed

Interplace

A Social Sciences , Science and Society & Culture podcast

#155 in Social Sciences · 🇮🇳 #181 in Social Sciences · 🇸🇪

About the show

Interplace explores the interaction of people and place. It looks at how we move within and between the places we live and what led us here in the first place. interplace.io

Newest episodes

Where ‘The Cloud’ Touches the Ground

Oct 30, 2026 25 min

Hello Interactors, I can’t, with certainty, explain my lapse in Interplace posts. I blame the shear bewilderment, ambiguity, angst, and collective anguish, anger, and exhaustion of all that surrounds the increasing intricacies intwining the interaction of people and place. Let’s just say centering my convictions has become as challenging as centering any creative energy on attempts to conjure any clarity to this complexity. It seems I’m not alone. As Japan-based political scientist Christopher Hobson recently concluded at Imperfect Notes, “Acceleration accelerates, disorientation deepens.” This on the heels of a Jean Baudrillard quote from 1995 that further complicates the articulation of the current moment because “the interpretation of things” is “always beyond” the event. THE SURREAL SPEED OF SOFTWARE AND SILICON It’s hard not to read Baudrillard’s writings on the simulated reality of the 80s and 90s these days and not feel like he had somehow time-traveled to make such poignant prognostications about today. As a social theorist, he was adept and omniscient at observing how media and technology can reshape not only daily life but the very language through which we perceive and interpret change. It today’s even higher-paced and surreal world it can be hard to recall just how disorienting the acceleration of personal computers and the internet was in the 80s and 90s. It may be even harder for those of us who were sitting in the driver’s seat. After all, speeding along on a bike, or inside a car, train, or rocket yields a very different experience than standing outside and watching it zoom past. The same could be said for the fear of computer viruses in the early 2000s that had ‘spontaneously broken free’ of their captive computers to wreak havoc on society. It seems human created ‘rogue’ AI demons and computer viruses have something in common with all technological innovation or failure: human intent, good and bad, is found at the source of their trajectories. As...

Regreening Ruses and Radiant Ruin

Aug 2, 2026 24 min

Hello Interactors, I’ve long been a fan of “regreening” cities, imagining replacing bits of asphalt and concrete with trees, plants, mini-parks, and green roofs to cool them down. In many cases these are indeed good interventions. But even these celebrated nature-based solutions to the “urban heat island” effect require closer inspection. It turns out any land cover change alters energy, water, and momentum exchanges between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Which are the right ones and where? To understand why cookie cutter greening plans can fail and how planners and policy makers can build cities that can handle climate change, we need to understand how land and the air interact. Environments vary from place to place, and this puts limits on what we can do to land to create urban climates that are both beautiful and healthy. To get a handle on what the research says, I found a literature review from 2025 that synthesized findings from 84 peer-reviewed studies. In was published in the journal Climate Risk Management. Let’s see what they, and others, found. BEATING HEAT WITH BIOPHYSICAL FEATS What better place to start than science. Let’s just delve right into how urban green spaces affect temperature. It starts with determining the energy balance at the surface of the earth. This comes from a budget equation found in physical geography. When sunlight hits the Earth’s surface, it breaks down into three main fluxes, or ways heat moves around * Sensible heat flux: the heat that directly warms the surrounding air, which we measure as temperature. * Latent heat flux: the heat that’s used to turn water from a liquid to a gas, like when we sweat or plants release water vapor (transpiration). * Ground heat flux: the heat stored in building materials, asphalt, and soil. In conventional urban environments dominated by concrete and asphalt, latent heat flux is minimal because we’ve built cities in ways that rapidly drain water away as ‘waste’. As a result, incoming sol...

Burning Both Ends

Jul 18, 2026 20 min

Hello Interactors, As Canadian and Alaskan wildfire smoke drifts across North American borders, it’s easy to resort to feelings and language of crisis in the demand for urgent, immediate control. But fires are not new to these landscapes, and this “crisis” sits alongside others that are also on fire. Climate crises events bring into focus which histories we forget, whose knowledge we ignore, and which relationships we disrupt. Turns out it’s happening at a cellular level too. The real danger is a world and ecology changing so quickly, and understood so narrowly, that it erases the very temporal patterns, memories, and ecological relationships that make adaptation possible. FIRE’S FRACTURED FREQUENCY The climate crisis is often communicated through rising averages. We read of climbing global temperatures, sea levels, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and acres burned. These measurements are indispensable, but averages can make crisis feel distant and abstract. In a forest, climate change is also experienced as an altered interval — as too little time between one disturbance and the next. A forest is not a passive surface. It actively shapes its own microclimate, stores carbon, and retains moisture until fire temporarily disrupts these relationships…and in doing so creates new ones. To understand what shorter fire intervals are doing to Alaska’s boreal forests, ecologist Xanthe Walker and an interdisciplinary team of researchers examined carbon storage and forest recovery across 555 plots associated with thirty-one fires. They compared stands with different fire histories, including sites that had burned repeatedly before black spruce forests could fully recover. The absolute amount of carbon released by individual fires was broadly similar across fire-return intervals, but recently burned landscapes began with smaller remaining carbon pools and therefore lost a greater proportion of what remained. Repeated burning also consumed more legacy carbon — the carbo...

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All episodes

Where ‘The Cloud’ Touches the Ground

Oct 30, 2026 25 min

Regreening Ruses and Radiant Ruin

Aug 2, 2026 24 min

Burning Both Ends

Jul 18, 2026 20 min

Burning Through 250 Years

Jul 3, 2026 22 min

Hello Interactors, Welcome to summer where Interplace turns its attention to physical geography and the environment. It’s already a crazy El Niño — thanks in large part to global warming — and the United States is having a big birthday. How might these be related and what to do about it? What follows is not a celebration or a condemnation, but more of a reckoning. I look at what was built, what was deliberately forgotten, and what is now continually arriving, season by season, in forms of weather the founders could not have imagined. Although Alexander Humboldt — one of the world’s most famous scientists at the time — did warn Jefferson of the effects of human-induced climate change in 1804. He based his prediction on changes he observed in forests and water systems as a result of mono-crops and industrial “steam and gas”. Jefferson ignored him. BUILDING, BURNING, BILLOWING BACK On this momentous 250th Fourth of July, when the world is experiencing record level extreme weather events, let’s reflect on how over the last 250 years the United States helped build, extract, and then burn the material and political conditions that made climate change possible. From the beginning, it tied itself to land, extraction, mobility, and expansion. Over time those commitments became an energy system built on coal, oil, gas, highways, suburbs, industrial agriculture, and a development model that treated nature as an inexhaustible storehouse. That legacy is now legible in the atmosphere itself. Let’s light a Roman Candle in celebration! Even before the 4th of July fireworks celebrations create another nationwide 42% average increase in fine particulate matter (Seidel, et al., 2015), the United States bears the single largest share of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions of any nation . We represent roughly 20 percent of the global total since 1850 contributing approximately 0.2°C of warming to date (Carbon Brief, 2021; UNEP, 2023). To represent four percent of the world’s current pop...

Living Through Tulsa's Time

Jun 19, 2026 24 min

Hello Interactors, A couple weeks ago, I found myself in Tulsa for the first time. I left pleasantly surprised. There’s a lot of private money flowing into this town, but the city is filled with sorted stories about land, who holds it, who loses it, and how that loss and potential return is engineered. On Juneteenth, the city’s history feels especially close so I thought I’d unpack the layers of displacement, violence, and reinvention that lurk beneath a city still struggling to face them. CONCRETE, COALS, AND A CITY THAT CONCEALS Raise your hand if you like Brutalist architecture (I’m raising mine.) I just didn’t expect to find it in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I was visiting for my niece’s wedding. The Brut Hotel is a converted Brutalist tower a few blocks from the Arkansas River and it’s all raw concrete. Even the floors and counters. Most people see Brutalism as cold — which is nice on a hot Tulsa day — but I read it as honest and direct. A bit like a Midwestern prairie settler stereotype. After all, the style did emerge in postwar Europe from an egalitarian impulse. It was meant to be democratic architecture stripped of ornamental excesses of fancy city folks. It arrived in America just in time to become the aesthetic of urban renewal. We mostly got housing projects and highway interchanges built on top of what had been Black and working-class neighborhoods, often by eminent domain and without meaningful consent. Concrete can be made to beautiful, but it’s definitely also the material of displacement. Tulsa is no exception. On my first muggy Tulsa morning, I ran from The Brut toward the river. A block or two along, tucked between midtown houses on Cheyenne Avenue, I passed a small park I had read about but didn’t know was so close. The bronze sculpture of a flame was the give away. This is Creek Nation Council Oak Park, and it is, in the most literal sense, where Tulsa began. In 1836, the Lochapoka clan of the Creek Nation arrived at this hill above the river after...

The Transit of Two Titans

Jun 1, 2026 23 min

Hello Interactors, We like to think we choose our own paths, but our cities have already decided for us. New York and Los Angeles function as the extended phenotype of our species — a living circulatory system that subtly channels our collective behavior. This week, we explore the multi-generational biology of transit to see how modern infrastructure effectively dissolves what we perceive as individual autonomy. MANHATTAN MOBILITY AND THE MASSED MILIEU I recently flew from New York visiting my daughter, where large vessels moved massive numbers of people around, to Los Angeles visiting my son, where small vessels moved small numbers of people around. The transition was jarring. I went from being physically enmeshed in a dense social milieu to being systematically protected from it — from walking over 10,000 steps a day to barely 1,000. My daily cadence shifted from bobbing and weaving around persons I could see, hear, and smell, to maneuvering around what sociologist Mike Michael termed ‘carsons’ — persons fused with a car. This deep-seated desire for individual control over our own mobility is not unique to the modern driver. The instinct to leverage an external entity to conquer long distances is as old as the domestication of the horse in the third millennium BCE. Every stage of human life presents a shifting horizon of mobile autonomy: from crawling to walking, to the childhood triumph of mastering a bicycle or a local bus network, to the initial rush of freedom that comes with a first car. All before the natural declines of aging ultimately diminish our autonomy once more. Yet, suggesting mass transit to many Americans accustomed to the perceived agency of the car feels like a threat to their very freedom. Because transit routes are fixed and schedules are unyielding, collective travel is often mischaracterized as an artificial restriction on liberty. History shows that long before the locomotive, scheduled, multi-passenger transit enabled human freedom and so...

