I was sitting on my porch the other day. It was a beautiful spring day.

Everyone in Cleveland is ecstatic on days like this this time of the year, me included. Sometimes I just walk around and stare in wonder at the flowering trees, etc. It doesn’t seem real. Especially just a few weeks of a winter that always feels like it would never end.

Anyway, as I was sitting there, four bicyclists passed, right at the same time, right in front of my house. I don’t think they were together. And I almost started crying.

More than 10 years ago, me and a few other cyclists would ride up and down my street. At the time, it kind of sucked. The street was sort of treated like a high-speed cut through. We spent years complaining about it, trying to get these incremental improvements.

It could be a great street to bike on, we always thought, with the mature trees. It was really a neighborhood street. Wasn’t meant to be a busy through-way. If we could just get traffic under control, more people would bike on it, it would be a lot nicer.

Everyone thought we were basically crazy people (sorta). And all these politicians sort patted us on the head, told us kinda what we wanted to hear and then did nothing. But we just never shut up. We came up with this plan, we wanted “traffic calming.” It took like 10 years and this horrible ugly political process where neighbors were basically tearing each other to shreds. But, the city (just barely) went through with it. They added all these innovative street treatments. And all the people who used it to speed through just kind of went away.

And we were right, I guess. At least when the weather is nice. If that traffic was calmed, it does seem like people enjoy biking on it. I was sitting there watching people ride by and thinking about the connection to things we did and said in the past and what they were doing, biking along on a beautiful spring day. Such a positive thing.

I have worked in the field of sustainable transportation for more than a decade and it’s a difficult fight. People lose their minds about things like traffic calming. Any kind of change is very hard fought, takes this big leap of faith.

Anyway, the street is just a tiny thing. I don’t really hang my hat on that specifically. But compared to all those years ago, it was better. A few people were actually positively impacted.

Anyway, I wonder sometimes and get discouraged about what I’m working on. Public meetings that planners do are depressing. Public affairs work can get you down in general. It’s not always the way it should be ideally. Finally, when your job is writing etc., advocacy, you don’t always get to see the product of your work very clearly. It’s not like constructing a building, or even mowing a lawn.

Also, one of the big things you're contending with is people’s disbelief. That anything could change or get any better.

I was ranting about this on Substack notes the other day. About how we should do more to protect kids from dangerous drivers. I feel like that should be sort of non controversial. But I guess it’s natural enough that a lot of people were kind of skeptical. First, that anything was any better in the past. Second, that anything could change.

Even a few years ago — before the pandemic — people used to at least have license plates almost all the time. Even if we could just get back to that, it would be an improvement!

I am guilty of being too pessimistic too sometimes. All day yesterday, I was looking forward to the Cleveland Cavaliers game. I am OBSESSED. I was literally like 3 hours till the game. Two hours till the game… Just all day. I love the playoffs.

Anyway, I sat there and I watched the whole game, up until it was almost over. It was kinda hard to watch. Donovan Mitchell, our best player, was really struggling shooting 0-7 from the three point line. Cade Cunningham was out of control. He sunk this three with 2.5 minutes left and they were up by nine. I just said, there’s no way they can win this and went back to bed.

Anyway, I woke up at 5 am and laid there feeling depressed about the Cavs. Thinking to myself… the season is probably over. They’re going to be eliminated. It was dumb to be so invested.

Then I woke up and went downstairs a couple hours later. And my husband says they won. I didn’t believe him. But it turns out as soon as I went to bed they launched this crazy improbable comeback. The whole momentum shifted. Then they went into overtime. And the Pistons started missing every shot they took.

The Cavs ended up winning by four or something. Hopefully tonight they are going to finish them off and go to the Eastern Conference Finals. I’m stoked. I think they’ve really got a shot against the Knicks.

I don’t know why I care so much about basketball. Anyway, the point is, things can turn on a dime. Things can and do change.

I was down last week in Texas. I was invited down there to speak at a statewide conference on traffic safety. I was kind of on the fence about going, for reasons I don’t want to get into. But the organizer said, Texas cities are really some really great work on traffic safety. I was excited to hear that.

When I first started writing about biking and pedestrian deaths, Texas was terrible. The State Department of Transportation (this is just my read) could have cared less how many people got run over on suburban arterial roads. It was laser focused on the “real work” of widening every highway in the state. The bigger the better! They stopped short of openly mocking people like me when we raised objections, but not by a whole lot.

So anyway, it seemed like progress to be invited down there to keynote a safety conference. When my book about pedestrian deaths was first published, 5+ years ago, it was considered kind of controversial to discuss it the way I did. To lay blame. One east coast state invited me to give a talk and then withdrew the invitation. Ha. It was too hot a topic for them. Now what I’m saying is basically accepted. it’s only been 5 years.

Austin, which is where it was, was doing some amazing work. They added bike lanes everywhere. It seemed like. I just picked up one of those rentable e-bikes by the side of the road and rode around one night for an hour or so, no idea where I was going. And almost the whole way it was on these nice paths or on these protected bike lanes that they threw up little bollards next to. I was impressed.

They’re spending $25 million a year adding sidewalks. And they have a Safe Routes to School program with 18 employees, not including their team of crossing guards. If Texas could get its act together on traffic safety, it would be a big deal. Nearly a third of pedestrian deaths in the country happen in just two states: California and Texas. Last I saw 800 or 900 people a year were killed trying to walk somewhere in Texas.

Of course, it’s still no utopia for people on foot. You can really see that once you get out of the downtown a little ways. But it really seemed like Austin changed the way it does streets and was putting the pieces together so at least some people could walk and bike. I think Houston and Dallas are farther behind. Houston has a new mayor that is reversing a lot of street safety projects, which is depressing. But having one of your major cities operationalize all that, that has got to have an impact.

Austin passed a big transit levy, to build light rail, a few years back and they’re still waiting on Trump to release the funding. The Trump USDOT has just not released any transit project funding since it has been in office, which is arguably illegal (It’s Congress that has the power to appropriate funds, and they appropriated it for transit.)

So anyway, I’m not necessarily taking a victory lap here. But still. Things can and do change. They can change for the better. Even now, when things seem bleak in certain ways, we shouldn’t lose sight of that and our own power and impact.

For the book I am working on, I got to interview Lenore Skenazy, the author of Free Range Kids and a writer and advocate I admire a lot. I think Skenazy is a top shelf public intellectual. I mean, to coin a term like that “Free Range Kids,” that becomes part of ordinary people’s lexicon’s — that’s a goated thing to do as a nonfiction writer. Her message remains perhaps even more relevant today than it was more than a decade ago when the book was published.

Here’s an edited summary of some of the interview highlights below.

Angie Schmitt 2:05
So like the premise of the book I’m working on, it’s like yours. It’s a little like yours, but it’s a little different.

Lenore Skenazy 2:27
Oh, great.

Angie Schmitt 2:40
Because I think yours was sort of about, like, really pretty focused on, you know, sort of parents and the role parents play in this. And my book sort of argues that we’re doing a bad job as a wider society, sort of making space for kids and protecting them and that to a certain extent they’re being excluded from public space and that there’s a little bit of a hostility that’s arising. So, so does that, does that sort of make sense?

Lenore Skenazy 3:07
Yeah, no, I there’s there’s one thing that really interests me there.
You know, the hostility towards kids in public, it’s it’s not coded as that. It’s coded as, Oh no, an unsupervised child. I better help them. What? Where is that terrible parent? Why aren’t they here?

Angie Schmitt 3:40
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lenore Skenazy 3:45
Right. So, and I don’t even think it is necessarily hostility, but once you’ve convinced a culture that any unsupervised child is automatically in danger, it becomes easy to you know, de-normalize that, right? And also to blame a parent who might simply be two things: One is trusting the kid and knowing their kid well enough to think they’re going to be fine. And two is poor. And so rather than I can’t, you know, I’m not going to hire Nanny or a babysitter. My kid can come home on her own.

So there was that horrible case. I’m sure you’re keenly aware in North Carolina, right? With Legend (Jenkins).

Yeah, the there was actually a case also in New Zealand.

Lenore Skenazy 4:38
Maybe 10 years ago that you might look up where a girl who is 10 was. She was coming home from school with her friends and then like at the last block or something, she goes one way and they go another way and she’s on her scooter and she got hit by a garbage truck or something and died. And the coroner blamed the parents.

Angie Schmitt 4:58
OK, yeah, even in my first book, I wrote about that a case like that. No, actually it wasn’t that case. It’s Raquel Nelson case. Have you heard about that? It’s it was in the northern suburbs of Atlanta where a woman, she was actually struck (by a driver). She’s trying to cross the road with her her kids.

Lenore Skenazy 4:59
What?
That case, yeah
No, I don’t know where, no.
Oh, I do that. I know this. She was crossing. She was on the median and she was going across, yeah.

Angie Schmitt 5:19
Yeah, she was prosecuted then, even though her son died. And really, that county sort of has a a routine, a problem of doing that sort of prosecuting these low-income moms.

Lenore Skenazy 5:22
Yeah.

Angie Schmitt 5:38
So it’ll be a little more urban planning focus sort of then and I know you’re pretty engaged in like legal issues, legal matters.

Lenore Skenazy 5:56
We’ve changed the laws in in 12 states. Yeah, including in Georgia after after the mom was arrested because her son was walking to the store. There’s a really big story. Brittany Patterson. You’ll see it. Brittany with an A, right?

Angie Schmitt 6:06
Awesome.

Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that is kind of what I want to talk to you about. And one thing, one thing I’m going to bring up in my book, and you don’t hear much about like in the United States, but is much more commonly discussed, like in Europe, is this idea of child rights.

I don’t know if you think about that or.

Lenore Skenazy 6:27
Yeah, I mean, I think about it, but I don’t don’t think about it as rights. I think about it’s like, why don’t we let our kids do things that we all did, and what’s happening to them when we don’t, and what’s happening to us.

You should watch my Ted Talk. It’s basically about how there used to be the different worlds. There was the kid world where kids went off and did stuff on their own that would we would find, you know, boring or stupid or slightly risky and we didn’t see it, so it didn’t bother us.

And then adults had a world that for sure was boring to kids where we’re just always talking about politics and and who’s, you know, going into the hospital.

And then there was also a shared world when you would eat dinner together or you’d go on a vacation together or whatever. And and now there’s no light between those Venn diagrams. And so that means that we’re with them all the time.

So a couple of things happen. In your sense, what happens is it denormalizes kids who are not supervised. But it also tells kids that they’re in constant danger, that they’re incompetent, that they need their parent there. And it tells parents that if you’re a decent human being, you know, you better be with them all the time, because anything terrible could happen.

It’s like, it’s like birth control for life. I mean, it just all you have to do is say it. And everyone’s like, oh, I guess it doesn’t, you know, I’ll, I’ll just take her there. I’ll just go into the store with her. There was a actually a um a conservative young woman who has a really big following. This name I always forget, and I always think it’s Alex Ward, but her last name might be Grant or something.

Anyway, she has a very popular podcast with a blog. She’s very pretty and and she doesn’t have kids yet, but she said if I had a kid. You know, I would send my, you know, I would say stay outside and send my kid in for a loaf of bread.

She was like, pilloried by her followers. Like, “are you kidding? And that’s because you don’t have a kid. And don’t you realize anything could happen? Something terrible could happen! You’d never forgive yourself!”

And I really feel like that’s the thing for me, that’s the thing that changed parenting and childhood the most and and the hardest thing to rewire because it feels natural. But it actually isn’t natural because I know this cause I grew up with a a nervous mom who didn’t think that way ‘cause you didn’t think that way about absolutely everything a kid did, and now we do.

Angie Schmitt 11:11
OK, yeah. So you’ve been, you’ve been going around the country, you have an advocacy group and you’re trying to pass laws that basically say it shouldn’t be illegal for a kid to take a short walk around their neighborhood to go to the store or to go to the playgrounds.

Lenore Skenazy 11:27
Right, right. So those are what we call Reasonable Childhood Independence Laws. And the first one was passed in Utah in 2018, back when they called it a Free Range Kids law. And it listed things. It’s like parents should be able to let their, you know, parents shouldn’t have to second guess themselves when they think their kids are ready for some independence.

So if I think my kid is ready to ride his bike around the neighborhood, or walk to the store, or climb a tree, or knock on a friend’s door, go to grandma’s, right? That should be up to me. Unless I’m doing something egregious, like saying, well, you’re three, it’s midnight. “Why don’t you go get some heroin for me at the corner, right?”

Angie Schmitt 12:05
OK.

Lenore Skenazy 12:07
And so the idea of the law is that unless you’re putting your kid in obvious and serious danger, letting them do things on their own is not neglect. And in fact, independence is good for kids.