Becoming Not Beginning

May 11, 2026 18 min

Hello Interactors, Neuroscience research on narrative shows that stories sharpen attention, improve recall, and recruit shared brain networks that help us organize events into a coherent arc. The trouble, for anyone who works with spatial data, is that the reality on the ground refuses to cooperate with clean narratives despite this inherent bias. Today I look at how the popular telling of how Homo sapiens came to contemplate such things — to become ‘modern’ — is not the story the evidence keeps telling. THE LURE OF THE LEAP We like our origin stories well defined. The popular telling — the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is the bestselling version — locates a moment when archaic humans crossed a threshold and became modern, transformed by some neurological windfall in Africa. But a recent paper by anthropologist Huw Groucutt on Homo sapiens dispersal argues this says more about Homo sapiens’ neurological bias toward clean narratives than about the evidence we have. This ‘revolution into modern’ frame has traceable historical roots. In the 1960s and 70s, the only deeply excavated record was in a western sliver of the Eurasian landmass called Europe. There, the transition from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens congregations did look abrupt. It was reasonable, given what was known at the time, to read this regional shift as a species-wide threshold — a sudden flowering of cognition and culture. But that reading was a misinterpretation. What Europe records is not a transformation but a replacement where one population arrived as another receded. The arc of change was migration, not metamorphosis. That correction took hold, but the ‘revolution’ story, like the species, simply relocated. There would be a coastal revolution in southern Africa, a cognitive revolution in the Rift Valley, a technological revolution in the Levant. The plot survived even as the setting changed. The deeper trouble lies with the word “modern” itself. It is a relic of mid-twentieth-centur...

What the World Points To

Apr 27, 2026 27 min

Hello Interactors, It’s been a while. Traveling for family, and a bit flooded by the relentless sneaker waves of unsavory world events — the kind that usually inspire me to write but lately threaten to pull me under. Spring in the northern hemisphere means Interplace turns to geographic information science and spatial analysis. How might we look at the complex unfolding of world events through this lens — and what happens when we push it further than emergence alone can carry it? That’s what I attempt to explore here. PATTERNS PRECEDING PHYSICAL PLACES Geographic information science is a relatively recent field. It emerged from mid-20th-century cartography and land-use planning. Computer cartography and quantitative geography of the 1960s is often considered the first true digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It became a science (GIScience or GISc) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Michael Goodchild questioned if there was a genuine scientific discipline lurking within the software. His answer was yes. He built an institutional home for that argument at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my alma mater. Goodchild was my senior advisor in 1989 as UCSB was becoming a generative intellectual hub in the field. UCSB’s geography department continues to push the question of what space means analytically, not just how to map it. I’m personally invested in better understanding how GISc may be a natural partner for complexity science, a field I’ve been attracted to since I started researching and writing. This partnership isn’t new. GISc provides a powerful framework for dissecting the spatial dimensions of complexity, where systems defy reductionist analysis and emerge through nonlinear interactions. In the early 2000s, geographer David O’Sullivan, and others, articulated this as the study of “the behaviour of macroscopic collections of many basic but interacting units endowed with the pot...

The Map that Murders and the Mind that Masks

Mar 14, 2026 24 min

Hello Interactors, This one attempts to balance the privilege of cold analytical escapism with the gruesome rehumanization of past, present, and future atrocities. I end up trying to make sense of the political psychology that leads to such jubilant violence. While it can be understood, its the very intelligibility that makes it so intolerable. PRESSURE, POWER, IMPUNITY In 1965, as my umbilical cord was being severed in Iowa, U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were cutting the ears off innocent dead Vietnamese children. And their parents. The shriveling cartilage served as “proof” they were killed. They’d string them into necklaces or hoard them in “ear bags” as trophies. Their commanders demanded a tally. This morbid ritual, born from the military’s obsession with numeric “success” metrics amid “search and destroy” orders, exposed not just individual moral depravity but a systemic disregard for human life. Such barbarity serves as just another example of America’s enduring pattern of defying Geneva Conventions on civilian protections, proportionality, and prohibited weapons. These atrocities are wrapped in bureaucratic euphemisms like “collateral damage”; all to evade accountability and perpetuate unchecked imperial violence. When barbarity returned like a boomerang to hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, the term “collateral damage” was absent. But “search and destroy” came back. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorizes the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” These expanded interpretations of and the idea of a “continuing, imminent threat” led to doctrines that allowed drones and bombs to be used as sanctioned forms of force across borders. Targeted killings are domestic justifications that override attempts at global legal constraints. As...

From Microsoft to the Surveillance State

Feb 23, 2026 27 min

Hello Interactors, Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me back to that time and the start of my own journey at Microsoft at the dawn of a new global reality. HOMELAND HATCHED HERE With all the focus on Olympics and immigration recently, I’ve found myself reflecting on my days at Microsoft in the 90s. As the company was growing (really fast), teams were filling up with people recruited from around the world. There were new accents in meetings, new holidays to celebrate, and yummy new foods and funny new words being introduced. This thickening of transnational ties made Redmond feel as connected the rest of the world as the globalized software we were building. By 2000 users around the world could switch between over 60 languages in Windows and Office. In behavioral geography terms, working on the product and using the product made “here” feel more connected to “elsewhere.” This influx of new talent was all enabled by the Immigration Act of 1990. Signed by George H. W. Bush, it increased and stabilized legal pathways for highly skilled immigrants. This continued with Clinton era decisions to expand H-1B visa allocations that fed the tech hiring boom. I took full advantage of this allotment recruiting and hiring interaction designers and user researchers from around the world. In the same decade the federal government expanded access to the United States, it also tightened security. Terrorism threats, especially after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, spooked everyone. Despite this threat, there was more domestic initiated terror...

Street Snatches, Stolen Soil, and the Power of Care

Jan 31, 2026 21 min

Hello Interactors, Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state. But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied. SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force. Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes. Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution: “You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is...

The Mind Can't Act Alone and AI Can't Either

Jan 16, 2026 22 min

Hello Interactors, It’s winter. So, as the sun tilts toward the sun (up north) my writing tilts toward the brain. It’s when I put on my behavioral geography glasses and try to see the world as a set of loops between bodies and places, perception and movement, constraint and choice. It’s hard to do that right now without running into AI. And one thing that keeps nagging at me is how AI is usually described as this super-brain perched in the cloud, or in a machine nearby, thinking on our behalf. That framing inherits an old habit of mind. Since Descartes, we’ve been tempted by the idea that the “real” mind sits apart from the messy body, steering it from some inner control room. Computer metaphors reinforced the same split by calling the CPU the “brain” of the machine. And now we’re extending the metaphor again with AI as the brain of the internet, hovering overhead, crunching data, issuing guidance. An intelligence box directing action at a distance is a tidy picture but it risks making us miss what’s actually doing the work. Let’s dig into how the brain leverages the loops of people, places, and interfaces we all move through to extend it’s richness and reach. GRADIENTS GUIDE WHILE BODIES BALANCE Have you ever hiked or skied in snow or fog and seen the middle distance just in front of you disappear? It takes the world you thought you knew, like ridge lines, tree lines, and the comforting predictable geometry of “just ahead” and reduces it to panic stricken near-field fragments. I’ve sensed once familiar ski runs become suddenly unfamiliar not because it changed, but because it was no longer accessible to my brain. In these moments, we’re all forced to reckon, recalibrate, and (usually) slow down as our senses sharpen. We take note of the slope under our feet and the way the ground shifts. We listen for clues our eyes can’t see and notice which direction the wind is blowing, how the light is changing, and how our own heartbeat and breath changes with each calculated...

Trains, Planes, and Paved-Over Promises

Dec 15, 2025 23 min

Hello Interactors, Spain’s high-speed trains feels like a totally different trajectory of modernity. America prides itself on being the tech innovator, but nowhere can we blast 180 MPH between city centers with seamless transfers to metros and buses…and no TSA drudgery. But look closer and the familiar comes into view — rising car ownership, rush-hour congestion (except in Valencia!), and growth patterns that echo America. I wanted to follow these parallel tracks back to the nineteenth-century U.S. rail boom and forward to Spain’s high-spe ed era. Turns out it’s not just about who gets faster rail or faster freeways, but what kind of growth they lock in once they arrive. TRAINS, CITIES, AND CONTRADICTIONS My wife and I took high-speed rail (HSR) on our recent trip to Spain. My first thought was, “Why can’t we have nice things?” They’re everywhere. Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half hours. Barcelona to Valencia, Valencia back to Madrid. Later, Porto to Lisbon. Even Portugal is in on it. We glided out of city-center stations, slipped past housing blocks and industrial belts, then settled into the familiar grain of Mediterranean countryside at 300 kilometers an hour. The Wi-Fi (mostly) worked. The seats were comfortable. No annoying TSA. Where HSR did not exist or didn’t quite fit our schedule, we filled gaps with EasyJet flights. We did rent a car to seek the 100-foot waves at Nazaré, Portugal, only to be punished by the crawl of Porto’s rush-hour traffic in a downpour. Within cities, we took metros, commuter trains, trams, buses, bike share, and walked…a lot. From the perspective of a sustainable transportation advocate, we were treated to the complete “nice things” package: fast trains between cities, frequent rail and bus service inside them, and streets catering to human bodies more than SUVs. What surprised me, though, was the way these nice things coexist with growth patterns that look — in structural terms — uncomfortably familiar. In this video 👆 from ou...

An Economic Geography of Complicity and Control

Nov 23, 2025 27 min

Hello Interactors, I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography. My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography. The presentation I prepared for the Lisbon conference, and which I hint at here, traces how the technical optimism of early desktop software evolved into the all-encompassing power of Platform Capital. We explore how digital systems like Airbnb and Google Maps have become more than just convenient tools. They are the primary architects of urban value. They don’t just reflect economic patterns. They mandate them. They reorganize rent extraction by dictating interactions with commerce and concentrating control. This is the new financialized city, and the uncomfortable question we must face is this: Are we leveraging these tools toward a new beneficial height, or are the tools exploiting us in ways that transcends oversight? CARTOGRAPHY’S COMPUTATIONAL CONVERGENCE I was sweating five minutes in when I realized we were headed to the wrong place. We picked up the pace, up steep grades, glissading down narrow sidewalks avoiding trolley cars and private cars inching pinched hairpins with seven point turns. I was looking at my phone with one eye and the cobbled streets with the other. Apple Maps had led us astray. But there we were, my wife and I, having emerged from the metro stop at Lisbon’s shoreline with a massive cruise ship looming over us like a misplaced high-rise. We needed to be somewhere up those notorious steep streets behind us in 10 minutes. So up we went, winding through narrow streets and passages. Lisbon is hilly. We past the clusters of tourists rolling luggage, around locals lugging...

Spirals of Enclosure

Oct 5, 2025 36 min

Hello Interactors, Fall is in full swing here in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time to turn our attention to economics and economic geography. Triggered by a recent podcast on the origins of capitalism, I thought I’d kick off by exploring this from a geography perspective. I trace how violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy aren’t simple externalities or accidents. They emerge out of a system that organized itself and then spread. Capitalism grew out of dispossession of land and human autonomy and became a dominant social and economic structure. It’s rooted in violence that became virtuous and centuries later is locked-in. Or is it? EMERGING ENGLISH ENCLOSURES The dominant and particular brand of capitalism in force today originates in England. Before English landlords and the state violently seized common lands back in the 1300s, economic life was embedded in what historian E.P. Thompson called “moral economies”.(1) These were systems of survival where collective responsibility was managed through custom, obligation, and shared access to resources. Similar systems existed elsewhere. Long before Europeans arrived at the shores of what is now called North America, Haudenosaunee longhouse economies were sophisticatedly organized around economies of reciprocity. Further south, Andean ayllu communities negotiated labor obligations and access to land was shared. West African systems featured land that belonged to communities and ancestors, not individuals. Back in medieval English villages, commons weren’t charity, they were infrastructure. Anyone could graze animals or gather firewood. When harvests failed, there were fallbacks like hunting and gathering rights, seasonal labor sharing, and kin networks. As anthropologist Stephen Gudeman shows, these practices reflected cultures of mutual insurance aimed at collective resilience, not individual accumulation.(2) Then landlords, backed by state violence, destroyed this system to enrich themselves. From 1...

Masters of Mess Making and Meaning

Aug 24, 2025 23 min

Hello Interactors, My wife and I recently started watching the mini-series 100 Foot Wave, which follows extreme surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride the mythical 100-foot breaker. The show has put Nazaré, Portugal on the map — not just as a place, but as a symbol of human daring against forces far larger than ourselves. At the same time, I’ve been listening to physicist-philosopher Sean Carroll’s recent “solo” podcast on the emergence of complexity, tracing how the universe began in simplicity and blossomed into stars, life, and consciousness. These two threads — towering waves and cosmic arcs — collided in my mind, stirring something that has been swelling in me for years: how to reconcile wonder at life’s improbable flourishing with despair at its accelerated unraveling on Earth. Should despair be the only response? Or is it possible, like the surfers at Nazaré, to recognize the peril without surrendering to it — to ride, however briefly, the wave that could also destroy us? THE COSMIC WAVE Beneath the lighthouse bluff at Nazaré, Portugal opens a canyon 140 miles long and three miles deep — three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Born of tectonic fractures and sculpted over millions of years, it is less a static feature than a force in its own right: a conduit that gathers the ocean’s momentum and hurls it shoreward. Swells that elsewhere would pass unnoticed are here magnified into walls of water, indifferent to whether they become playground or grave. Geography conspires — wind, current, and rock — but the canyon itself is an accomplice, a reminder that Earth is never merely stage but actor. For today’s surfers, this is possibility. For centuries of fishermen, it was peril. The waves have not changed, but the stance we take toward them has — and that, too, becomes part of the story the canyon tells. So it is with complexity. Every wave begins simple, a long low swell born of distant winds, that crescendos into chaos at the shoreline. It swirls and curls int...

Native or Not? How Science, Politics, and Physics Decide Who Belongs

Aug 10, 2025 25 min

Hello Interactors, It’s been awhile as I’ve been enjoying summer — including getting in my kayak to paddle over to a park to water plants. Time on the water also gets me thinking. Lately, it’s been about what belongs here, what doesn’t, and who decides? This week’s essay follows my trail of thought from ivy-covered fences to international borders. I trace how science, politics, and even physics shape our ideas of what’s “native” and what’s “invasive.” INVASION, IVY, AND ICE As I was contemplating this essay in my car at a stop light, a fireweed seedling floated through the sunroof. Fireweed is considered “native” by the U.S. Government, but when researching this opportunistic plant — which thrives in disturbed areas (hence it’s name) — I learned it can be found across the entire Northern Hemisphere. It’s “native” to Japan, China, Korea, Siberia, Mongolia, Russia, and all of Northern Europe. Because its primary dispersal is through the wind, it’s impossible to know where exactly it originated and when. And unlike humans, it doesn’t have to worry about borders. So long as a species arrives on its own accord through wind, wings, currents, or chance — without a human hand guiding it — it’s often granted the status of “native.” Never mind whether the journey took decades or millennia, or if the ecosystem has since changed. What matters is that it got there on its own, as if nature somehow stamped its passport. As long time Interactors may recall, I spend the summer helping water “native” baby plants into maturity in a local public green space. A bordering homeowner had planted an “invasive species”, English Ivy, years ago and it climbed the fence engulfing the Sword Ferns, Vine Maples, and towering Douglas Fir trees common in Pacific Northwest woodlands. A nearby concerned environmentalist volunteered to remove the “alien” ivy and plant “native” species through a city program called Green Kirkland. Some of the first Firs he planted are now taller than he is! Meanwhile, o...

When the Sky Swells, the Land Breaks

Jul 13, 2025 19 min

Hello Interactors, It’s hard to ignore the situation in Texas, especially as I turn my attention to physical geography. 'Flash Flood Alley', as it’s called by hydrologists, had already been pounded by days of relentless rain, soaking the soil and swelling the rivers. It left the region teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Then came the deluge. A torrent so sudden and intense it dumped a month’s worth of rain in under an hour. Roads turned to rivers. Homes were lost. Lives were too. As the floodwaters recede, what remains isn’t just devastation — it’s a lesson. One about a changing water cycle, a shifting climate, and a stubborn way of thinking that still dominates how we plan for both. DROUGHT AND DELUGE Is Texas drowning due to climate change? Just three years ago, we were told it’s drying up. That’s when a record drought emptied reservoirs and threw aquifers into steep decline. From 2011 to 2015, 90% of the state was in extreme drought. This seesaw between soaked and scorched is the kind of muddled messaging that lets climate deniers laugh all the way to the comment section. The truth is Texas is drying up AND drowning. This paradox isn’t just Texas-sized — it’s systemic. Our habit of translating global climate shifts into local weather soundbites is failing us. According to hydrologist Benjamin Zaitchik and colleagues, writing in Nature Water in 2023, two dominant narratives frame how these events are explained. Public and policy reporting on patterns like those in Texas usually falls into two camps: * The "Wet-Get-Wetter, Dry-Get-Drier" (WWDD) hypothesis — climate change intensifies existing hydrological patterns, bringing more rain to wet regions and more drought to dry ones. * The "Global Aridification" (GA) hypothesis — warming increases the atmosphere's "thirst," drying out land even where rainfall remains steady. Both frameworks can explain real conditions, but the recent Texas floods expose their limits. If a region long seen as drying can also produce o...

Red, White, and Choo Choo

Jul 4, 2025 4 min

Hello Interactors, Happy Fourth of July and welcome to a brand new season of Interplace! We’re kicking things off with a video of my cross-country rail trip that took about four days to ride…and nearly twice as long to edit and produce. This first ever Interplace video launches our summer focus on physical geography and the environment. I hope you enjoy a slow journey through space, place, and the unexpected beauty between the coasts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

How Cities Loop Us In

Jun 8, 2025 22 min

Hello Interactors, My daughter in Manhattan’s East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.” A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?" The parallels stood out. In Manhattan’s West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country, students cycle through Starbucks in Seattle’s U-District like clockwork. The drinks are overpriced and underwhelming, but that’s not the point. It’s familiar. It's part of a habitual loop. Different cities, similar rhythms. One loop is visual, the other habitual. But both show how space and emotion sync. Like an ambient synth track, they layer, drift, and return. If you live in or near a city, you exist in your own looping layers of emotional geography. FLASH FEEDS My daughter has been deep into modular synthesis lately — both making and listening. It’s not just the music that intrigues her, but the way it builds: loops that don’t simply repeat, but evolve, bend, and respond. She’ll spend hours patching sounds together, adjusting timing and tone until something new emerges. She likens it to painting with sound. Watching her work, it struck me how much her synth music mirrors city life — not in harmony, but in layers. She’s helped me hear urban rhythms differently. Like a pop synth hook, the Flash loop is built for attention. It's bright, polished, and impossible to ignore. Synth pop thrives on these quick pulses — hooks that grab you within seconds, loops that deliver dopamine with precision. Urban spaces under this loop do the same. They set a beat others fall in line with, often flattening nuance in exchange for momentum. This isn’t just about moving to a beat. It’s about becoming part of the beat. When these fast loops dominate, people start adapting to the spaces tha...