I mean, we’ve seen that over the years. (Dr.) Peter Gray did a wonderful study. He’s a professor of psychology at Boston College, and he’s also one of the founders with me of Let Grow, and his study that was published in the Journal of Pediatrics showed that as kids’ independence and mobility and free play have been going down over the decades, not just since the iPhone, not since COVID, over the decades, their anxiety and their depression have been going up. And so we need to reverse that. And you can’t reverse that if you think you’re going to get arrested because you let your kid walk to the bus stop.

So Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, Connecticut, Illinois, Montana, Georgia, Florida, Missouri, Indiana. And did I say Virginia? Anyways, 12 states have passed reasonable childhood independence laws now, and right now Ohio is debating it.

Angie Schmitt 13:22
Oh, so exciting.

Lenore Skenazy 13:24
Are where you’re not? Are you near Columbus? Where are you?

Angie Schmitt 13:26
I’m in Cleveland. I’m in Cleveland, but I am working with a statewide organization that I could maybe pass word along to.

Angie Schmitt 14:33
Yeah. OK. So one thing I want to ask you about since I’m sort of interviewing you is Utah. Like one thing I’ve been thinking for the book is, is Utah sort of a good example because they have so many children. I’ve heard that like just culturally they’re a little bit more supportive of children’s independence.

Lenore Skenazy 14:40
Yes.

Angie Schmitt 14:53
They have better safe routes to school. They build better transit in part to support these larger families. What do you what’s your take sort of, I mean that was the first state it passed in.

Lenore Skenazy 14:58
That’s neat.
Right. Obviously bigger families mean that even if you think that a parent should be with a kid every single second, if you have a two year old and a six year old and an 8 year old and a 10 year old.
You know, how are you going to be at everybody’s pick up? You know, how are you going to be at every soccer game? How are you going to take every kid? So I think there is just more independence built into large families because of logistics.

You know, I feel like when my mom let me walk to school, she got used to not seeing me for 8 hours and that that built her trust muscle.
Right. She didn’t. You know, even if she was worried the first couple of times, then it just became routine. And so she wasn’t imagining, you know, all the horrible things that could happen to me because the default was trust. The default was faith in me and my neighbors and my neighborhood and my crossing guard.

And and that has been leached out by the idea that you can either be with them all the time, or here she pulls out her Sketchers shoe with the…
One second.

Angie Schmitt 16:39
Oh yeah.

Lenore Skenazy 16:41
Right, you’ve seen it.

Angie Schmitt 16:42
Yeah, AirTag. It’s got an AirTag.

Lenore Skenazy 16:45
Yeah, there’s the the air tag goes in there (in the shoe). So faith in anything else, including God, has been replaced by certainty, and certainty is only fed by certainty. So then you have to keep having check-ins to make sure he’s still on the route to, you know, the school.

Angie Schmitt 16:48
Yeah.

Lenore Skenazy 17:04
Call. Did he get in? Is there a camera on the bus? You know, is she on the bus with the bus stop at the bus stop? I got a ping. And so if you’re talking about a state where there is more faith in God as well as, you know, in their kids’ capabilities because they can’t be with them all the time, that’s sort of a you know, a vote for somebody else. I don’t have to be in charge all the time because I can’t be all the in charge all the time. And in fact, we’re never in charge all the time.

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I just got back from Texas, where Waymo, and a number of competitors have been green lighted, pretty openly.

Waymo is operating in all the major Texas cities, now. Their cars were cruising around as I was biking and walking around the city. I have to say, I didn’t notice them doing anything that concerned me, although in many cases they seemed to be empty. Some of what’s going on, apparently, is still testing.

I moderated a panel at a safety conference that included a Waymo spokesperson. She presented data that the company is 13 times safer than the average driver, in terms of serious collisions.

I don’t disagree that there’s a lot of potential here to improve traffic safety. Still, I’m a tiny bit skeptical of the kind of full-throated endorsement of Waymo as kind of the answer to our safety problems there’s been on this subject by some journalists and other pundits.

The 13 times safer number, that’s the company's figure. I think that’s a good place to start out. But that has to be taken with a grain of salt, imo. I’ve seen some (knowledgable) people scrutinize it. Fatal crashes only happen every 100 million or so miles in the U.S. Waymo has only logged 200 million in total. So there’s a lot of “noise” if that makes sense. A single fatality could really change that a lot. Hopefully (!!) that won’t happen.

I don’t think we should just accept Waymo’s version of events. Not because I necessarily think Waymo is evil or whatever. It’s just too high stakes. We wouldn’t kind of all just say, “well Chase bank claims it has the best consumer protections on the market.” We have ratings agencies and third party quality control for banks. And banks aren’t in a position to potentially kill or injure people.

Everyone seems to be convinced that Waymo is the industry leader, safety wise. I don’t doubt that. They are releasing all this data, inviting people to scrutinize it, which I think is very important and good. Most people, though, even most government officials, just don’t have the knowledge to evaluate these kinds of claims and recognize any weaknesses or concerns. That’s a problem I think.

And I KNOW our current safety record is bad. That is like my whole thing career, wise. Part of our problem is the values we have around safety. If we put a low premium on safety and then bring self-driving cars into that, without altering the underlying value, we would replace a bad system, with a less bad one. The real problems safety wise, in the U.S. aren’t lack of tech. We have all kinds of life saving tech we don’t even require (like Intelligent Speed Assistance). These are questions about politics and culture and that’s always been where the trouble is with traffic safety.

Anyway, I’d like us to have a good system, turn a page. I think the way we manage all this right now is important. It’s important that we get it right.

In Texas, I was happy to learn, it’s not a complete free-for-all. It was at first, now Texas has some basic legislation that allows gives the state discretion to revoke authority from companies. The safety advocates I work with and trust said they thought Texas’ legislation was not bad. There are some transparency requirements. I think that’s very important.

I don’t necessarily blame Texas for allowing Waymo etc., either. There is something to be said for the potential safety and mobility benefits warranting some risk and the need for some experimentation in the early stages. Texas cities are very spread out and mobility is a big challenge for people. Also Texas’s safety record is pretty bad.

I also don’t really blame New York City for being a little more cautious. New York City is different from other cities and has been more cautious for example about other modes. Like they don’t allow e-scooter companies in the city etc.

I also don’t blame blue states for considering the impacts to the millions of Uber and Lyft drivers who are legitimate stakeholders here. I’m honestly sort of offended by ostensibly left wing people who act like this isn’t something we should be concerned about. (This is the kind of stuff that makes me NOT wonder how the Dems lost the working class in the last election.)

It doesn’t mean I think New York should never allow Waymo. Just that it should use its leverage to win strong public protections, the best possible deal for the public. I don’t necessarily think in NYC that’s no strings-attached, Waymo’s everywhere. They’re trying to get cars OUT of lower Manhattan. That’s kind of what congestion pricing was all about.

Some kind of referee is needed here. Even if Waymo is the answer to our prayers, safety wise, the market could include competitors (cough cough Tesla) who are not as scrupulous. We need some kind of quality control authority.

To me it seems like it should be a government agency, like an NTSB. They play a role like that with respect to plane crashes. They conduct investigations and can demand information from airlines or trucking companies, almost like a police investigation. But I suppose some trusted “ratings agency” or third party, like we have with banks could also work maybe.

Waymo, these companies, just have so much money. That’s one of my concerns. Will the public be able to ensure fair treatment in a political system so dominated by money against a company that is basically minting it? It’s also why I cringe when I see journalists that seem to be doing PR for Waymo.

When I was in Texas I was curious what people thought about Waymos. I heard mixed things.

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Our kids attended pre-school together for a while. We got to know each other a little bit because every day we would arrive at the back door of the school at pickup. She and another mom and I usually hung around after school and let the kids play on the playground.

I had recently quit my job to finish my first book. I was planning to start a business when it was finished. So my schedule allowed for that.

The moms and the kids got to know each other. We were building community, investing time in getting to know each other. We would talk. This one mom, she was visually impaired. She couldn’t read real well. Couldn’t really use a computer. Sometimes she would ask for help filling out a school form. But she was faithful about bringing her daughter to school and she was a sweetheart. She had attended the school herself as a child, she told me and lived just a few blocks away.

Then one day, without warning, I never saw her again. The school closed for covid and did not open again until very late the following year. A full year later, when the school reopened, my son only returned for a few days before I yanked him for another school that was offering 5 day a week in person instruction (I was lucky to be able to find). (The school we had been attending was only offering kids two days a week in person learning, which meant me paying $700 a month to put my son — who’d missed a year of school — in daycare three days a week where he would “learn” on Zoom. It was truly the dumbest and most insulting thing in the world. The daycare teachers weren’t immune to covid! In fact they were offered vaccines later than K-12 teachers.)

Anyway, both my kids remain at the school I transferred them to, a charter school that is also in the neighborhood. For a time, every day, I would see those moms, those kids. And then like that, we never saw each other again. It was so disruptive academically, of course, but also socially for kids, for parents. Had I known the school was going to be closed for a year — something I would have never in my wildest dreams have imagined at the time — I would have said goodbye, gotten this woman’s number at least.

The other playground mom, I had known from before. We were very close at the time. We celebrated birthdays together. I would watch her kids from time to time when she was in a pinch. She left the school even sooner than I did. (She had to work in person and quickly enrolled her kid in the neighborhood catholic school when it announced it would be open in the fall, unlike our school.) Later she moved to a distant suburb and we have mostly lost touch.

The school, our preschool, wasn’t far from my house. At the time it was newly constructed. We attended the first year it was open. I was trying to recruit other neighborhood parents to enroll. Even then, it was under enrolled. Even the free, all day preschool program, which had three (as required legally because of student-teacher ratios) college-educated teachers who were deeply wonderful, had about 10 open spots. I couldn’t believe it. But the district didn’t advertise it very well, and made it really hard to enroll.

Anyway, that school we attended is one of 29 now being “closed” as part of a big restructuring the school district is taking on. 400 employees including more than 100 teachers are being laid off. And apparently more cuts are coming thanks to a big looming budget crunch. That’s despite the district’s perfect record in passing levies — big ones, emergency ones — over the 15 years I’ve lived here.

The kids who remained at that school we attended will be transferred to another, which is actually closer to my house. Two relatively high performing schools outside the neighborhood are going to be merged into the school we attended. The name will be changed.

In Cleveland, I always felt like, there wasn’t a lot of focus on the school system. Politicians rarely brought it up, except maybe to offer some very careful, union-approved bromides. The union was really the only game in town that had any political juice as far as the schools went. I could never understand why they went so hard for the extended school closures. I felt pretty certain the long term consequence would be something like this. It seemed to be the result of lingering resentments. But it was extremely caustic imo. It’s not clear, however, this financial crisis the district is facing would be any different if they had handled covid better though, I guess. (Although hiring teachers with one-time covid-relief money from Biden was a classic self-own.)

The current superintendent and school board is obviously taking a bunch of heat now. I was watching a meeting last night and it was awful. But the people who are most responsible, in my opinion, are the former superintendent and the former union president, are both out the door. The last superintendent took a “golden parachute” (imo) high-paying government job created specifically for him. He for sure knew what was coming when he did. The former union president was recently voted out by her peers. The only thing that surprised me about that is that it didn’t happen years earlier.

Closing 29 schools is a big deal. Even though it seems unavoidable in some cases (the district was operating some high schools that were 25 percent enrolled, for eg), the fallout from that just blows my mind. I feel terrible for the kids and teachers ands families that were invested in those schools. The social capital that will be lost is incalculable. Schools are a key building block of community. Kids need stability to learn and this is chaotic, shuffling thousands of kids around like playing cards.

The district though, its back’s against the wall. It’s not just management failures like their mishandling of covid. They have demographic headwinds — a shrinking number of school age children — to deal with. That is aggravated in Cleveland and other major cities by policies that have catered to young, childless singles and couples rather than families with school age kids.

Other districts around the country are going through the same thing. This is the new normal. Boston is looking at 400 layoffs in its school system as enrollment declines. The district has 2,000 fewer enrolled students than last year. Seattle was planning to close 21 schools — about a quarter of its total. After a pushback campaign, they reduced it to four. Portland is planning to close 5-10 schools. Oregon’s 10 largest school districts have shed 7 percent of their students since 2019.

I wonder if, without anyone local openly acknowledging it, Cleveland is on the path of Detroit or even New Orleans.

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I absolutely hate that. I guess I’m weird, and maybe it’s online people being jerks online, but I consider it nice to see kids in public.

To be successful online, you have to be against someone or something. I’m willing to plant a flag here. I am against those people who complain online about their close encounter with a child who wasn’t perfectly behaved. Good grief! Grow up.

When it comes to “kids these days,” what’s wrong with them, personally, I think a lot! Mental health struggles! Depression, anxiety, obesity, chronic absenteeism. Pretty serious stuff! The stuff Jonathan Haidt writes about, and the Surgeon General. I agree with them that it’s that bad and worse.