Beaks, Brakes, and Brainwaves

Jun 1, 2025 18 min

Hello Interactors, This week, four strange bird encounters landed in my lap — three in real life, one on my screen. First, a crow tore through the bushes in our yard chasing a frantic nuthatch. Moments later, I spotted two more crows feasting on roadkill just outside our house. Then, while walking with my wife, we watched four ducks in hot pursuit of another, flapping furiously down the street — some kind of aerial turf war. And finally, scrolling through my feed, I stumbled on a paper describing a Cooper’s Hawk hacking the city’s traffic system to hunt smarter. After all that, I tried seeing cities as a bird might. So I wrote as one. HISS, HUM, HUNT I first sense the city as vibration. Before sun rays even breech the branches, a hiss of car tires emerge; street lamps click off; somewhere a garage door rumbles open. Each resonance strikes the hollow chambers of my bones like sonar. It’s a sketch of distance, density, and direction. This all makes perfect sense to me even though I am just a kid. A juvenile Cooper’s Hawk — Accipiter cooperii — yet the human-made maze below me is as legible to me as the nest I left barely two winters ago. What follows, in human words, is a recount of one day’s hunt. I hope to demonstrate what humans regard as intelligence, innovation, and enterprise exists in a single act of predation. DANCING WITH DATA AT DAWN Perched on a gray mast of the Main and Prospect traffic light, I begin to render the scene. My basemap is no pixel grid glowing on some screen across town; it is a topological organ in my scull. Topology matters when a lamppost sits one maneuver away from the porch roof, which is one glide away from the dumpster rim. My so-called ‘bird brain’ calculates dynamic flows of probability. One flip of a traffic light, a garbage truck rolls by, and that gust of wind changes direction. My internal map pulses between “larger” when prey likelihood rises and “smaller” when likelihood falls. As I gaze out above the east-west avenue, a slips...

Launchpads, Land Grabs, and Loopholes

May 25, 2025 23 min

Hello Interactors, I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend’s deck when a rocket’s contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you’ll hear it.” And we did. “They’ve gotten really annoying,” he added. He’s not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They’ve already been approved to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, with filings for 30,000 more. This isn’t just future space junk — it’s infrastructure. And it’s not just in orbit. What Musk is doing in the sky is tied to what he’s building on the ground. Not in Vandenberg, where regulation still exists, but in Starbase, Texas, where the law doesn’t resist — it assists. There, Musk is testing how much sovereignty one man can claim under the banner of “innovation” — and how little we’ll do to stop him. TOWNS TO THRUST AND THRONE Musk isn’t just defying gravity — he’s defying law. In South Texas, a place called Starbase has taken shape along the Gulf Coast, hugging the edge of SpaceX’s rocket launch site. What looks like a town is really something else: a launchpad not just for spacecraft, but for a new form of privatized sovereignty. VIDEO: Time compresses at the edge of Starbase: a slow-built frontier where launch infrastructure rises faster than oversight. Source: Google Earth This isn’t unprecedented. The United States has a long lineage of company towns — places where corporations controlled land, housing, labor, and local government. Pullman, Illinois is the most famous. But while labor historians and economic geographers have documented their economic and social impact, few have examined them as legal structures of power. That’s the gap legal scholar Brian Highsmith identifies in Governing the Company Town. That omission matters — because these places aren’t just undemocratic. They often function as qua...

Cities in Chaos, Connection in Crisis

May 11, 2025 23 min

Hello Interactors, This week, I’ve been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that’s been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren’t just struggling with transportation or housing. They’re struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don’t we ask that more often? STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATED The urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction. Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable. I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren’t just systems of movement — they’re systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it’s shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn’t new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang’an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city. These weren’t just settlements — they were spatial arguments about...

You Are Here. But Nowhere Means Anything

May 4, 2025 24 min

Hello Interactors, This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe. Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American. The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better data, the U.S. shows little appetite for using geographic insight to actually address climate change. Information is growing. Willpower, not so much. So it was oddly clarifying to read a passage Christopher Hobson posted on Imperfect Notes from a book titled America by a French author — a travelogue of softs. Last week I offered new lenses through which to see the world, I figured I’d try this French pair on — to see America, and the world it effects, as he did. PAPER, POWER, AND PROJECTION I still have a folded paper map of Seattle in the door of my car. It’s a remnant of a time when physical maps reflected the reality before us. You unfolded a map and it innocently offered the physical world on a page. The rest was left to you — including knowing how to fold it up again. But even then, not all maps were neutral or necessarily innocent. Sure, they crowned capitals and trimmed borders, but they could also leave things out or would make certain claims. From empire to colony, from mission to market, maps often arrived not to reflect place, but to declare control of it. Still, we trusted it…even if was an illusion. I learned how to interrogate maps in my undergraduate history of cartography class — taught by the legendary cartographer Waldo Tobler. But even with that knowledge, when I was then taught how to make maps, that interrogation was more absent. I confidently believed I was mediating truth. The lines and symbols I used pointed to substance; they signaled a thing. I tr...

Cities on the Brink, Faster Than You Think

Apr 27, 2025 21 min

Hello Interactors, Every week it seems to get harder to ignore the feeling that we're living through some major turning point — politically, economically, environmentally, and even in how our cities are taking shape around us. Has society seen this movie before? Spoiler: we have, and it has many sequels. History doesn't repeat exactly, but it sure rhymes, especially when competition for power increases, climates collapse, and the urban fabric unravels and rewinds. Today, we'll sift through history’s clues, peek through some fresh conceptual lenses, and consider why the way we frame these shifts matters — maybe more now than ever. PRESSURE POINTS AT URBAN JOINTS Let’s ground where we all might be historically speaking. Clues from long-term historical patterns suggests social systems go through periodic cycles of integration, expansion, and crisis. Historical quantitative data reveals recurring waves of structural-demographic pressure — moments when inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain converge to produce instability. By quantitative historian Peter Turchin’s account, we are currently drifting through some kind of inflection point. His 2010 essay in Nature anticipated the early 2020s as a period of peak instability that started around 1970. That’s when people earning advanced degrees, entering law, finance, media, and politics skyrocketed from the 1970s onward. Meanwhile, the number of elite positions (like Senate seats, Supreme Court clerkships, high level corporate positions) remained fixed or even shrank. This created decades of increased income inequality, elite competition, and declining public trust that created conditions for events like the rise of Trump, polarization, and institutional gridlock. The symptoms are familiar to us now, and they are markers that echo previous systemic ruptures in U.S. history. In the 1770s, colonial grievances and elite competition led to a historic revolutionary realignment. It also coincided with poor harvests...

Between Urban Order and Emerging Meanings

Apr 19, 2025 21 min

Hello Interactors, Cities are layered by past priorities. I was just in Overland Park, Kansas, where over the last 25 years I’ve seen malls rise, fall, and shift outward as stores leave older spaces behind. When urban systems shift — due to climate, capital, codes, or crisis — cities drift. These changes ripple across scales and resemble fractal patterns, repeating yet evolving uniquely. This essay traces these patterns: past regimes, present signals, and competing questions over what's next. URBAN SCRIPTS AND SHIFTING SCALES As cities grow, they remember. Look at a city’s form — the way its streets stretch, how its blocks bend, where its walls break. These are not neutral choices. They are residues of regimes. Spatial decisions shaped by power, fear, belief, or capital. In ancient Rome, cities were laid out in strict grids. Streets ran along two axes: the cardo and decumanus. It made the city legible to the empire — easy to control, supply, and expand. Urban form followed the logic of conquest. As cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes, “One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration. Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen districts, each subdivided into vici. These districts were administered by annually elected magistrates, with officials and public slaves under them.” In medieval Europe, cities got messy. Sovereignty was fragmented. Trade replaced tribute. Guilds ran markets as streets tangled around church and square. The result was organic — but not random. It reflected a new mode of life: small-scale, interdependent, locally governed. In 19th-century Paris, the streets changed again. Narrow alleys became wide boulevards. Not just for beauty — for visibility and force. Haussmann’s renovations made room for troops, light, and clean air. It was urban form as counter-revolution. Then came modernism. Superblocks, towers, highways. A form that made sense for mass production, cheap land, and the...

The Hollow City

Apr 12, 2025 20 min

Hello Interactors, Spring at Interplace brings a shift to mapping, GIS, and urban design. While talk of industrial revival stirs nostalgia — steel mills, union jobs, bustling Main Streets — the reality on the ground is different: warehouses, data centers, vertical suburbs, and last-mile depots. Less Rosy the Riveter, more Ada Lovelace. Our cities are being shaped accordingly — optimized not for community, but for logistics. FROM STOREFRONTS TO STEEL DOORS Let’s start with these two charts recently shared by the historian of global finance and power Adam Tooze at Chartbook. One shows Amazon passing Walmart in quarterly sales for the first time. The other shows a steadily declining drop in plans for small business capital expenditure. Confidence shot up upon the election of Trump, but dropped suddenly when tariff talks trumped tax tempering. Together, these charts paint a picture: control over how people buy, build, and shape space is shifting — fast. It all starts quietly. A parking lot gets fenced off. Trucks show up. Maybe the old strip mall disappears overnight. A few months later, there’s a low, gray building with no windows. No grand opening. Just a stream of delivery vans pulling in and out. This isn’t just a new kind of facility — it’s a new kind of urban and suburban logic. Platform logistics has rewritten the rules of space. Where cities were once shaped by factories and storefronts, now they’re shaped by fulfillment timelines, routing algorithms, and the need to move goods faster than planning commissions can meet. In the past, small businesses were physical anchors. They invested in place. They influenced how neighborhoods looked, felt, and functioned. But when capital expenditures from local firms drop — as that second chart shows — their power to shape the block goes with it. What fills the vacuum is logistics. And it doesn’t negotiate like the actors it replaces. This isn’t just a retail story. It’s a story about agency — who gets to decide what a plac...