Where I differ from (some) other people is A. who is to blame. B. what is the cause.

The reflex I see a lot is to blame parents. A lot of people are just like “gentle parenting” caused all this. I don’t think many parents actually use gentle parenting, outside of a few very wealthy and fashionable areas. Also these mental health issues are a global phenomenon that predates that whole trend, even though I guess I can acknowledge some of the critiques of that practice are valid. (I honestly don’t even know a ton about gentle parenting and never knowingly subscribed to much of any of it.)

I think people gravitate toward that explanation — deficient parents! — for a few reasons. One, it allows you to be judgmental (and if you’re a parent smug about your own superior parenting skills.) “If only these dummies millennial parents did this one easy thing everything would be better.” Hard disagree. (Go back two generations in my family and certain parents were alcoholics who let toddlers run around the neighborhood all day in nothing but a diaper. This is who we’re idealizing? Come on!)

Secondly, this defective parents diagnosis doesn’t require us to change anything. At least if we don’t have kids. We can go back to eating brunches, while all the children are locked in their houses playing Fortnight, without ever being disturbed. As God intended.

What’s actually best for kids, their health, never comes into focus online I feel like. It’s only when adults are impacted by children’s behavior that anyone even cares. Very bad and weird imo. Symptomatic of the wider problem. Kids being excluded and depressed and, as a result, maladjusted.

I’m waist deep in book writing now, about 40,000 words in. And looking at a lot of this stuff. I’m going slightly crazy, so bear with me. But I want to lay out kinda my thesis, and the way I think about this stuff.

Here goes:

#1.

Kids should be treated as legitimate users of public space with their own set of rights. (Right now it’s treated as conditional too often.) It can’t be seen as some kind of gross norm violation if a kid is walking down a street, or eating with their parents in a restaurant. Kids cannot be properly socialized by their parents alone.

#2.

Children cannot be expected to be properly regulated unless they’re getting the required minimum of 60 minutes of physical activity a day and very few are. The average is 20 minutes. This is a systems level problem. We’ve designed exercise out of everyday life, out of children’s lives, and that is a big, big developmental problem that requires a public response.

#3.

Parenting is very hard and no one knows exactly what they’re doing. The child of an average parent should be able to thrive. Individual parent heroics (car line + travel sports et al. strong discipline whatever) are poor compensation for the humble developmental needs kids are being denied: freedom and safety to roam around their homes and play independently with other children. Parents alone cannot close this gap, even though many are killing themselves trying. Even they get raked over the coals for being too “helicopter” or too indulgent or whatever. Parents cannot win.

Kids would be less depressed, healthier, if they were walking or biking to school, for example. And it wouldn’t be that hard, imo, to make that a little safer and more acceptable to parents. It would benefit parents a lot too, if we could get out act together a little on that. Even riding school buses. Anything but hours in the back seat alone (or apart from classmates).

Kids also need a few public spaces, small parks etc, they can have a sense of ownership over and where they can gather. They need a sense of community and belonging and some age-appropriate independence.

We ALL need this stuff and I don’t think many of us are doing that well right now social emotionally. But if you’re an adult at least you can hop in a car and be welcomed practically anywhere you bring your wallet. Children, on the other hand, just find themselves trapped at home, isolated. No where to go. Especially lower income ones.

I think we underestimate the number of kids who are spending huge, huge portions of time alone on screens and what that does to a person, especially a child. It’d be too hard to look squarely at. Part of that is the addictiveness of screens, 100%. But partly, it’s the lack of good alternatives. Regardless, kids who spend huge blocks of time along on screens are not going to be able to perform well in social settings and academically in many cases. It’s like we’re trying to give them ADHD.

We should approach these problems, IMO, with a spirit of generosity, toward children and parents, who have a wide range of resources they bring to the project. We’re jumping to condemn, and not asking, what is needed? What would make your life easier and better? I think it can be very cruel. Children remain out of focus, parents on the defensive. I don’t know why but we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to condemn and judge parents. In our own minds, we’re all the most fabulous parents in history. And we will stop there if nobody forces the issue.

Last week was Earth Day and my daughter’s birthday. For the last few years I’ve been organizing a “bike bus” to school to mark the occasion.

I honestly, feel bad that I haven’t made it a more regular thing, the bike bus. It makes a lot of practical sense for us. There’s a whole group of kids coming from my block to the same school, and a lot of days, they’re all arriving by car, each with their own family. That routine, once established, is really hard to break. It becomes automatic. Even my kids, my husband has gotten in the habit of dropping off, have gotten pretty accustomed to it. (They take the bus home. In the winter, anyway, that made a ton of sense.)

Anyway, the one-day bike bus was relatively successful. A few families went well out of their way to come and I appreciated it. It is a friendly thing to do to join in something like that. I know it’s hard in the mornings, the morning routine. And the reason we haven’t done something cute and different like this is because so many families have their heads down and are just trying to get everyone there on time, which is legit difficult.

Right now I’m writing about the school car line and how terrible and unstoppable it is in so many ways, in my book that I’m working on. I don’t really blame parents, at least not fully. There are so many factors “pushing” parents into that choice, including the fact that we’ve (powerful government authorities) let streets get out-of-control dangerous.

Still, it’s depressing to confront how overwhelming the trend toward driving kids to school is, all the negative outcomes, for kids and parents and even schools. Just in terms of time, and cost and, most importantly probably, the way it keeps kids and parents isolated and apart from each other and the wider community.

Anyway, it was a beautiful day, the day we biked. One thing I noticed is it made afterschool more social, active and fun. The parents who did the afternoon pickup, three of us, sat around talking. The kids were able to bike a little in the parking lot. It’s a pretty good spot for kids to bike, once the giant car line clears away. All of us parents were lucky to have the flexibility to do that.

When we rode home, we had a couple extra kids along. And they went directly to the playground. Whereas normally, they might come inside, turn on the TV for at least a half hour — till I yell at them to stop. It got me thinking about how the car line establishes this whole “natural order” and routine. The kids return home alone, sedentary. And then are delivered into a house without other kids, into the waiting arms of screens.

The aloneness of the commute turns into a whole alone afternoon maybe. Whereas, a walk home or a bike home might result in a side quest adventure, meetings with friends and neighbors. All these patterns get established, and they’re hard to break. I think we don’t want to look squarely at the outcome almost. It’s dark.

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The overwhelming relief I feel when spring finally arrives in Cleveland is hard for me to describe. Late winter is such a difficult time here.

All the sudden, the first nice day, everyone comes outdoors. People you didn’t know existed come out of their houses. They’re biking. They’re porch sitting. They’re shooting hoops on clumsily balanced basketball hoops. Everyone is absolutely elated.

I recently learned, in Japan, they recognize 72 micro-seasons. And this particular one, lasting a few weeks at most, is otherworldly.

To watch everything transform, painfully slowly and then all at once, is legitimately amazing. It’s too much! I’m bowled over. I get why people have sung and wrote poetry about this forever.

My daughter was born at this time of year, and her middle name was inspired by this magical period. Right around mid-to-late April, every plant starts flowering at once. This is the time she was born. The difficulty of pregnancy, my impatience for it to be over, followed by the birth of a beloved new child, to me, seemed comparable.

The last week or so, I have been going on long walks and just staring at everything almost stupefied by its beauty. The trees, they look like something someone would make up for a fairy tale. It’s hard for me to believe this is real.

It’s a cliche, I guess, to “stop and smell the roses thing” for a reason. But that is really so important. I find a tree like this now, and I have to stop, stand under it and gaze at the blue sky above through the petals.

What is so (I can’t believe I’m using this term, but) almost spiritual for me, is noticing details. Roots that spill over the sidewalks, that’s HUGE in my neighborhood. I know it’s probably bad for trees (blah blah blah) but it is THE MOST charming thing I have ever seen.

Sometimes it’s the way the light hits a brick wall. Dated religious iconography. A classic form of public art. I have always loved it.

A random pop of color. A stranger’s perfect style choices, layered over one another.

When I walk, especially I love to look at the plants, how they have changed. Lately, everything is so green, so colorful, some soft, some vibrant. My neighbors are great gardeners. What a pro-social hobby. I get so much enjoyment out of seeing what they’ve come up with.

The neighborhood sometimes seems to be blessed in some kind of way that runs deep into the soil.

I don’t know if we’re all just so online now, that I go out into the real world, and I feel overwhelmed by how wonderful it is. It’s sad, I guess, that my first instinct is to photograph it and bring them over to the internet, which just cannot properly relay the experience.

It’s not the same without the birds making their noises. The familiar mailman making his way through a yard. The dog walkers doing their rounds. The shadows shifting in the wind.

Mr. Rogers was really on to something I think. About the neighborhood as a social unit. The beauty and fundamental value of those relationships. The familiar buildings part of a bigger, more important unit.

The neighborhood is the scale we were meant to matter at.

My neighborhood has very nice sidewalks. Which I think facilitate a neighborliness, Mr. Rogers style, combined with the big front porches. Our ancestors, they understood certain social needs so much better than we do now.

The style now is anti-social. Garages that swallow people into private worlds. Houses oriented to the backyard. The highest modern real estate value being “privacy.”

I grew up in a new neighborhood, which was built on a cornfield. I don’t think you could recreate this experience there (although I haven’t been back lately). It’s sorta like Jane Jacobs said, about the need for organic small-scale places, built over time, cooperatively. No single entity exerting too much influence. So that the environment itself is democratically developed, varied, interesting.

You need that mix of old and new. The big trees. Little surprises everywhere.

Even things that are arguably ugly, I find, have their own charms. Maybe it’s just the dopamine, I have been missing, from the sun.

See how the light is glowing in the tiny leaves?!? Right there? Incredible! I don’t know if there’s a God, but I can definitely see why people believe; The wonder of nature is just so overwhelming sometimes.

I think that is generally accepted, but mostly in a hike-in-the-forest kind of way (which I also love). There becomes this purism about that, where we treat man made things as some kind of pollution.

I don’t see it that way. Done right, they make things even more perfect. The things people have made, side by side, with natural elements, when it all comes together. A church building and school fronting the street. Massive trees whose arms interlock with electrical wires. A squirrel tightroping one to the other and back. At its best, there can be a really beautiful harmony.

Anyway, I hope you are enjoying spring, and some nice walks. And as you walk, the flowers are opening their faces to greet you. And you heart is full of love for everyone you pass. And your place within the whole beautiful continuity reveals itself simply and everything for a moment is just as it should be.

Every once in a while, in Cleveland, I see a burnt orange Chevy Cruise from circa 2013 driving around and I sigh to myself. Or a Ford Focus with their tiny little butts, about a third the size of the average car on the roads these days.

Those were the days. You could still buy an affordable car from the Detroit big three. AND a lot of people did! So much has changed since then — car wise. IMO most of it for the worse.

In that era, the Chevy Cruise was made at the Lordstown plant outside Youngstown, Ohio, your textbook struggling rust belt city. That city relied so much on the revenue those jobs pumped into the economy. I remember, when I briefly lived there, the sitting mayor said the whole area would be devastated if the plant closed. That was frightening to me, even though I only lived there a little while, working as a newspaper reporter.

A few years later the plant did, indeed, close. GM phased out the car entirely, along with most of its affordable sedans (only its luxury brand Cadillac continues to sell sedans). The Cruise had previously been the Cobalt, another cheap, unremarkable car that just got people where they needed to go. The kind of car a hairdresser in her mid-20s might have bought for herself, financed at a reasonable rate and not worried too much about after that.

The Cruise was the last in a line of 50 years of these kinds of cars. At their peak, in 2014, they were selling hundreds of thousands of them a year. Back then, people weren’t so anti color, which is why you see that era-specific burnt orange. People were not only buying Cruises in that era, they were buying them in fun and flashy colors.

Nobody buys a colorful sedan from an American company anymore (and yes I know they all manufacture all over, but still.)

General Motors all but stopped making sedans in favor of higher-profit SUVs a few years later. The Cruise, which sold new for sub $18,000 in 2018, was out. The Trax and Trailblazer were in. To be fair, these vehicles do still have pretty low starting MSRP. Low 20s. These are forgettable SUVs blobs, offering few advantages over the Cruise, in my opinion. They handle worse probably. These high-riding vehicles, somehow that got sold as a good thing.

With respect to SUVs, American auto companies, in particular, I think were a little boxed in. They had lost their dominance in sedans to Japanese automakers. Everyone thought their cars were bad — at least compared to the Japanese companies. According to an auto writer I trust, the quality really wasn’t very different from the Japanese competitors at this point, but the narrative was fixed in Americans’ minds. For some reason, that same sort of snobbery didn’t apply so much to their trucks or SUVs, which was where the real money was anyway.

The New York Times and other outlets have been weighing in on the affordability crisis affecting the auto industry and American consumers, who are increasingly looking at 60 (72!?) month loans at 7 percent and $800 a month payments to afford new cars, which average $50k. The Detroit Free Press says right now it’s hard to even find a 3-year-old USED car under $20,000.

Back in 2014, there were still three NEW vehicles on the market that consumers could purchase for sub-$20,000. And they made up 11 percent of auto sales. This included “compliance” cars like the Chevy Spark, which was phased out in 2022. At the time, it started at less than $14,000.

Anyway, I don’t blame consumers for being pissed off. I think they’ve been done a disservice by the auto industry.

Anyway, around 2020, 2022, the world moved on. The tiny cheap cars were annihilated. Consumers LOVED SUVs. Or so all the VERY SERIOUS car commentators said. And I have to admit, it was wild how cars that were perennial top sellers like the Camry and Civic kind of lost their mojo around that time and even earlier. The normie consumer now wanted a Rav4, not a Corolla, never mind that the Rav4 was basically just a tall Corolla, at least initially.

Consumers wanted bigger and taller cars. This is something I have always struggled with. When I was working on my first book, I read this late-1990s era book called “High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV.” (It’s very good.) Now, to be fair, High and Mighty, which was written by the former New York Times Detroit Bureau Chief Keith Bradsher, was about first generation SUVs — the kind of SUVs that were built on pickup frames like the original 1990s era Ford Explorer. These were the kind of SUVs whose wheels randomly exploded and then had a habit of flipping over on highway embankments and killing their occupants. Think of the famous Simpson’s skit: Canyoneroooooo!

The critique of SUVs at the time had some resonance with the public. Environmentalists hated SUVs. Bradsher’s book reveals that Detroit automakers KNOW the SUVs they’re selling the public are crap. They can’t corner for shit. They roll over a ton. They have HUGE blind spots. In the back. In the front! In the pillars by the wide of the windshield, which totally obscure pedestrians when drivers are making left turns. 😬

STILL, auto companies were making a fortune on them. Even Honda and Toyota get in on it. The Honda Pilot, WTF? The 2019 version looks like it was purposely designed to obscure as much as possible of the road as possible to unfortunate driver stuck behind them. Everyone just had to adjust to these kinds of cars being everywhere, blocking out the sun, threatening to crush you.

What Bradsher says is auto executives, they were tapping into people’s weird military cosplay fantasies etc., pretty dark stuff, violent impulses etc. They’re selling cars that are more dangerous, less efficient, and in some ways outright anti-social. Big menacing grilles are sort of the hallmark feature. Boy, has that gotten out of control.

(All this, just to prove you’re not gay.)

Anyway, after the Explorer scandal in the late 1990s, SUV the trend dies down a little. But the first wave of SUVs influences car makers forever. Everyone forgets after a little while about the Explorer thing. This new second wave of SUVs — crossovers — that came along later, started really ramping up in 2005 or so, were admittedly not that bad. More like cars. They were unibody, rather than slapped on these clunky pickup truck frames.

STILL. Some of Bradsher’s points, his critique stands. For one, NOBODY drives off road in the U.S. Nobody owns land like that. And people who do own land don’t want random jerks driving their cars all over it. Everyone’s buying these “sport utility” vehicles for adventures to the Costco parking lot. MAYBE they go camping twice a year. Or moms like the trunk space, for dogs or big bulky strollers.

Now it’s like we were born driving SUVs. But until the 1990s, they were basically unheard of. Prior to that, the only SUVs are like Land Rovers used literal “landed gentry” — like British royalty — on their hunting grounds. When average consumers started buying them, they were aping that style and privilege. It was a really revolutionary change in the U.S. auto industry. This is when, the auto industry, in my opinion, started to get really weird. They seize on this. The whole vehicle market is transformed. It didn’t make a lot of practical sense but nobody cared.

Try to find a station wagon now. You can’t! Except in a niche luxury brand like Volvo. Practical family cars, I get. Sports cars, on some level, I even get. At least they’re fun to drive! A lot of the crossover SUVs don’t even really have any additional useable space compared to a sedan. All the extra space is in this weird leg area. They seat the same number of people as the sedans they replaced — less if you include the rear seating in some of the station wagons that have disappeared. (Although there are a few more three row full size SUVs to be fair.)

To be fair, again, many smaller crossovers are basically sedans. There’s a real Kinsey scale between trucks on one end and sedans on the other when it comes to SUVs. It’s not binary. Some of the bigger ones are also basically minivans.

Regardless, the market had spoken, so to say. Consumers liked SUVs, yes sure. But also automakers companies worked very hard to sell SUVs to the public. These companies are ENORMOUS advertisers with huge range. Everyone likes to imagine they aren’t influenced by auto ads — but they are! The level of conformity we see now in the auto market is almost unbelievable.

Crossovers became this big sweet spot. In many cases, automakers could sell a crossover SUV for $10,000 more than the sedan it was based on. That was almost pure profit, since the crossover SUVs weren’t much more expensive to make.

Tiny working-man pickups were phased out as well. The gravy train was in the $75,000 fully loaded full-size luxury pickup. KING RANCH, whatever that means, for an additional $10k.

Car makers auto dealers, this was a big giant upsell. They could get people to pay more for bigger cars.

People act like it’s almost embarrassing now but to drive anything but an SUV. That’s how car companies get over on your though. (Don’t you want to be “sporty” while you sit on a freeway in suburban middle America?) Regardless, you can hardly blame consumers at this point. Even if you WANTED to buy a sedan, there’s none really left in the market.

Automakers were sneaky about all this. Sometimes, they would stop making affordable sedans just to kind of funnel more consumers into the higher profit SUV version.

Along comes the Rav4, Toyota’s answer to the Camry in the crossover era. The Rav4 isn’t even a particularly objectionable (by my weirdo standards) SUV. Toyota has definitely perfected it. It’s not even that much more expensive or more gas guzzling at this stage than a sedan.

Still! It makes me sad. Why? I think the Prius was a more groundbreaking, more efficient and better car in a lot of ways. The Rav4 was a step backward in efficiency. The Prius — that hatchback form — could haul a remarkable amount of stuff too. The whole shape of that car — that is the peak form for A. fuel efficiency B. spatial efficiency. C. Safety to pedestrians.

Had Toyota continued to build on what it had going there, sigh… I don’t know. Since the Prius, that company has not been a big innovator, imo, especially when it comes to fuel efficiency. In fact, it sided with Trump famously, a few years ago, in his bid to eliminate fuel efficiency standards. 😡

If Toyota continues with its innovation re: the Prius, the way it did in the 1990s, probably millions of barrels of oil are saved. Hundreds of injuries and deaths are avoided. Instead, they shift to the Rav4, which is functionally similar but has the SUV snout, glaring face, which it turns out, is no bueno for pedestrians.

Toyota phased out some of its Prius models so it could sell more Rav4s. (At least they’re going to make all Rav4s (conventional) hybrids soon, which is a big enough deal, they sell so many of them, that it will positively affect the efficiency of the entire U.S. vehicle fleet.)

Not all crossovers are as inoffensive as the Rav4 though. The larger Toyota 4 Runner is triggering for me. Why? Well because its Grille looks eerily similar to the “punisher” logo? That kind of mean, scowling very square grille came in style and there was no looking back. The rise of this kind of vehicle shape is one of the key trends that has led to the huge jump in pedestrian deaths in the U.S. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, vehicles with that kind of flat “aggressive” front end, are 45 percent more likely to kill a pedestrian than the more sloping traditional kind, a la the Cruise, Prius. 😭

For a long time, federal agencies like the Federal Highway Administration knew SUVs were killing pedestrians. And they just kind of ignored it. They continued to scold pedestrians with these unbelievably patronizing messages reminding them to “look both ways” and “wear bright clothing,” while they were sitting on research showing SUVs were two or three times more likely to kill pedestrians when they struck them.

These agencies that had the authority to keep the public safe, never regulated U.S. vehicles for impacts to pedestrians, the way they require all kinds of bells and whistles like airbags and anti-lock brakes to protect passengers. And then pedestrian deaths rose 80 percent over a period of a little more than a decade. My book about it was published in 2020, and then they jumped another 20 percent during the pandemic.

More than 7,000 people are killed that way in the U.S. now (about double the 1990s low). By comparison only about 3,500 people are killed every year by fires.

That punisher grille on the 4Runner, research has shown is in itself is more likely to kill someone it strikes. And keep in mind, all this was basically FASHION. That’s what Bradsher said. There was no real mechanical reason the 4 Runner had to have a big old snout. People just liked that look. And they liked it, in part, because it was mean and aggressive. Gah. Dark stuff.

One of the stories that inspired the first book I wrote, about pedestrian deaths was a story about a little boy. He was playing in the street with his neighbors and siblings in Fort Lauderdale. And the driver of one of these kind of generic mid-sized SUVs drove right over him. She reported she had no idea she had struck him. Just continued driving.

Anyway, the boy’s family witnesses this crash, chases her down, pulls her out of the car and starts basically attacking her and beating her up. Police never get involved though. Because they believe the woman when she says she couldn’t see the boy. And I just thought: 🤯. Insane that these dumb SUV blobs have these big forward blind spots now that can render a whole child invisible at close range! And this was sold to the public as some kind of improvement. “You could see the road better!” which did have a certain logic once everyone was driving ones of these bulky things. Then it got to the point where a kid (who knows how many kids?) was mowed over and everyone shrugged. GROAN.

Anyway, when it comes to cost: SUVs are a big factor. Cars are too big! They aren’t aerodynamic or very safe, in many cases. Car companies have gotten away with selling consumers on some features that are anti social (inefficient, unsafe). And they did it to make money. And they manipulated the public into paying more for all of that.

Another thing: Cars today are also overpowered. I used to know this kid in high school. Kind of guy everyone loved. His parents bought him a Geo Metro. We call joked about it. But it is HONESTLY the perfect car for a high school boy. Don’t buy a high school boy — the most dangerous drivers — a pickup truck or a sports car FFS. They’re just going to kill themselves or someone else.

It got 54 mpg on highways in the 1990s! GAH. Bring back the Geo Metro! I don’t care what anyone says, 1990s cars were GOATED. The roads used to be full of these underpowered cars that could barely get up to 65. That was positive for safety! Don’t let any of these macho car guys try to convince you speeding is good for safety. A complete fantasy!

What kinds of cars do we want the growing legions of octogenarians driving in the U.S.? Do we want them in punisher logo vehicles with big forward blind zones?! NO! We want them in these tiny little harmless people scaled cars. But thanks to the PUNISHER cars, everyone’s too afraid to drive these anymore. Sigh.

Meanwhile, there has been a “horsepower arms race” that has eaten up a lot of the efficiency gains that would have otherwise been a product of improving technology. Used to be a 100 or 200 horsepower cars was normal. Now, they’re less so.

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When my dad was a kid, he had five brothers and sisters. He lived on the same street as his grandmother and could walk there. She helped care for him, cooked hosted parties.

This was the catholic way of raising kids at the time. I am in awe of this way of life, the degree of interconnectedness. I am also fascinated with how quickly it disappeared. My dad had 50 first cousins. They all lived nearby. They hung out together and grew up together and are still friends, friendly.

My dad’s family now is completely scattered. That generation of cousins, his age, almost all of them left Toledo and the other NW Ohio small towns where they lived. I don’t know how much that is due to the fact that Toledo’s economy totally collapsed in the 1970s, and basically continued doing so for 50 years. And how much is due to the fact that modern folks just don’t live that way anymore.

I’m nostalgic for all that even though my own experience was totally different. I grew up with one sibling more than 100 miles from any relatives. That being said, I grew up in a suburb, kindergarten through 12th grade, same suburb. So it’s not like I grew up among strangers, but it was very, very different just in a single generation. My mom, I know struggled a little without that support, from her parents and in-laws.

Some things are out of your control, when it comes to creating a “village” or a functional community around which to raise a family. You can’t really help it if your entire metro area’s economy implodes, right? Here’s the BIG number one rule to having a “village” imo:

#1. You gotta be rooted in place.

If your goal from Day 1 is to have a village — and if we had better values that really would be more people’s goal — probably the best thing to do is never leave your hometown. I know it’s deeply uncool to say that, but it’s true. Live near your mom or your elementary school best friend, I’m not kidding: automatic village. This is a good way to live. You are never going to be able to replace your relationship with your mom — unless your mom really sucked, I guess. But I can’t relate to that.

NOW, this way of living is not for everyone. I don’t live in my hometown! If you already moved away, there’s not much you can do about this. BUT one thing I want to say is, you really can’t just pack up and move every 3 years or so and expect a functional “village” to materialize around you — unless you’re some kind of social savant.