Peach Baskets and Passing Lanes to Global Stars and Spatial Games

Mar 22, 2025 21 min

Hello Interactors, It’s March Madness time in the states — baskets and brackets. I admit I'd grown a bit skeptical of how basketball evolved since my playing days. As it happens, I played against Caitlin Clark’s dad, from nearby Indianola, Iowa! Unlike the more dynamic Brent Clark, I was a small-town six-foot center, taught never to face the basket and dribble. After all, it was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s era of back-to-the-hoop skyhooks. By college, however, I was playing pickup games in California, expected to handle the ball, shoot, dish, or drive. Just like Caitlin! The players around me were from East LA, not Indianola. Jordan was king, and basketball wasn't just evolving — it was about to explode. It’s geographic expansion and spatial dynamism has influenced how the game is played and I now know why I can’t get enough of it. BOARDS, BOUNDARIES, AND BREAKING FREE There was one gym in my hometown, Norwalk, Iowa, where I could dunk a basketball. The court was so cramped, there was a wall right behind the backboard. It was padded to ease post layup collisions! But when I timed it right, I could run and jump off the wall launching myself into the air and just high enough to dunk. This old gym, a WPA project, was built in 1936 and was considered large at the time relative to population. It felt tiny by the time I played there during PE as a kid and on weekend pickup games as a teen — though it was still bigger than anything my parents experienced in rural Southern Iowa. Basketball began as a sport of spatial limitation. James Naismith invented the game in 1891 — 45 years prior to my dunk gym’s grand opening. The game was invented to be played in a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts. This building dictated the court's dimensions, movement, and strategy. Naismith’s original 13 rules emphasized order—no dribbling or running, only passing to move the ball. Early basketball wasn’t about individual drives but about constant movement within a network of passing lanes, wi...

Misinformation Nation

Mar 8, 2025 20 min

Hello Interactors, From election lies to climate denial, misinformation isn’t just about deception — it’s about making truth feel unknowable. Fact-checking can’t keep up, and trust in institutions is fading. If reality is up for debate, where does that leave us? I wanted to explore this idea of “post-truth” and ways to move beyond it — not by enforcing truth from the top down, but by engaging in inquiry and open dialogue. I examine how truth doesn’t have to be imposed but continually rediscovered — shaped through questioning, testing, and refining what we know. If nothing feels certain, how do we rebuild trust in the process of knowing something is true? THE SLOW SLIDE OF FACTUAL FOUNDATIONS The term "post-truth" was first popularized in the 1990s but took off in 2016. That’s when Oxford Dictionaries named it their Word of the Year. Defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, the term reflects a shift in how truth functions in public discourse. Though the concept of truth manipulation is not new, post-truth represents a systemic weakening of shared standards for knowledge-making. Sadly, truth in the eyes of most of the public is no longer determined by factual verification but by ideological alignment and emotional resonance. The erosion of truth infrastructure — once upheld by journalism, education, and government — has destabilized knowledge credibility. Mid-20th-century institutions like The New York Times and the National Science Foundation ensured rigorous verification. But with rising political polarization, digital misinformation, and distrust in authority, these institutions have lost their stabilizing role, leaving truth increasingly contested rather than collectively affirmed. The mid-20th century exposed truth’s fragility as propaganda reshaped public perception. Nazi ideology co-opted esoteric myths like the Vril Society, a fictitious occult group inspired...

Manufactured Mayhem Muzzles the Masses

Mar 1, 2025 23 min

Hello Interactors, Since his return to office, Trump hasn’t just taken power — he’s trying to reshape the landscape. From border crackdowns and sick real estate fantasies to federal purges by strongman stooges, his policies don’t just enforce control — they seek to redraw the lines of democracy itself. Strongmen don’t wait for crises — they create them. They attempt to manipulate institutions, geographies, and public trust until there’s so much confusion it makes anything they do to ease it acceptable. I dug into how authoritarianism thrives on instability and contemplate some ways to alter it. DEMAND DOMINATION THROUGH DOUBT AND DISORDER I was once a strongman, or at least I could summon one when needed. I could override the part of my brain that protects me from injury and tap into something primal — something that made me feel invincible. A surge of adrenaline convinced my brain I could not only hurl myself into another person but through them, painlessly. I played rugby. What I experienced is known as Berserker State, or berserkergang—a shift in brain activity and hormone surges that cause extreme arousal and altered perception. Rugby is a sport where people spend over an hour pretending they’re not hurt. That’s in contrast to soccer, where people spend over an hour pretending they are. 😬 But while rugby is violent, it’s not played with violent intent. Players may be tough, but they don’t seek to hurt each other — at least, not permanently. That’s in stark contrast to figures like Trump or the new FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino — men who cultivate a different kind of "strongman" identity. They like to wield aggression not as a tool for sport, but as a weapon against others. Bongino is a tough guy on steroids — literally, or at least he acts like it. His wide-eyed rage on his online show suggests a performance of strength, a constant need to assert dominance. But people like Trump and Bongino weren’t born this way; they were molded by insecurity, myths, and...

Where You Stand Shapes Where You Stand

Feb 22, 2025 18 min

Hello Interactors, The land on which we stand can demand where we politically stand. But what happens when that land shifts, shakes, burns or blows away? Recent Southern U.S. floods displaced thousands. Disasters don’t just destroy — they can redraw political lines. With second round of Trumpster fires deepening divides, geography and ideology matter more than ever. As climate crises, economic upheaval, and political struggles intensify, the question isn’t just where people live — but what they’ll fight for. History shows that when the ground shifts, so does power. SHIFTING LANDS AND LOYALTIES From fertile fields to frenzied financial hubs, geography molds the mindset of the masses. Where people live shapes what they fear, fight for, and find familiar. Farmers in the Great Plains worry about wheat yields and water rights, while coastal city dwellers debate rent control and rising tides. But political geography isn’t just about climate and crops — it’s about power, privilege, and the collective making of place. No space is neutral; as evidenced by the abrupt renaming of an entire gulf. History and the present are filled with examples of territories being carved and controlled, gerrymandered, and gentrified. The recent floods in the South serve as a stark reminder of how geography has historically upended political identity. Especially during Black History Month. The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was a devastating deluge that displaced thousands of Black sharecroppers, washing away not only homes but also old political loyalties. The Republican-controlled federal government, led by President Calvin Coolidge, took a hands-off approach, refusing to allocate federal aid and instead relying on Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to coordinate relief efforts through the Red Cross. However, aid distribution was dominated by white Southern landowners, who withheld resources from Black communities. They forced many into quasi-forced labor camps under the guise of relief....

Trust in Flux, Power in Play

Feb 8, 2025 23 min

Hello Interactors, In 2002, when I was at Microsoft, Bill Gates launched an initiative called Trustworthy Computing (TwC). The internet was fresh, ripe for malicious attacks, and Microsoft was a big target. Memos were issued, posters were printed, teams were formed, and code was fortified. And in the case of hidden Easter Eggs in Windows and Office — removed. Internal hacks weren’t a good look. Trust is everywhere these days — politicians vow to restore it, social scientists try to measure it, and brands continue to demand it. U.S. money says to trust God, and it seems we’re now asked to trust Musk. Clearly trust isn't universal; it's shaped by our views of and interactions with power, place, and institutions. Lately, trust feels harder to hold onto. It's not just social media, politics, or government failures — the spaces where trust once thrived are disappearing. Town squares, shops, and local newspapers are vanishing, replaced by fragmented digital alternatives. Trust may be declining; but it's mostly shifting, and not always for the better. Trust won't simply "return" with a memo from Bill. Nor from Trump, Zuck, Musk, or Jeff. Even if they did, they’d likely soon be tossed in the Trumpster Fire. These figures make us question who is gaining trust, who is losing it, and what these new patterns mean for democracy and social cohesion? SELF-TRUST LOST TO CIVIC COST Trust begins with confidence in what we know and perceive. We rely on self-trust to navigate the world — to make decisions, assess risks, and interpret so-called reality. Self-trust relies on the brain’s ability to process uncertainty and predict outcomes. The prefrontal cortex (the brain’s decision-making hub) assesses risks based on past experiences, while the anterior cingulate cortex (a small but crucial center between hemispheres) detects conflicting information, signaling when to doubt or adjust beliefs. When these systems function well, self-trust remains stable. But in an era of conflicting infor...

Train the Bot, Rot the Brain?