I’ve been in the house I currently live in, in Cleveland, for 16 years now at least. I’ve kinda lost count. We have a small yard. We kinda added on — finished our attic, but we never “upgraded.” And we’re (probably) NEVER going to move now, because our kids’ best friends live right across the street — and that will root your butt right in place.

There are sacrifices that come with being part of a village. But having an additional bedroom or whatever — to each his own, but if you prioritize that over close social ties in a community, you shouldn’t be surprised if your “bench” of people who are able to help and support you is lacking.

I so want to be clear, I am sympathetic to moms and families that feel disconnected, lonely, unsupported. I’ve definitely been in that position. Our way of life doesn’t make deep community connection easy or automatic. This isn’t going to be me dunking on lonely moms, telling them it’s all their fault. My aim is to help.

Even if you’ve already moved away from the people you grew up with, the GOOD NEWS is, having kids sets you up, in my opinion, to build a village nicely. BUT the #1 rule is, you gotta be rooted in place. You gotta really commit to a house and neighborhood.

I give myself and my husband credit, for picking a house and a neighborhood and sticking with it, part of this is also …

#2. Be lucky. When we moved here, there were already kind of neighborhood and community heroes that had cultivated a sense of neighborliness and a social scaffolding where we didn't have to start from zero. They would, for example, host Christmas pot lucks in their houses, invite the whole neighborhood, even the kids. That kind of social trust, again, feels like a holdover from another era. But regardless, they did this.

In part because of that work they did, the neighborhood has improved and is thriving, which leads to us not being dissatisfied and wanting to move away (not that I haven’t been tempted from time to time). I think these things are connected! So part of our having landed ourselves a “village” is dumb luck. But another thing we/I did that probably helped is …

#3. Live a highly localized lifestyle. Again, this is not possible for everyone, but for me was a good trick to building a lot of close local ties.

So for about a decade, we only had one car. I was walking everywhere, a lot of times, schlepping kids. I was choosing the closest daycare and the closest pediatrician for these reasons. And I was SUPER lucky to be able to do that FWIW. Having a doctor’s office you can walk to, just a couple blocks away — GAME CHANGING when you’re in that stage of pregnancy where they’re making you visit every week and you’re still trying to hold down a job.

But anyway, we weren’t driving 25 miles to find a better daycare, or seek out specialists. Again, that’s partly luck. Had we needed to, I would have driven my kids to a specialist. But in keeping close to home, we were running into neighborhoods, building ties with community institutions, basically deepening our investment in our neighborhood.

I have written before about biking my son to basketball and running into a mom I know. And then getting a chance to sit there are talk with her. My neighborhood is like that. I don’t know if it’s just people banding together, because this is Cleveland and we’re forced to rely on each other a little, but there are SO many folks that are just two or three degrees of separation from a friend I already have. And when opportunity strikes, we can become closer. Like for example, if our kids had played week after week on the same basketball team, me and this woman might have gone from being acquaintances to friends.

Here’s another rule I think is important:

#4. Be friends with your neighbors. I remember not too long ago this very popular Substack writer wrote a viral essay recently about how you should move close to your friends. And she had packed up and moved to some tiny island to live near her friend. I remember thinking: 😬. The reason I felt that way is because I thought this placed so little emphasis on community. Leave everyone you know to be around a single person? That puts so much pressure on the friendship. 😬

To each his own but at this point, I’m not packing up my family and moving for a reason like that. We’d lose too much. We’d never be able to recreate the social connections we have where we are — or it would take FOREVER. We’re stuck, for better or worse (I think mostly better).

Anyway, a lot of the people I am close with socially live REALLY close to me, as a result of all the stuff I mentioned earlier. Frequently, where I live, I go to one or two parties over the weekend and I can walk to both of them. Like sometimes I carry a dish, and I don’t even cover it because it’s not even worth it. Because I’m friends with my neighbors. In fact, if you don’t live within a couple miles of me — it’s going to strain our friendship, hate to say it. This is a great, great thing though for me.

Kids, I’m working on a book about this, lead VERY localized lives, or at least traditionally they did, before we started shlepping them around a 50 mile radius for tennis lessons and trampoline party birthdays (boo!). Anyway, it just makes sense: Ideally kids are going to be best friends with the kids who live across the street. Mine were! This, IMO, should be encouraged. I basically forced my kids to make friends with the kids across the street, and I have zero regrets about it! My mom did the same for me and I still keep in touch with some of those people from 30+ years ago. Anyway, the neighbor kids: They love each other. I love that for them.

Here’s another rule about creating a village:

#5. It takes a lot of social trust, especially when kids are involved. And that takes a lot of time to cultivate. Adults have all these unwritten rules about how they’re supposed to behave around friends, and many of these rules frankly sabotage the whole thing. But kids have none of that. They knock on each other’s doors for spontaneous hangs. They don’t need an activity, they make one up and sit around being silly together — THE BEST.

Anyway, adults are dummies about this stuff, but the kids, they will kind of draw you together. If my daughter hears one of the neighbors is having a bonfire or a cookout, AND SHE WILL HEAR ABOUT IT, she is going to drag my butt whether I am officially invited or not. (Usually I am, ha.) And a backyard hang with neighbors and kids — this is a top tier life experience. Whenever I get a chance to do this with the folks I live around, who I have gotten to know over years, in part because of our kids’ relationships, I just have to pinch myself.

#6. Be deliberate about this

I’m going to wind this up. But I mentioned this is partly luck but partly me doggedly forcing this to happen. Now it was LUCKY that families with kids my kids age moved right across the street from us, SO LUCKY. One of the best things that ever happened to me, I’m not exaggerating.

But also, I was very active in encouraging my kids to become friends with those kids. We have them over for sleepovers. We host movie nights in the backyard and sometimes the parents don’t even come, it’s just the kids. It’s annoying sometimes, but great, having kids running in and out of your house all the time.

In fact, I am always looking for other kids who they could be friends with, especially if they are in walking distance. I’ll get in touch with the mom, set something up. I want both kids to not only have one or two friends they can walk to but at least three. So that way if their favorite friend is on vacation or whatever, they aren’t moping around all day playing Roblox.

Once you have the start of something like a village, it builds on itself. The returns are enormous. You can build an approximation of something like this through a lot of hard work that’s not so tied to a place I suppose. But you’re going to drive yourself crazy. Building a sustained village, for raising kids, takes a lot of stability in a place.

I’m excited to see social media companies facing a huge lawsuit over the harms they have caused children.

I basically agree with the critics of these platforms, people like Jonathan Haidt, that say they knowingly ruined kids’ mental health. Every day, another horror story comes to light about Roblox or Chat GPT or SnapChat, and I think we’ve barely scratched the surface.

FWIW I also think these companies destroyed journalism (this is the industry I used to work in) and undermined democracy AND made a hefty contribution to the whole country being lonely, depressed and at each others’ throats all the time. If it turns out Zuckerberg himself was running interference for Epstein using a special pedo island he created in Meta, I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised.

One thing I think is interesting though, and maybe I’m partly a tiny, tiny, bit responsible for this, is that social media companies have never really faced a lot of scrutiny about one of the worst things they’ve done: for sure killed a lot of people on the roads.

One thing tech companies have going for them here is that we don’t have great information about this. That’s because people who cause crashes while they’re checking their Facebook notifications generally aren’t very forthcoming about it. And we typically don’t investigate even fatal car crashes that thoroughly in the US. Also our “privacy” protections protect bad actors a little bit.

NHTSA — the federal agency that tracks this kind of stuff — says about 300 people a year are killed in crashes caused by cell phone distraction. 300 deaths a year caused by a consumer product is nothing to sneeze at and would open a lot of normal companies to major liability.

But NHTSA are relying almost totally on police reports for that information, and like I said, police don’t typically conduct the kind of investigations that could determine someone was distracted without a shadow of a doubt. So IMO, there’s a strong possibility that NHTSA’s data is a VAST undercounting.

Many researchers have tried to investigate this more thoroughly. A meta analysis of studies that tried to determine how many crashes were caused by cell phone distraction found wide variation. Studies found the percentage caused by cell phone distraction could be anywhere between .4% and 45%. But the median, the meta analysis found, was 3.4 percent.

This is just me extrapolating from this study for illustrative purposes. But if we accept the 3.4 percent rate, that would mean 1,390 deaths a year caused by cell phone distraction and about 75,000 injuries. And again, that may even be conservative. At least some research has guessed that the number would be WAY higher.

Regardless, that is a lot of people killed, torn from their families, and injuries — laid up in hospitals, missing work etc. I add that just because I think we get numb to these numbers. If you’ve ever had someone in your life suddenly killed in a car crash, you know, it’s traumatic.

So what responsibility to tech companies have for preventing this? That hasn’t been discussed as much as it should be imo. I said earlier I take a little bit of responsibility for that. I was focused on traffic safety in reporting for years and I think I was able to influence the discussion a bit. But I have been more focused in my career in holding automakers — another bad actor — responsible.

Here’s the thing though. When I was traveling around and speaking about rising pedestrian deaths, people always brought up cell phone distraction. And you can see it when you’re out and about. Everyone seems to be staring at their phone while driving. I even see people doing things like making turns while looking at their phones. This is not a harmless thing. It’s similar or worse to drunk driving. I also think it’s bad to discount public perception. The public is not dummies. They are observing this phenomenon because it is real.

What most people don’t realize, I don’t think, is the tech companies KNOW you are looking at your phone while driving. They have ALL sorts of information about you, where you are, the speed you’re traveling. They are selling this information essentially. They even know what position you are IN the car — the driver’s or the passenger seat.

IF these companies cared about being good corporate citizens and saving people’s lives they could simply “brick” people’s cell phones when they know they are driving. What they actually do instead is continue to use all these psychological tricks, honed and perfected by the best paid professionals in the world, to tempt you to pick of your phone and interact with it, so they can sell more ads and make more money.

And it works. And the result is a lot of gruesome crashes with an enormous social toll. Regular people’s lives are ended and ruined. And these tech companies are never held accountable, so why should they change anything?

Anyway, I’d love to see a similar lawsuit against Meta or X or whatever the most addictive algorithm is now in a similar lawsuit against the families of people who were killed because they were being “ping” “ping” “pinged” like it was a five alarm fire because their cat meme got liked or whatever.

For book research I interviewed Alan Mallach, who is an urbanist writer and thinker and who wrote a book I really liked called Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World — which talks about the huge demographic shifts that are happening as the population ages and people have less children.

One thing he says in the book is it will soon be normal for cities to shrink and lose population, even whole countries, in fact many already are. I thought there was some good stuff here and wanted to share.

Angie Schmitt 5:10

Well, I appreciate you doing this. You know, I just Friday I interviewed Lenore Skenazy. Do you know who that is?

Alan Mallach 5:14
Who? Sorry, Lenore.

Angie Schmitt 5:24
She’s the author of Free Range Kids.
That was kind of fun and exciting, I thought. I’m a fan

Alan Mallach 5:33
Oh, God, yes. I grew up in a different era, but I was, I was totally free range from, you know, from, you know, when I was 10, I was we lived in Tel Aviv.

And we lived in a sort of an outlying part of the city. When I was 10, I was taking the bus downtown to go to the library or just hang out or go to a go to a concert or whatever. And my parents attitude was j ust be home for dinner.

Angie Schmitt 6:08
Anyway, you you’ve done a lot of research and work about the demographic shifts that are going on. I was just hoping you could kind of help me understand. Help me like with some numbers or help me understand like how big of a shift this is happening right now in terms of like the aging of the population.

Alan Mallach 9:47
So OK, the big thing is population, you know, the United States is still growing, but mainly through immigration. If we, if we stop, actually stop immigration, the United States will start losing population and probably.

About 1/4 of the world’s countries, including China, Japan, most of Eastern Europe, Italy are already losing population. So this is a global trend.

The world is almost definitely going to go into total population decline before too long. You know, there are lots of different different people have done different projections. The magic number, the date when that’s likely to happen, it could be anywhere from 2055 to 2085 say, but it’s it’s definitely on its way and the biggest what that means a couple of a bunch of things.

First it says as the fewer children there are the more the population skews older and older and older. So if the obviously there are lots of factors, but the United States, for example, now had it’s it’s getting close to where 20% of our population will be over 65.
Which by comparison, during the 50s, it was like 5%. We were a very young country. Now we’re we’re maybe at 18, eight, 19% getting there.

Japan, which has been doing this sort of thing for a lot longer.
30% of the population is over 65 in Korea, which is still younger than Japan but is going down faster. They the government projects that within less than 50 years well over 40% of the population will be over 65 and so.

It’s interesting in the back in the 50s and 60s, almost half of American households were married couples raising kids. Now it’s 17%. There are more single people living alone in the United States today than there are households raising kids.

Angie Schmitt 12:33
Right.

Alan Mallach 12:44
And so we’ve seen this, it’s an amazing shift and we have a a whole, there’s this huge cultural shift. I wouldn’t say it’s across the board in the United States, but it’s in a very large part of the population, a shift towards the notion that not having kids living in a child-free world is normal and in some cases is is a positive good.

Angie Schmitt 13:10
Yeah, definitely.

Alan Mallach 13:11
You know, I don’t agree with, I don’t agree with them, but this is, this is a major, it’s a major trend.

So I mean, so this is, so this is the the basic dynamic of it. So the other part of it is as you as the population ages and shifts, you’re going to have fewer people.
And especially once it starts to shrink, you’re going to have fewer people entering the workforce and the workforce as a whole is going to skew older and older.

I’ve been looking at Korea quite a bit and back in the 80s when Korea had it’s what is still probably the most incredible economic takeoff of any country ever. I mean, Korea went in less than 50 years from being one of the poorest countries in the world to being one of the richest countries in the world. But anyhow, during their takeoff, they were at this sort of sweet spot demographically where the the population growth was starting, was slowing down and huge numbers of kids from the period when the high fertility period were entering the workforce.

So the 80s there was a period where there were a million new people entering the workforce every year. Now it’s about 400,000. 50 years from now, it’ll be about 150,000.

Angie Schmitt 14:48
Yeah.

Alan Mallach 14:48
And so I mean the the implications of this in terms of economic slowing of economic growth, slowing of innovation, productivity, all kinds of stuff. It’s just mind boggling.

Angie Schmitt 15:06
But AI is going to come along and eliminate the need for all the jobs, right? [Laughs]

Alan Mallach 15:10
Well, maybe, but but but you know, it’s funny. I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying to get a hint. I mean, nobody knows what the hell AI is going to end up doing.

Angie Schmitt 15:12
Yeah.

Alan Mallach 15:25
Jobs that do not require physical effort and jobs that are routine and standardizable are going to be more and more taken over by a I like coding like another one that’s interesting.
Is translation.
Is going to become more and more AI driven.

Alan Mallach 17:10
But I don’t think it’s going to be fundamentally change this trajectory.

Angie Schmitt 17:15
Yeah, so I may I don’t know how much I’m going to get into this in my book, but I do think as a parent it does make things a lot harder. Like one thing I’m writing about is like children not being welcome in restaurants anymore (in some cases). In a lot of cases I feel like and one of the the premises of my book, like I originally wanted to call my book, the title I had for it was “Not Seen and Not Heard,” which my literary agent didn’t think was marketable enough, but like that children you know are being excluded from public space.

I’m not going to get into this too much in the book either, but I thought during the pandemic it was really intense. Like it was just like, we’re going to banish kids from society for well over a year. And that’s, you know, if you don’t like it, you’re a bad person or something. And it was really damaging, I think.

I’m going to sort of argue a little bit. I think that like the social support just really isn’t there and like one thing I’m writing about right now.

Like car lines at schools, right? Well, there’s just massive car lines. And part of it is like, OK, parents are too protective, but also part of it is they’re cutting school busing. Like school busing when I was a kid, it just w as there, you know, you didn’t have to think about very much and now it’s kind of not.

Alan Mallach 19:28
You know, in the countryside around that surrounds the village (where I live), there are a lot of these big Mcmansions and things, and every now and then I’m driving off somewhere and I find myself behind a school bus. And what amazes me is I see people drive from their houses, drive their kids from their houses to the road.

Alan Mallach 20:10
So they can get on the school bus, which is we’re talking about 1000 feet maybe.

Angie Schmitt 20:12
No, it’s weird.

Alan Mallach 20:21
When I was again growing up in Tel Aviv obviously you walk to school. The notion that’s there in elementary, you know it’s K-eight was basically the standard public school. Then you go to high school and the high school I was assigned to was some distance away. It was a temporary location for they were going to build a new.
New high school in my neighborhood, but they hadn’t gotten around to it yet. So it was about maybe 2 1/2, three miles away. So the city sent a school bus to pick us up every morning to get us to school. But that’s all. As far as they were concerned, getting home was your business.

Angie Schmitt 21:04
I used to walk to school too.

Alan Mallach 21:04
And and and I loved it. I would walk basically every day. I would walk home basically the first mile, mile and a half I’d walk, which included the last roughly 1/4 mile. There’s Tel Aviv has an incredible market, you know, market with all stalls and things and so forth, which is basically linear along a pedestrian street and it’s been roofed over with tarps and things. It’s called the Carmel Market.

And the last roughly 1/4 of a mile of my walk every every afternoon after school was through the Carmel Market. And when I got to the North End of the market, I’d catch a bus which would take me home. But I think the the car lines, it’s ridiculous.

Angie Schmitt 22:07
It really is. Yeah, it really is. But then at the same time, the alternatives are also so bad. They won’t get the streets in order so that they’re safe to cross. You know, the streets are so hostile even in Cleveland which is like probably close to as good as it gets, you know, for walkability. It’s still like intense, even for someone like me at certain locations, what we’re dealing with.

Alan Mallach 22:39
Yeah, I mean basically I think you’re basically your thesis makes a whole lot of sense. We are, we are getting, we are becoming an increasingly less child oriented, child friendly society. I mean, the whole business about child-free spaces and so forth is just awful. The extent to which people feel they have that it’s OK to complain if somebody’s child starts, God forbid, crying or doing something in the vicinity.

Angie Schmitt 23:14
Yeah.

Alan Mallach 23:16
It’s appalling.

Angie Schmitt 23:19
Yeah, no, people really like, I was laughing because online, these people, it’s like they’re recounting, like coming back from the front lines of combat, you know? And it’s like a kid kicks in the back of my seat on the plane. Like, who cares? God, is that really such a big deal?

Angie Schmitt 23:34

But yeah, I don’t know that the book that Mark Freedman book was kind of hopeful about all this cause he said that we’ve got these a lot of older people that don’t have like a lot of meaning in their lives and that like they can be more of a resource for like helping, you know, young people.

Alan Mallach 23:59

Oh, it could be done. But of course one thing that is works against that is the extent to which we’ve been creating these age segregated environments where you know people.

Angie Schmitt 24:18
Yeah.

Alan Mallach 24:22
Don’t even have access to kids, even if they wanted to and.

Angie Schmitt 24:26
Right. Yeah, he’s talking about that too.

Angie Schmitt 24:33
Yeah, it’s it’s huge. It’s huge. And like the institutions like churches and that kind of thing aren’t what they used to be, like some of the multi-generational institutions.

Alan Mallach 24:43
Yeah, there. That’s the other thing. I mean, there are a lot of, a lot of, you know, churches in much of this country are, you know, far fewer people in go to go to church or are engaged in church activities than t hey once were and they they and the the vehicles for connecting people.

Angie Schmitt 25:00
Right.

Alan Mallach 25:09
Especially connecting multiple people of multiple generations have really as a atrophied we.

Angie Schmitt 25:17
Yeah, I agree.

So you’ve looked at these other countries too, and I know in Korea there’s like a real anti-natal kind of culture element.

Alan Mallach 25:46
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Angie Schmitt 25:49
How much do you sort of see that in the US? Do you think that’s a big risk?

Alan Mallach 25:54
It’s not as bad. I think what you’ve got in Korea from women’s perspective is a real kind of double or triple bind. The first thing is that the Korean government has for many years has for economic reasons, has actively encouraged women to go to college, go into the workforce, and so they do. And now slightly over half of the college graduates in Korea are women.

It’s not the the sex ratio isn’t as skewed as it is in the United States, but it’s still more than half and they get jobs and they go to work.

Korea, and a lot of it, she argues that it’s especially bad in Korea because the transformation of the society from a rural patriarchal.
Old traditional society into a modern society took place almost overnight.

Angie Schmitt 27:40
Mhm.

Alan Mallach 27:41
Compare contrast to, say, a place like Denmark, where it took place over maybe 200 years and so the patriarchal attitudes are still extraordinarily powerful. So women go into the workforce. There is major issues of glass, glass ceilings, harassment, you know, all kinds of bad stuff plus.

If a woman marries and has kids, the husband — this is true in China — well, the husband typically expects the wife to take care of the kid, take care of the household. At the same time, he expects to make major decisions like what school the kid’s going to go to and things like that.

The wife is expected to do everything while continuing to work full time. In fact, in China I read a piece which I’ll also I’ll send you a link to if I can get it by a Chinese woman who described it as — Says the term they’re using in China is widow style parenting.
Because you might as well be a widow for all the help you’re getting from what’s his name.

Alan Mallach 29:42
So there’s this extraordinary pressure on parenting. So you add it all up.
And there has been this widespread reaction by women to, I don’t want to get involved in that.

Angie Schmitt 30:29
Yeah, yeah.

Alan Mallach 30:31
Now the United States, I mean clearly there’s some of this, you know, there’s some strong feminist, anti marriage, anti child, you know, strands and things like that. But also in the United States we a ren’t quite as stuck in the patriarchy as in Korea or China. I mean, obviously they some are, but there’s a much more of a range and there are a lot of men who participate actively in child rearing and household stuff.
And so the pressures and the pressures are, they’re they’re steep, but they’re not as intense, not as. So think the United States has some of that, but it’s certainly far less intense than in Korea or China.

Angie Schmitt 31:12
Yeah.
OK. Yeah. Yeah. Um.

Alan Mallach 31:31
Yeah.

Angie Schmitt 31:36
Yeah, yeah, I I think it’s a more individualistic also than it used to be in the past. It’s like everything is on sort of the parents, you know, there’s a rush to sort of judgments basically.

Angie Schmitt 34:42
Right. I mean, I think there’s a little bit of similarities kind of between the way children are treated and the way older people are treated.

Alan Mallach 34:55
That, oh, that is you’re you’re absolutely right. I mean it’s it goes both ways because, you know, I think a lot of people, especially when older people find themselves in in institutional settings.

I mean, like one of the things that I think is wonderful about the village I live in is we’ve got a lot of, well, myself included, a lot of older people and I have, you know, I’ve got a c ouple of friends who are in their 90s.
Quite a few who are like me in their 80s and etcetera all the way down and it’s and as long as you know, we can live at home and be part of the community and be involved in things and so forth.

It’s really great, but I think once you get into, I mean there’s a tendency the whether it’s assisted living, whether it’s retirement communities, what have you to segregate older people

Angie Schmitt 36:05
Yeah, yeah. That’s what Mark Freedman talks about a lot. Yeah.

Alan Mallach 36:08
And and I think that’s, I think it’s it’s terrible and I just the only I hope to live fortunately I don’t have stairs, but I hope to live here as long as I possibly can and the only the challenge is driving.

Angie Schmitt 36:30
Yeah, right, of course.

Alan Mallach 36:30
So far, so so far one of the things that’s really, again, it’s another problem is if you live like I do in a small sort of semi rural village, there’s no public transportation.

Angie Schmitt 36:46
Right.

Alan Mallach 36:47
Literally none.

Alan Mallach 37:08
Public transportation in this country is either inadequate or nonexistent.

Angie Schmitt 37:15
Yeah.

Alan Mallach 37:16
So so there are a lot of lot of problems which are fostering this age segregation.

Angie Schmitt 37:45
Children find themselves like isolated too because of it and parents.

What do you guys think about all this? In the meantime, Alan writes the Substack The Sapiens Project, check it out!

What he says is, when he was growing up, there was some kind of organization for youth — a Boys Scouts type of thing — that paired boys and girls with older adults. So he would visit this older woman regularly and help her with household chores.

The memories of her and her house, its smells, wonders and peculiarities, must have made a strong impression on him. He remembers she “Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.” This was a reference to face cream she used.

I can relate to that sensory experience, core memory of visiting the house of an older person. I had a great-aunt my family was close to growing up and her house is etched in my memory. First of all, she was a very small woman (people were actually smaller then!), and the house, like her was tiny, with tiny rooms, filled with stuff. Curious stuff, some of it, like glass paper weights or tiny spoons collected from around the country. Lots of glass knick knacks. She was the kind of woman who would have her couches wrapped in plastic. 😂

I remember she had a door mat made of bright green plastic grass with a plastic daisy. And she would serve us Bugles, which I don’t think I need to explain to any Millennials the excitement of for a kid. (They were like chips, but they fit on your finger tips and made for a fun thing to play with and eat.)

When we visited my aunt we were supposed to behave a certain way, and I don’t think I liked that. But the impression her house made on me is unforgettable.

Anyway, I loved Paul McCarney’s essay and I loved the Liverpool he remembered. What an ingenious program, I thought, boys helping older people in their own communities. It’s hard to imagine that happening anymore, just because of the way children have become prisoners of the family chauffeur and all.

The refrain of the song, of course, is “all the lonely people.” McCartney must have been a welcome source of support for this woman. And he must have felt proud and competent to be able to genuinely help her.