Jan 25, 2025 17 min

Hello Interactors, Artificial intelligence divides us. To some, it’s a miracle waiting to solve humanity’s greatest problems. To others, it’s a creeping force, stealing our skills, jobs, and even autonomy. The truth, as always, is more complicated. From sharpened sticks to smartphones, humans have always loved their tools — but at what cost? Plato feared writing would weaken memory; now we worry GPS dulls our sense of direction, calculators erode our math skills, and AI chips away at our ability to think creatively and critically. Are we creating marvels that strengthen us, or are we outsourcing so much that we’re making ourselves vulnerable? What if the answer isn’t rejection or blind adoption, but finding a smarter balance? Let’s dive into what we gain, what we lose, and how interdependence with technology might just be our greatest strength. DEPENDENCY WEAKENS COGNITIVE AGENCY Let’s start with Plato. He famously criticized writing for weakening human memory. His complaint, though seemingly dramatic today, nonetheless echoes across centuries. Modern tools like calculators, spellcheckers, and GPS extend our cognitive reach — a concept known as extended cognition, where tools function as external parts of our thought processes. These tools are marvels of convenience, but they come at a cost. As geographer Paul Torrens highlights in his work on behavioral geography, tools like GPS don’t just help us — they sideline us. By reducing direct interaction with our environment, they bypass processes like navigating landmarks or forming mental maps. Over time, the skills we’ve refined for millennia quietly wither under the glow of our devices. But there’s more to the story than atrophy. Torrens points out another subtle trap: the loss of what “small geographies” offer when we overly rely on tools like GPS and vehicles, both forms of extended cognition. “Small geographies” — our immediate, lived, day-to-day interactions with space — are rich in sensory details that inform nav...

The Emotional Maps of Mandated Smiles

Jan 11, 2025 18 min

Hello Interactors, The weight of winter up north can have its cozy comforts, but cold, damp, and dark can take a toll. We also continue to face a convergence of daunting global challenges — climate change, inequality, political instability, and health crises — each amplifying the other straining our ability to find meaningful and sustainable solutions. So much for ‘Happy Holidays’. A recent article on avoiding despair turned to the concept of “tragic optimism.” This can sometimes be offered as a way to avoid our human tendency to seek “doom and gloom” while also not succumbing to “toxic positivity.” These topics struck me as a decent lens to kick off this winter’s focus: human behavior. Let’s unpack the emotional geographies that shape us. How do spaces and norms influence how we feel, process, and express emotions? SPACES, SMILES, AND SOCIAL SCRIPTS When I was in seventh grade, I was the lead in our middle school musical, Bye Bye Birdy. It featured the song, Put on a Happy Face that employed this cheery, but pushy, line: “Spread sunshine, all over the place…just put on a happy face.” Dick van Dyke played the starring role on Broadway from 1960-61 earning him an Tony award. He then appeared in the movie in 1963, launching him to stardom. In that role, many other roles, and in real life, he is a man who appears perpetually happy. Even now at age 98! But under that smile, lurks a darker side. Soon after his early success, Van Dyke became an alcoholic. The alcohol may have helped him put on a happy face society expected, but it came at a price. This insistence on relentless optimism regardless of circumstances is called “toxic positivity” — and it’s more than a personal behavior. It reflects societal norms that prioritize surface-level harmony over emotional complexity. These norms shape how we navigate feelings and influence our individual well-being. But shared spaces, like our workplaces or homes also influence these emotional dynamics. Have you ever walked into...

Shape-Shifting Systems of Survival

Dec 29, 2024 14 min

Hello Interactors, As the year ends, I reflect on 2024’s top five essays and a shared theme emerges: the systems that define our lives. These systems intertwine nature and nurture, machines and morality, and markets and minds. From evolution’s harmony to the moral balance of economic power, the co-opting of language to the divides between prosperity and precarity, our journey has revealed deep connections between people, place, and power. Let’s rewind and reweave these connections into a broader narrative that sets us on our way to another trip around the sun. NATURE, NURTURE, AND NODAL NETWORKS In “DEVO, Darwin, and the Evo-Devo Dance,” we explored how evolution reflects the eternal interplay between biology and environment, progress and adaptation. The evolution of synthesizers — as my daughter’s playful experiments with sound reminded me — offers a metaphor for humanity’s relationship with technology. This relationship echoes the broader theme of systems and evolution. Iterative changes and interactions between tools and users offer the potential to create new possibilities. As noted in the essay, "DEVO’s fusion of human and machine echoes these evolutionary dynamics, where both biological and technological systems evolve through reconfiguration and integration, creating emergent complexity that Darwin could not have imagined." Just as synthesizers blend natural sound waves with human creativity, humanity’s interaction with technology evolves in cycles of adaptation and transformation, shaping both the tools we use and the societies we build. We shape our tools, and they shape us in return. The blend of nature’s design and our technological imprint creates an ecosystem of mutual influence, much like the Evo-Devo theories of biology, where small tweaks in developmental genes lead to dramatic evolutionary outcomes. This interplay of creation and transformation mirrors the cycles of human progress. Just as Hox genes orchestrate body plans, societal changes—spurred b...

Light, Land, and Lessons of Equity

Dec 22, 2024 10 min

Hello Interactors, Happy winter solstice! Today, the northern hemisphere experiences its shortest day and longest night, a celestial event rooted in the planet's axial tilt. This seemingly simple astronomical fact has profound implications for economic geography. It influences everything from agricultural productivity to social traditions of sharing and reciprocity. SOLSTICE AND SHARING I recently visited the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre at Whistler. These two tribes are part of the Squamish River watershed that flows into Howe Sound, a fjord located just around the corner from Vancouver, British Columbia. This watershed is central to their traditional territories and plays a vital role in their culture and economy. From an economic geography perspective, the tilt of the earth underpins the seasons and, by extension, patterns of production and scarcity that shape human economies. In regions where winter brought agricultural dormancy, societies had to develop systems to store, preserve, and share resources to survive until the next growing season. The winter solstice symbolizes the end of this scarcity. It promises returning light, a pivotal moment in the annual cycle for societies historically reliant on natural rhythms. For the Squamish and Lil’wat peoples, this period was a time of reflection, gratitude, and redistribution. Ceremonial gatherings and potlatches reinforced community bonds by ensuring that the resources harvested in times of plenty were shared equitably during the lean winter months. I saw evidence of these community bonds at the cultural center. The five visitors from West Virginia and myself, were the only white folks in the place. I was happy to see and hear a group of teen Squamish or Lil’wat boys gathered, talking, and giggling. There was a table of older Indigenous women sharing tea and treats. I asked one of our guides if she was doing anything special for the upcoming holiday. She said, “Well, I have presents for my mom’s side, but not my...

Woke and Wealth

Dec 11, 2024 19 min

Hello Interactors, Language shapes power, but it can also obscure and manipulate. Words like woke and decolonize, rooted in justice, are now tools for distortion by figures like Trump and Modi. In this essay, we’ll explore how these terms connect to economic and political geography, tracing their co-opting, parallels to colonialism, and the need to reclaim their transformative potential. Let’s dig in — and stay woke. STAY WOKE, START TALKING Are you woke? It’s a provocative question these days. Especially since this term was co-opted by the right as a pejorative since the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. Even last June Trump said regarding so-called woke military generals, “I would fire them. You can’t have woke military.” And then there’s Elon Musk. He’s been increasingly waging a war on what he calls the ‘woke mind virus’. It seems he started abusing the term in 2021, along with other political rhetoric he’s been ramping up in recently. The Economist reports a “leap in 2023 and 2024 in talk of immigration, border control, the integrity of elections and the ‘woke mind virus’.” Folks more on the left are also starting to distance themselves from the term or use it as a pejorative. Including some of my friends. Even self-described leftist and socialist, Susan Neiman criticized "wokeness," in her 2023 book Left Is Not Woke. She argues, as do many, that it has become antithetical to traditional leftist values — especially as it becomes a weapon by the right. According to the definition in the Cambridge dictionary, I am decidedly woke. That means I’m “aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality.” It worries me that people are eagerly running from this word. I’d rather they interrogate it. Understand it. Find it’s meanings and question the intent behind its use. We should be discussing these nuances, not shushing them. Using the word in a sentence (in an approving manner), Cambridge offers hints at one of the original meanings: “She urged young...

Main Street to Metropolis: The Split Defining State of the United States

Nov 27, 2024 16 min

Hello Interactors, Beneath the surface of election fatigue and endless punditry lies a deeper story — one rooted in the economic geography of this nation. It’s a tale of two Americas: the urban hubs thriving on growth and globalization, and the rural heartland struggling to hold on. One of those hubs allowed my career and family to grow and the other allowed me to grow. The outcome of this election is well timed with Interplace’s fall theme of economic geography. Let’s step back from the noise to explore how decades of policy, technology, and shifting demographics have redrawn the map of opportunity. This isn’t just about red versus blue — it’s about who we are, how we got here, and where we go next. DIVIDED VOTES, DIVIDED LIVES The 2024 presidential election highlighted many things, but one that really resonates with me is the growing urban-rural divide in American politics. Trump dominated rural voters and Harris dominated urban centers. This contrast is reminiscent of 2016, but has been building through decades of economic divergence: urban areas thrive on knowledge economies and globalization, while rural regions face stagnation and demographic decline. This enduring divide underscores the differing opportunities and values of urban and rural voters that renders as blue and red election maps. The U.S. operates on division. It’s driven by a political and economic duopoly. Two major parties dominate, limiting ideological diversity and reducing complex issues to binary debates. This unfairly ignores the nuanced solutions needed to bridge these yawning economic and human geography gaps. Economically, we can see corporate power’s concentrated influence, with dominant industries in technology, finance, and healthcare shaping policy, market dynamics, and communities. Smaller players, including local businesses and alternative voices, are often overshadowed, ignored, or silenced. The effects are visible in places like King County, Washington where I live. Tech giants l...