Intergenerational ties, I think, have broken down a little since then. This is something I am focused on a lot in the book I am writing. One of my big important theses is that children are not really welcomed in public space anymore. And that that’s very, very bad for them, but bad for society at large as well.

One thing I found in my research — I’m trying not to spoiler my book too much but — about a third of people over 55 in the US now live in age segregated communities where children are not even allowed. 😱😭 How sad for them. How sad for kids, not to have that relationship Paul had with Eleanor.

Over the years, in my life, it has happened to me on a couple occasions that I became friends with someone much older than me. This is always a surprise and always so wonderful. It takes a special kind of older person to strike up a genuine friendship with someone decades younger than them.

When I was about 19, I kind of impulsively quit college and moved to Atlanta — far from friends or family. I just didn’t know what I wanted to study in school and wanted to get some more real world experience before I made that kind of commitment. I was renting a small, cheap apartment in Midtown and working as a waitress.

I was pretty lonely. One of the first friends I made, ironically, was my landlord. His name was Ben and he had daughters who were a little older than me. he tried to give me a little advice, not in an annoying way. And he invited me one time, I remember, to a cafeteria he and his other senior friend used to like to eat at next door to our building at a hospital. They liked it because it was cheap — HA!

Eventually a room opened up at the house my cousin was living in near Emory. And Ben did me a big favor. He let me break my lease after three months. He even helped me move, which ended up being really good for me, living in a house with 3 other women close to my age in this pretty neighborhood by the university. 🥹

Anyway, whenever I write a book I always read a lot of books as research. Reading is really where I get a lot of my inspiration. I came across this book called “How to Live Forever,” by Marc Freedman. The point Freedman makes in this book is we have this huge growth in our older adult population right now, a huge demographic shift is happening from young to old.

And that is going to affect our culture and politics profoundly. The outcome could end up being a zero-sum struggle for resources. (This is something I talk about in my book.) That would be VERY VERY bad for children, in my opinion. And has already begun, imo. For example, we see in Michigan property owners without kids in school winning property tax relief, something fellow Substacker Darby Saxbe called “anti natal.”) Even the one-year closure of schools to protect older people from a virus — the way they were treated as disease vectors during covid and their needs for education and socialization were treated as negotiable, I think is a good example. We harmed the health of children for the benefit of older adults (I don’t really think there’s very good evidence is really benefitted older adults health very much either.)

“Many believe the coming years will be full of animosity between generations,” writes Freedman. That could be characterized by “scarcity, conflict and loneliness.”

What Freedman proposes, and what I very much agree with, is it doesn’t have to be that way. For example, Freedman makes a very, very compelling case that close relationships between the old and the young can be profoundly beneficial for both parties.

What Freedman says is many older adults are lonely. They spend a lot of time watching television. And two-thirds, according to a Harvard study, say their lives lack meaning.

But nurturing the next generation can be profoundly beneficial for both parties. Older adults who were invested in caring for the next generation — as involved grandparents for example or volunteer mentors — were three times as likely to report they were happy.

These intergenerational relationships, Freedman writes, are also crucial for young people, especially young people who come from difficult circumstances. Huge amounts of data supports the benefits of programs like Big Brothers and Big Sisters and the Foster Grandparent program (which was one of the more lasting and important outcomes of the War on Poverty, Freedman says.)

“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her,” he says.

Read more

Last week I was very distracted by a conflict at my kids’ school. I wasn’t even an important player in this drama. So it’s crazy how much of the week I spent feeling bad about it and thinking about it.

I’m not in a leadership role at my kids school, but I guess I’m still pretty invested. I love school and will defend the value and importance of school till I’m blue in the face. Watching this situation unfold that I thought threatened the school’s health was really upsetting. I almost couldn’t focus on anything else.

I don’t think I really appreciated how dependent we all are on institutions like that for our well being, until it all started breaking down a few years ago. There’s something, I think, about having kids that makes you more dependent on shared institutions. We all need other people, and also socially organized institutions. Right now it feels really hard to build and maintain them.

One of the things that I think is so hard (and also aspirational) about school right now, is it really relies on people’s ability to cooperate. Maybe it’s just me, but in every organization I’m part of, this type of thing seems to be happening right now. Sometimes, it’s one person, or a group of people, that become very rigid about imposing their own agenda, regardless if that is the role they’re supposed to be playing. A lot of relatively minor situations that become explosive. There’s a lot of bad feelings.

When I was young, I remember community institutions and groups as being more stable and reliable. It seems like — and maybe this is nostalgia — people could disagree but put some of that aside for the greater good.

Conflict is very close to the surface these days. I wanna blame online discussions, but I see it in person as well. I don’t think our national leaders are modeling a very healthy pattern for us. Team being-angry-and-burning-it-all-down is winning.

Anyway, I don’t think this is just about my kids school. I notice the same sort of pattern now within groups where I volunteer, or institutions in which I am involved with for work. A lot of ugly situations. Tiny little skirmishes or concerns get treated with extreme importance. Broader social fallout from those conflicts or actions is, I think, under appreciated.

I don’t want to get into the particulars of this school conflict, except to say that it was a kind of mundane problem that became existential for some reason. One person and one family in particular were affected pretty negatively. That person and that family were very important to the school community however. So it caused a lot of terrible bad feelings across a huge group of people. A lot of fallout, in terms of trust and sense of “safety” within the group, I feel like was squandered. I honestly think it will take years to recover.

What would have been so helpful was someone to moderate the conflict in a way that preserved the investment of both parties. Instead one party “triumphs” at the expense of the other. But the institution emerges weaker and the “winning” party is emboldened nonetheless.

Years ago I read this very provocative book called “Conflict is Not Abuse” by Sara Schulman. I thought it addressed this kind of thing very skillfully and very bravely. The book was basically about how people within a group can hurt each other. A review of the book described it this way: to avoid “the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding” people “often overstate the harm that has been done to them — they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation.”

These situations, the reviewer wrote, often involve “a misplaced sense of danger, an overreaction, then a rift that came to seem impossible to repair. Schulman saw people turning away from the challenges of conflict and instead asking some larger body — a group of friends, a college bureaucracy, the state — to ratify their status as victims and intervene on their behalf.”

The book is a little bit controversial. And it’s been a long time since I read it and I’m not sure I understood it perfectly. For example, many readers saw it as an indictment on progressive culture, maybe what some people would call “cancel culture.” But Schulman is a progressive with impeccable credentials, having spent her youth doing radical grassroots AIDS advocacy in the 1980s. (I heard an interview with her where she said it was all a big allegory for Palestine and Israel, which was even more confusing.)

Maybe reading the book is uncomfortable for a lot of people because of who in indicts and how messy it is. It doesn’t pick sides in a larger ideological war. It asks us to self examine and accept responsibility for our own part in disputes. Who hasn’t behaved like a jerk, and not been very self aware about it?

The one thing that really stuck with me was, Schulman said if you are “in community” with other people you have a “duty of repair” if there is a conflict. She said that conversation should happen in person or by the phone — not online or over text, where context could be lost. I don’t know if I’ve always practiced that in real life, but it’s always been in the back of my mind, and every now and then I have tried to, with varying success.

I was walking around my neighborhood a week or so ago at night. And the streets were deserted. It wasn’t even very late. And I got to thinking, how strange and lonely it felt.

There is a lot of fear of others, I think right now, a lot of hurt feelings. Public spaces are empty. Everyone has retreated. And when they do venture out, if they have a bad experience, it only confirms their worst fears and the cycle repeats itself.

I don’t know if any of this make sense or if I’m on to something here. I’m going open up the comments and ask people to chime in.

Today was an awesome lazy Saturday in my neighborhood. In the morning my son had a basketball game at this sparkling new gym nearby.

This rec league we play in is very cute, very social, everything youth sports can and should be — but are less and less. (This is something I’ll write about another time and I’m writing about in the book I’m working on.)

Anyway, so many of our parent friends were at the same gym rooting on their own kids. We decided to stay late and cheer for a neighbor kid who played next.

Here is the beauty of living in a walkable neighborhood with kids: The whole day could unfold in kind of a fun, unplanned way.

My husband decided to take the van and drive home. My daughter and I agreed to walk because we wanted to stay a little longer. My son was still shooting hoops with a friend, so I said either get a ride home or walk. Home is less than a mile away.

I said to my daughter, “let’s go to the donut shop on the way home.” But we hadn’t gotten one block before I noticed we were going right past a new book shop. We stopped in and browsed. And my daughter picked out a couple books. Then, we continued on our way to the donut shop.

As we were sitting there eating, I was kind of in disbelief of my good fortune. (That happens to me a lot lately.) One reason is, this corridor we were walking on has just recently really come alive with small scale retail. The book shop — people are thrilled about it. The donut shop is just a couple years old.

Right next to the donut shop was this amazing local vintage clothing store. And so I said to my daughter, let’s stop by just for a few minutes. Again, this is a relatively new addition to the street. It’s got to be one the of the coolest vintage clothing stores in the country. It’s great for kids. There is an actual plastic tube slide where you can slide from one floor to another.

After that, we turned around and headed home. And my daughter and I had a chance to chat. It was such a fun outing, we both agreed. A mini adventure.

Later on my husband and I were just laying around screening. And I said: you know what? “Let’s walk down to the lake.” We live just under a mile from Lake Erie and this really expansive public park. There’s a loop we can do, for exercise, for a serious walk, that is about 2.5 miles. So we did that.

On the way home we were going past the Dollar Store and I stopped in to buy some Diet Coke (because I’m an addict). And then we passed a corner store, and I stopped to buy some onions (it’s a minor emergency for me when we run out of those). Practical trips, undertaken spontaneously.

It got me thinking, how great that is. Being able to accomplish a few tasks on foot is the ultimate life hack imo. It’s healthier and more fun, imo. There’s social rewards as well, I believe. Close to home, you run into people that you might know.

I feel like if there’s one thing people in my field (transportation planning) could accomplish that would really improve life for average people, it would be creating more opportunities for average folks to make a useful trip on foot every once in a while. Too few people have that opportunity right now. Even if they live near retail, it’s often designed to be as hostile as possible to pedestrians. For example, a Target store might abut a residential neighborhood, but have a fence that prevents anyone from accessing it from the neighborhood side.

My first book was about pedestrians and how they get killed in huge numbers in the U.S. and how there’s sort of an institutional indifference. I didn’t go ahead with it, but if I were to add one more chapter to that book it would have been about retail.

The big box retail model that dominates, has dominated for decades in the U.S., objectively sucks for pedestrians. In fact, I cited a study that shows, for every Walmart, for example, added in a community, they can expect to have 1.8 more pedestrian crashes every four years.

That is sort of the nature of these places. They require huge parking lots. Huge access roads, with lots of turn lanes, which taxpayers typically pick up the tab for. They also produce a kind of sameness to town after town. A corporate hegemony. I follow an urbanist account that calls the kind of big box retail you see in suburb after suburb as “corporate slop.”

The kinds of stores and restaurants you can walk to, imo, they tend to be a little more interesting. You might come across something that surprises you. There are more personal touches. Local businesses play an enormous role, imo, in local culture, which is something more and more I really treasure.

One of the reasons I was so stoked about how my day unfolded is because some or all of this is new. I’ve lived in my neighborhood in Cleveland for 15 years. And for a long time I didn’t have a car. But one thing that was a bummer about it was that there just wasn’t much retail at all. That has gradually started to change, and I am pretty stoked about it. The fact that that is happening while in-person retail is shrinking nationally (as the even more anti social model for internet shopping takes over), is even more exciting.

Now, I was in Chicago last weekend, and they have REAL retail. Corporate retail in the city. Just blocks and blocks of restaurants and stores. I wrote about passing a Hermes on the Miracle Mile. I honestly wouldn’t mind having some more corporate retail in Cleveland. (My dream is to have a Sephora.) We are still a retail desert with respect to a lot of corporate chains.

I think without the kind of mass transit Chicago and Toronto and New York have, it’s difficult to make it work, though. You need a lot of foot traffic to have storefront retail, designed at walking scale. And without a subway, a good amount of high density housing, it’s hard to get a good concentration of foot traffic on sidewalks.

Maybe we wouldn’t have any at all in Cleveland except we have this legacy of the old streetcar system. And the storefronts that abutted our streetcar corridors are lined with this kind of old-school retail. It’s just that it’s not often occupied, at least in a well used way. There are a few rare exceptions though in Ohio.

Lakewood, Ohio, a nearby suburb, has seen one of its old streetcar corridors really come alive with local businesses. And I think that’s in part due to the fact that they have a ton of these legacy spaces, and they’re able to offer very affordable rent. It’s sort of a beautiful thing. I think it helps stimulate entrepreneurship as well.