Molding Minds Through the Markets of Material Worlds

Nov 1, 2024 26 min

Hello Interactors, We often think of the economy as a fixed, objective force, separate from who we are. But what if it actually shapes our identities? Like a DJ mixing a set, economics amplifies certain behaviors and silences others. I saw this firsthand last summer when Calvin Harris performed live in Scotland, dynamically controlling thousands of people with a turn of a dial or push of a button…on tracks he’d already mixed in the studio! Brett Scott, in his recent Substack Remastering Capitalism, uses this music mixing metaphor to show how human nature is molded — elevated or suppressed — by economic systems. His insights remind me of social constructionism, which reveals that what we see as “natural” is often constructed by institutions, including the economy. Our many identities aren’t just reacting to the system — they are being shaped by it. But what if Homo Economicus, the rational, self-interested individual, isn’t who we truly or solely are? What if these systems are muting our most moral and communal parts? With my last three posts on economics in mind, let’s explore how economics and geography construct — and limit — who we become. MARKETS MOLDING MINDS At the heart of social constructionism is the idea that reality isn’t something we passively experience — it’s something actively constructed through our social interactions, power dynamics, and the institutions that shape our lives. One of the most powerful institutions in modern society is the economy, which shapes not just markets but the very way we see ourselves and our place in the world. And, as with all social constructs, it is influenced by those who hold power. In Econ 101, we’re introduced to Homo Economicus, the rational, self-interested individual who makes perfectly reasoned decisions geared toward maximizing utility without emotional interference. Think Spock from Star Trek. This figure is more than a character or abstract concept; it reflects the values that the market rewards and those in...

NAFTA, Nations, and Native Networks

Oct 19, 2024 17 min

Hello Interactors, On October 12th, the United States observed Indigenous Peoples' Day, a recognition first proposed in 1977 during a UN conference in Geneva. Indigenous delegates called “to observe October 12, the day of so-called ‘discovery’ of America, as an international day of solidarity with the indigenous peoples of the Americas” drawing attention to the broken treaties between Indigenous nations and the U.S. government. Thirty years later, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirmed that these treaties are of international concern, though the United States and a few other countries initially refused to endorse the declaration, and the resolution remains non-binding. On Indigenous People’s Day, the satirical news outlet, The Onion, used the occasion to post a story with this headline: “Nation’s Indigenous People Confirm They Don’t Need Special Holiday, Just Large Swaths Of Land Returned Immediately” Today, there are 574 recognized Indigenous nations within the U.S., many of which still struggle for recognition and rights. As trade agreements like NAFTA dominate discussions on labor, immigration, and environmental impact, little attention is paid to the intricate trade systems Indigenous nations developed long before European contact. Here in the Pacific Northwest, societies like the Coast Salish had sophisticated economies driven by geographic access to key resources, especially salmon. Their control over rich fishing sites shaped trade, reinforced social hierarchies, and created territorial dynamics that predated modern trade systems. Yet, colonization disrupted these Indigenous networks, imposing disorienting and often exploitative systems of land ownership and resource extraction. This week, I hope to explore how the adaptive strategies of Indigenous nations—despite the hardships imposed by colonization—can inspire decentralized solutions to today’s environmental and socio-economic challenges, just as these nations did for millennia. C...

Markets, Machines, and Morality

Oct 10, 2024 18 min

Hello Interactors, We’ve entered fall here in the northern hemisphere, and you know what that means — pumpkin spice everything, cozy sweaters, and … economics! That’s right, as the leaves change color (at least for those above 40°N latitude), it’s the perfect time to explore how the changing seasons mirror shifts in human interaction, from the flow of resources to the balance of power and progress. This week, it’s time to cozy up with Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and James Watt —three names you probably didn’t expect to find together, but trust me, they make quite the trio. So grab your favorite fall beverage and join me on a journey through the Industrial Revolution, steam engines, and the forgotten role of moral feedback loops in economics. Let's find out why balancing wealth and well-being is harder than finding a public restroom in an old university. PURGING THE URGE FOR SYMPATHY I needed to pee. More specifically, the stretch receptors in the walls of my bladder, which monitor the volume of urine inside, became activated. That sent sensory signals to the spinal cord and brain through my pelvic nerves. The pons in the brainstem (which includes a dedicated urination control center) processed this information in coordination with my prefrontal cortex, which allowed for conscious control over my decision to urinate. It was a Sunday, and the campus was dead. Lucky for me a door was open, so I ducked in and began my search for a potty. The hallway was musty and narrow. The walls were old, but not as old as the 250-year-old structure surrounding it. There was no immediately visible sign for a restroom, but there were numerous potential doors and directions for me to attempt. As I approached one of them, the industrial grade door magically opened before I could even touch it. I cautiously inched forward half wondering if it would lock behind me. Now inside another chamber further in the interior, I was met with another set of mysterious doors. I stepped inside anothe...

DEVO, Darwin, and the Evo-Devo Dance

Sep 23, 2024 21 min

Hello Interactors, My daughter has developed a keen interest in synthesizers. She has even created illustrated characters named Morg and Snorf, inspired by keyboard brands like Korg and Nord. Recently, she borrowed an old Korg synthesizer and has begun composing her own music during what she calls, “Korg time”. The evolution of electronic music has been remarkable since its inception, with even classical composers now embracing technology in their work. Notably, Ada Lovelace, one of the earliest computer programmers, foresaw in 1842 that computers would eventually be used for music composition — a prediction that has come to fruition. The blending of acoustic music and computer-generated sounds prompts me to reflect on how we shape our environment, which in turn shapes us. This interplay mirrors the story of evolution: nature nurturing nature ad infinitum. However, I wonder if technology as we know it today will ever truly integrate into the fabric of nature. Will we see human-like robots or robot-like humans? What if technology is already embedded within nature, and we are on the brink of learning to program it just as we would a computer? Let’s find out… MAN OR MACHINE? “Are we not men?” This was a question presumably posed to and by members of the band DEVO who masquerade as part human and part machine. The answer by the humorous humanoids was “We are Devo!”. This question and answer became the title of their first album in August of 1978. It served as both a declaration of their band name, DEVO, but also as a rhetorical question that questioned humanity during the early rise of digital technology and its perceived, and actualized, dehumanization. DEVO is an abbreviation of the term de-evolution. The band’s founding member, lead singer, and keyboardist, Mark Mothersbaugh had come across a 1924 pamphlet produced by Rev. B.H. Shadduck titled “Jocko-Homo Heavenbound” which critiqued, often humorously, Darwinian evolutionary theory. “Jocko-Homo” translates to Ape-M...

Fires, Foothills, and Flourishing

Sep 9, 2024 12 min

Hello Interactors, It’s been awhile. I’ve been off getting our kids settled at college…including a transfer to Los Angeles. And I may have also been seduced by the lazy days of summer. After dropping our son in LA, my wife and I took some time to return to Santa Barbara where we first met. I was reminded of how uniquely beautiful that place is. It’s also host to a unique collection of physical geography. And while it mostly enjoys a cool, calm environment, it can also endure bouts of destruction and renewal. A bit like all of us. Let’s reflect, shall we… MIGRATIONS, MOUNTAINS, AND MEMORIES Traversing the globe dropping offspring is as old as humanity. As far as we know, early hominins like Homo erectus first stepped out of Africa two million years ago. The oldest human skeletal remains outside of Africa to date were found in Eurasia (now the country of Georgia) and are 1.8 million years old. These waves of migrations were likely driven by changes in climate, resources, societies, and technologies — the same factors driving migration today. Our oldest kin dispersed widely across Eurasia, reaching as far as Southeast Asia. Some may have even used primitive boats to navigate to and between islands. This all set the stage for later migrations of other hominins, including Homo sapiens, as they spread across globe over the next million years. I was reflecting on this on a hike my wife and I recently took in the foothills of Santa Barbara (where we had our first date 34 years ago!). The Santa Ynez Mountains were uplifted during the late Miocene (23.03 million years ago) to early Pliocene (2.58 million years ago) due to the tectonic interactions between the Pacific and North American plates. This exposed a complex layering of ancient marine and terrestrial sediments that were deposited over millions of years in a marine basin stretching from current day central valley of California to Northern Mexico. These sandstones, shale, and conglomerates are revealed along the trails...

Record-Breaking Temperatures and the Uncertainty of Climate Predictions

Jul 31, 2024 21 min

Hello Interactors, Flying provides a great opportunity to catch up on books and podcasts, but it also brings feelings of guilt. My recent trip likely contributed about 136 hot air balloons' worth of CO2 to the atmosphere. Should I feel guilty, or should the responsibility lie with airlines, manufacturers, and oil companies? We all contribute to global warming, but at least our destination was experiencing an unusually cool July. However, globally, the situation is very different and worsening faster than expected. What’s to be done? Let’s dig in. CLIMATE CONUNDRUMS CONFOUND CALCULATIONS There are two spots on the planet that are not affected by climate change, and I recently flew over one of them. It’s a patch in the ocean just off the coast of Greenland that our plane happened to fly over on a family vacation to Scotland. The other is a small band around the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. I likely won’t be visiting that one. I learned this on the plane listening to a podcast interview by the physicist Sean Carroll with climate scientist and Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt. Gavin has been at the forefront of climate science, spearheading efforts to quantify Earth's climatic fluctuations, develop sophisticated models for projecting future climate scenarios, and effectively communicate these findings to the public and policymakers. In this discussion, they talked about the methods currently employed in climate research, while also offering insights into the anticipated climatic shifts and their potential impacts in the coming decades. Gavin is known for bridging gaps between complex science and accessible information. I’m writing this piece to bridge some of my own gaps. For example, there’s often mention that climate change has created more extreme swings in temperature — that the weather is increasingly varying from extreme heat to extreme cold. In statistics, this is called variance. Some argue this variance may be hard for u...

Weathering Wonders: From Microbes to Mother Earth's Mirth

Jul 12, 2024 16 min

Hello Interactors, I recently read an intriguing article about unexpected forms of life thriving deep within the Earth's crust. These discoveries are revitalizing environmental theories and processes that mainstream science has long tried to dismiss—yet I've been exploring them over the past few summers. While working outside, I realized that some of these processes are unfolding right under my nose...and possibly even inside it! On that note, this might sound a bit awkward, but... Let’s dig in! WORLDWIDE WEATHERING WHISPERS I’m behind on my pressure washing. This can have detrimental effects here in the predominantly damp Northwest as moss spores, tiny lightweight travelers, are lifted and lofted by the wind’s wings until they land on damp concrete. A new home for moss to roam. Upon contact, the spores absorb moisture and germinate, developing into a protonema — fine lines of sprawling verdant vines. As the structure crawls through the creviced concrete an anchored lace unfolds. Atop it grows a carpet of green and gold, down below tentacles grab hold. The rhizoid roots anchor mounding moss, absorbing food and water nature has tossed. As the concrete crumbles into nutrient stores, the soft moss blossoms with chromophores. Over time, atop the luscious mountains and rocky moistened pours, the wind releases more lofting spores. It turns out the contrasting boundary between soft squishy plants and hard concrete is as pronounced as the divisions between the disciplines of biology and geology. But advances in Earth System Science are starting blur these boundaries, as integrative science tends to do. Like moss softening concrete. My expansive moss colonies, part of the plant kingdom, house communities of tiny microorganisms like bacteria, fungi, and microscopic animals like rotifers and tardigrades. Many of these communities have symbiotic relationships with moss. For example, some bacteria promote moss growth through the production of the plant growth hormone auxin using...

Regulatory Shifts and Environmental Drifts: Legal and Natural Boundaries

Jul 4, 2024 19 min

Hello Interactors, We’re fully into Summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and as the earth tilts toward the sun, Interplace tilts toward the environment. And what a crucial moment to do so. Just last week, the Supreme Court made sweeping decisions that could unravel over fifty years of environmental legislation, threatening to plunge us into chaos. This upheaval comes precisely when our world’s natural boundaries desperately need regulatory stability and security to make any meaningful progress in combating global warming. Let’s dig in… POLLEN, POLLUTING, AND POLITICS I recently returned from the Midwest visiting family. I like looking out of the airplane window at the various crop patterns from state to state. Trying to discern which state I was over; I was reminded of a corny Midwest joke. Why do Iowa corn stalks lean to the east? Because Illinois sucks and Nebraska blows. Folks in Illinois tell the same joke, but it’s Ohio that sucks and Iowa that blows. You get the idea. The truth is the wind does commonly blow from west to east oblivious to state borders. It sends whatever it wants across the border — clouds, dust, seeds, pollen…pollution. And if there’s money to be made, borders become porous or disappear altogether. Those rivalrous corn jokes mirror an economic reality. Bordering states all compete for federal subsidies and access to markets — mostly across international borders. Access to these markets can be impacted by corn pollen drifting from one state to another. With the widespread adoption of genetically modified (GMO) corn varieties, there’s potential for contamination of non-GMO corn fields by pollen from GMO corn fields on state lines. One study suggest cross-pollination could be detected up to 600 feet away from the source, although counts dropped off rapidly beyond 150 feet. But the more pressing concern isn’t pollen drift, but pollution drift. As part of the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a “Good Neighbor” rule designe...

Garden Invaders and Global Rhizomes

Jun 12, 2024 21 min

Hello Interactors, The lengthening northern days have unleashed verdant chaos in my yard and it’s challenging my desire for order. Some unruly growth demands surrendering control, embracing life's rhizomatic entanglements — an invitation to honor multiplicity over singularity, relation over individuality, and emergence over stasis. Let’s dig in… FERN FRENZY IN FULL FORCE Those skinny unattractive immigrants are invading. They’re nudging their way through every nook and cranny stealing resources and opportunity from those already here. Before long, they’ll be taking over the place. I’m talking about Leptinella squalida (Derived from the Greek "leptos" meaning slender and the Latin “squalid” meaning unattractive). That is the scientific name for a New Zealand native ground cover commonly referred to as ‘Brass buttons’ and it’s taking over my garden. Leptinella squalida is rhizomatous. It sends rootlike horizontal shallow subterranean stems — a rhizome — in a multitude of unpredictable directions. At various intervals in its journey, it progressively produces small nodules that send whisker roots below while sprouting shoots vertically to the surface to form miniature fern-like fronds — sometimes green and other times ‘brass’ colored. Once a year it produces a yellow ‘button’ blossom that can send seeds aloft leapfrogging the host to colonize another territory. I planted it in a shady moist area of my small backyard after ripping out a grass lawn. Liptinella squalida makes an even carpet that can withstand a fair bit of foot traffic, making it an attractive alternative to grass. Unfortunately, other plants can’t withstand is aggressive propagation, starving them of light and nutrients. That’s exactly what this exponentially expanding rhizome is doing to the slower growing, less aggressively sprawling Sedum rupestre 'Angelina' — a variety I also helped colonize from Western Europe. I suspect strict immigration laws should be applied to my little rambunctious rhizomatou...

From Paternalism to Partnership: Rethinking Western Response to Global Displacement

May 27, 2024 20 min

Hello Interactors, In an era where Western leaders craft policies that oscillate between harsh border controls and selective humanitarian aid, our understanding risks being clouded by data-centric approaches. Through the lens of critical cartography, we see how enhanced data collection can reduce displaced individuals to mere numbers, obscuring their complex human stories behind cold statistics. Insights into the disorienting effects of domineering multinational capitalism further illuminate how these data practices, though aimed at clarity, often mask the real experiences and struggles of those displaced. I explore some contradictions in these policies—how they promise to protect yet perpetuate power imbalances, offering a guise of support while fundamentally failing to address the root causes of displacement. Let’s go… DISORIENTED BY DOMINANCE The Dutch government recently took a giant political step to the right. Some say this is as far right as a democratically elected Dutch government has ever been. It’s probably the most intolerant since Hitler installed a Nazi occupation regime from 1940-1945 implementing racist policies which persecuted not just Jews but other minorities as well. The Dutch government leaned right as recent as 2010-2012, when the right-wing politician Geert Wilders was Prime Minister. Wilders is now back in office, though not as Prime Minister, and has formed a coalition government seeking to implement racist immigration policies that echo an ugly past. In one of his campaign speeches he said he desires a strict and harsh Netherlands where "people in Africa and the Middle East will start thinking they might be better off elsewhere". Wilders joins the ranks of intolerant European populists like Le Pen of France, Meloni of Italy, and Hungary’s Orban, using anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric as rallying cries. Meanwhile, here in the Americas, Biden and Mexico’s López Obrador have deported tens of thousands of migrants to Mexico despite known...

Does Biden's "Cannibal" Gaffe Reveal A Deeper Colonial Mindset?

May 7, 2024 17 min

Hello Interactors, Biden’s recent reflective quip got me thinking about how European colonial doctrines like the "Doctrine of Discovery" and the "civilizing mission," continue to justify the dominance over Indigenous peoples, including those in Papua New Guinea. These lingering narratives not only influence contemporary struggles for self-determination, they also impact global politics and economic globalism. Join me as I unpack the complex interplay of decolonization, sovereignty, and the roles international actors, and their maps, play(ed) in shaping these dynamics. Let’s go… MAPS MARK MYTHS Biden recently suggested his uncle was eaten by "cannibals". Reflecting on World War II war veterans, he said, "He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea." Military records show that his uncle’s plane crashed off the coast of New Guinea for reasons unknown and his remains were never recovered. Papua New Guinea's (PNG) Prime Minister James Marape didn’t take kindly to Biden's remarks, stating that "President Biden's remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such." Marape reminded Biden that Papua New Guinea was an unwilling participant in World War II. He urged the U.S. to help locate and recover the remains of American servicemen still scattered across the country. President Biden is a victim of depictions of "cannibals" in Papua New Guinea that are part of a deeply problematic colonial and post-colonial narrative still debated among anthropologists. These often exaggerated or fabricated historical portrayals of Indigenous peoples as "savage" or "primitive" were used to justify colonial domination and the imposition of Western control under the guise of bringing "civilization" to these societies. During the age of exploration and colonial expansion, European explorers and colonists frequently labeled vari...

Contours of Control Creep Onto Campus

Apr 27, 2024 21 min

Hello Interactors, The horrific acts of violence in Palestine have prompted acts of violence on university campuses around the world. This post is about one thing they have in common — maps. Maps legally define territory, the rights of those who occupy it, and the rights of those in power to silence them, displace them, or ‘invisible’ them. A pattern we also see with America’s unhoused. Let me try to map this out… CAMPUS CONFRONTATIONS ECHO Citing "clear and present danger," Columbia University recently called for the New York Police to intervene. On April 18th, students had set up tents on a small patch of grass on campus — a form of protest calling for the university to divest from Israel due to the violence in Palestine. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, the President of the school claimed their presence was menacing and that they were trespassing. Evidently, parts of campus are closed to students during certain hours. The incident resulted in the arrest of 108 students. But many returned and were joined by more upon their release. Nearly a week passed before House Speaker Mike Johnson called on the school’s President to resign if she can’t suppress the war protests at her school. He went on to threaten federal funding for colleges that he sees are creating unsafe environments for Jewish students. Many equate opposition to the state of Israel as opposition of Jewish people. Meanwhile, the Jewish Voice for Peace is claiming the university is making it unsafe for both Jewish and non-Jewish students in their actions. Of the 85 students suspended for protesting the actions of the Israeli state, 15 are Jewish. The Jewish Voice for Peace writes, “Yesterday’s statement by the White House, like the administrators of Columbia University, dangerously and inaccurately presumes that all Jewish students support the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians. This assumption is actively harming Palestinian and Jewish students.” Restrictions on student rights have...

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Where ‘The Cloud’ Touches the Ground

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Podcast details

Created by: Brad Weed
Status: Active
Latest episode: Oct 30, 2026
Episodes: 172
Release period: Every two weeks
Avg. episode length: 20 min
Explicit: No
Language: English

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