But like I said, it’s pretty rare. And that’s, of course, due to changes in how we travel. Households with 2 SUVs and a quarter-acre lot, their retail options are more or less baked in. Most likely they’re going to shop by driving 15 miles into the hinterlands to Costco.

Meanwhile, I’m just wishing there were more places I could dash in and get a loaf of bread. There are a few places like that now, between my house and my office (a distance of a couple miles) and I couldn’t be happier about it.

One point I wanted to make with this post and my long, annoying windup, was that there are a number of trips I made today that I wouldn’t have if I wouldn’t have happened to be walking past:

• The donut shop

• The book store

• The vintage clothing store

• The Dollar Store

• The corner store

I’m an impulsive person, not a big planner. And the level of preparation and planning it requires to get everything you need for the week in one big grocery trip — ugh. It’s difficult for me. And I also think it turns something that could be very fun — shopping for food! - into this big, boring chore.

Anyway, for people who love that, I know there are a million Costco lovers out there, to each his own. I mean that. But this other model that is a little more compact can be pretty great when it works. We have so few places where we’ve managed to put all the pieces together. But what a beautiful thing when it all comes together.

Saturday, at 4:03 am I took the Amtrak out of Cleveland’s tiny station in the pitch dark.

Middle of the night service is all we get in Cleveland as far as Amtrak, thanks to our state lawmakers being firmly against Having Nice Things (Arthur’s fist meme).

As I boarded, I walked past rows and rows of sleeping Amish people.

I slept a few hours and when I awoke we were cruising past vast flat farms and tiny Indiana towns. Backyards strewn with old toys. As we approached Chicago, we passed the most massive industrial sites I have ever seen. Just otherworldly scenes, void of people.

This photo doesn’t do it justice.

I got off at Union Station in central Chicago, six hours after I left. I was in town just for 36 hours. I serve on the board of a small nonprofit (the Midwest chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism). Me and some other city planning nerd type people from around the region got together for an annual retreat. We’re all volunteers but all trying to improve our respective cities around the region, mainly with respect to urban planning, architecture and development. .

It’s been years since I’ve been to Chicago. Immediately, me and another board member made our way to a popular local diner: Lou Mitchells. I LOVE diners. And this diner was everything I love about them. It was packed with all kinds of people, families, friends. We had to wait in a long line outside but eventually we got a spot at the bar. And everything was — as it should be at a diner — perfectly preserved, like a time capsule from 1965.

This is the part of Chicago I love and it was was casting a deep, deep spell on me. The diner was an ideal third place, by all the metrics that matter most to me. It was intergenerational. There was an old lady milling around seating people. Part of the restaurant family I assume. An adorable little boy was happily playing with toys on the ledge behind his booth while his parents ate. A group of three older ladies sat around a booth wearing paper party hats. It had its own distinct and beloved culture. The vibes were off the charts. Even the staff seemed to be happy to be there.

I think the hit Netflix show the Bear celebrates this side of Chicago. Italian Beef sandwiches and coney dog side of Chicago. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s a little rough around the edges and very endearing.

I tried to order the most Chicago diner-y breakfast I could imagine: corn beef hash. And while we ate, a waitress stopped everyone and the whole restaurant sang happy birthday to a little girl named Olivia 🥹. It was, in my opinion, a snapshot of the best of what our cities can be.

After the diner, we made our way over to Michigan Avenue, another Chicago, the Miracle Mile. And I was passing shops like Hermes and Yves Saint Laurent, where handbags cost thousands of dollars. Wealth is also part of the culture in Chicago. That Big City kind of wealth that is a bit foreign to me, just being from Ohio.

If I bought something from Hermes, for example (which I wouldn’t because I don’t have that kind of money) I don’t think anyone in my circle would even recognize it as anything special. Or it might just register as weird and eccentric. Sometimes I like to go and gawk at these items anyway, just to try to understand what these objects mean to people, and who those people are and what they are like. It is also like a window into a world I’m not part of and I don’t fully understand.

When I made it back to my hotel, on the table was a copy of one of those bougie local lifestyle magazines specifically for Chicagoans. The first half of the magazine was all ads for expensive properties, most between $1 and $7 million. These ads often featured large photos of women real estate agents, presented a little like models or minor celebrities, promising they would be there for the client at any moment of the day. There was a hyper competitiveness about it. I was stressed out just reading it.

That month’s edition was dedicated to “wellness.” “Aesthetic medicine” — a term I’ve never heard before — was an important theme. “Thanks got dramatic advances in science — and thanks to the accessibility of health technologies we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 yeas ago — longevity is the buzz word of the moment,” wrote the editor in chief. “It’s the ultimate luxury, the ability to sustain energy, clarity and even beauty into the years ahead.”

I’m not even really ideologically anti botox or anything. But it struck me as really creepy. It made me wonder about this class of Chicagoans and about the rich, which play such an outsized role in cities, especially over the last decade plus.

The point here isn’t really to single out Chicago. Illinois has 23 billionaires — not even close to California or New York, who both have more than 100. (Ohio has 7). My limited impressions are that it is a strange group with values and customs that would be pretty alien even to people like me, who aren’t poor — who after all, travel to Chicago and stay in hotels.

The magazine, maybe it’s not the best representation, but it made me think something is really off about this group of people in this class ahead of and apart from mine. It was striking to me that even though these people had so much money and had achieved success by conventional measures — the intended audience anyway — it seemed that what they really wanted instead was youth. Of course, I can relate to wishing I looked and felt younger. But the tone of the magazine indicated a weird discomfort with aging, I guess, almost an insecurity. And a naive faith that, with enough money and effort, it could be neutralized. I don’t share that faith, nor to I have the same energy and drive to fight it.

Anyway, the “wellness edition” reminded me of this famous character in the White Lotus. That show, especially the most recent season, set in Thailand, was a critique of “wellness culture,” and ultra wealthy people seeking all these questionable, expensive and sometimes risky or painful procedures. Beneath it, the show was pretty heavy handed about pointing out, seemed to be a tragic kind of a spiritual emptiness.

I guess I’m not the only one who is feeling alarmed about this. There was a Substack article I came across this week about some weird viral character called Clavicular, an influencer of the bizarre trend of “looksmaxxing,” undergoing all kinds of painful and potentially dangerous procedures in order to increase attractiveness, I think mainly to women. This isn’t a little botox or something. Some of these procedures involved smashing and reshaping his bones as well as a hormonal regimen that left him infertile.

The writer argued this kind of this intense focus on appearance was a form of narcissism. And that narcissism came not from an over confidence in self, but a lack of substance at people’s core. Like something missing at the center of people’s personality.

Maybe things are just less competitive in Ohio but this kind of stuff is really foreign to me. I saw a movie on an airplane recently — the Materialists — that was a little bit of an introduction to all this. The premise of the movie was that the dating market for wealthy New Yorkers is so competitive even wealthy men sometimes undergo extremely painful surgical procedures, to add inches to their height, for example. It was pretty dystopian. I thought it was mostly just fiction.

But even in my own neighborhood in Cleveland — maybe this is the final stage of gentrification — a new medical spa opened up. I thought maybe it was the kind of place you could get a massage. My sister-in-law were going to go for something like that because she had been gifted a gift certificate. But when we looked into it, we found out the offerings were far weirder. They inject people with IVs full of fluids that are supposed to treat things like hangovers and the flu. A lot of the procedures were really bizarre, or I had never heard of them. Like $800 for some thing that’s supposed to help with hair loss.

I was thinking about all trying to sleep, with my hotel window looking over the skyline, not far from the Miracle Mile.

Fortunately, the board retreat was an amazing antidote to the foreign set of values I was seeing promoted, at least in certain venues. The group I met with was all-volunteer. Just people trying to improve their communities in a variety of ways.

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Because it was so middle-of-the-road, demographically and culturally, Columbus at the time was a big presidential swing area in a swing state. Big corporate restaurants used to test new foods there to see if they would succeed nationally because the Columbus area was so representative.

During this era Columbus was also quietly booming. The city had a reputation for being professionally managed, a new sort of city. Families like mine migrated there from rust belt cities like Toledo and Cleveland in droves. They set up families and lives in full of other families with similar backgrounds in suburbs that had a few years before been corn and soybean fields.

Our parents worked at corporate middle management jobs at places like Nationwide Insurance (if they were lucky) and sent their kids to large public high schools, which were segmented by income. I grew up in not the wealthiest suburb in Columbus, but probably one of the top third wealthiest I guess. I went to school with some kids who were working class and kids who lived in McMansions.

During this era, Columbus was a fast food Mecca. Bob Evans and Wendy’s were headquartered there. It was also a retail Mecca. As a high school student who worked at the mall, I was a big target of all this, and a participant as a consumer.

(This was the mall I worked at in high school, along with all my friends. They were kleptomaniacs.)

The culture of Columbus at the time, at least the mostly white suburban world I was embedded in, Abercrombie and Fitch was an inescapable brand. All the most popular kids at my high school, the “richest,” wore Abercrombie and Fitch. “I Like Girls that Wear Abercrombie and Fitch” was a literal pop song that charted during this era. I worked as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool, where they would play top 40 radio all summer and I must have heard it 10,000 times. The song was a little tongue in cheek I think, but still.

Even at the time I rolled my eyes a little at all this. But I wasn’t totally above it I guess. I did I shop at Abercrombie and Fitch a little, mostly a the sale rack. It was just a popular clothing brand at the time. I don’t know if I made a giant distinction between it and like a Levi’s, although it certainly had a much bigger influence on us in that era.

Anyway, Abercrombie and Fitch was owned by Ohio’s richest man: Les Wexner who lived in the Columbus area. He was a powerful and mysterious figure in Columbus and has become a key figure in the Epstein scandal. His New Albany compound — that’s really the only way to describe it — was featured in the Netflix documentary “Filthy Rich” about Epstein’s crimes. One of the victims, who was in her mid teens, was taken there, to New Albany, Ohio, and sexually assaulted by Epstein.

Anyway, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Wexner owned Limited Brands, which owned Victoria’s Secret, Bath and Body Works, the Limited, Express — huge, huge retail names. If you went to a mall anywhere in the world, you were likely to see at least five of these Columbus-based stores. Everyone thought of Columbus as this cultural backwater in this era, they weren’t entirely wrong, but in fact it was dictating a lot of the style trends of the era far beyond Ohio. Kids like me, the middle class lifestyle we were living, they were trading on in a weird way.

When I was in high school, Abercrombie and Fitch pioneered in the catalog-as-soft porn trend that American Apparel would later run with. The similarities between these two companies, looking back, are striking. In 2003, the catalog — which was aimed at 10 to 13 year olds — included partially nude photos of young models and group sexual activity, according to Snopes, which rated this claim as “true.”

It was controversial, even at the time, but not overwhelmingly so I would say. I remember seeing them, being mildly interested in scandalized but that was kind of it.

A&F did a lot of edgy things, which ended up, I assume, benefiting them financially. They would also hire underage kids, high schoolers, they thought were hot to stand at the front doors, the girls in tiny tops, the boys shirtless sometimes. I knew some of these kids. Again, this was sorta controversial. I remember there was a lawsuit where black employees alleged they were forced into lower paying back of the house jobs — discrimination.

This was stuff we heard and knew about, but it was just the tip of the iceberg apparently. Mike Jeffries, the CEO of A&F, hired by Wexner in the early 1990s, was years later arrested for running a “prostitution and international sex trafficking business” in which vulnerable young men were trafficked to him and his partner for sex, often lured to his apartment under false pretexts. The operation is strikingly similar what is described in the Epstein case. Some of the stuff he is accused of doing is so sick.

These two cases aren’t even the only two sex trafficking scandals in which Wexner has been implicated. He is also being sued civilly by victims of former Ohio State Physician Richard Strauss, who saw student athletes (most notoriously the wrestling team) and was accused of abusing 177 male students during his tenure. Wexner was on the board of trustees for the university during this era, and plaintiffs allege he knew about the abuse but did nothing.

While this was going on Wexner was a huge power broker in Columbus and Ohio. He developed this huge new suburb outside Columbus: New Albany it was called. New Albany was this wealthy place. His rule was all the properties had to have these white fences, large estate style lots and houses. It was this very fake bucolic thing. In this area, he also built this huge mall Easton, which was, I believe, the first mall flipped inside out. The “Lifestyle center” that was a fake walkable small town, now the norm. Wexner was way ahead of the curve in retail. He was able to convince politicians in Ohio to build this huge expensive new highway (I-670 East) right to New Albany and his mall on taxpayers’ dime.

When I was in college I spent two weeks working the night shift folding clothes for Abercrombie and Fitch before quitting. This job had decent pay: $12 or $15 at the time. This would be 2004 maybe. But I pretty quickly learned I wasn’t cut out for spending 45 minutes meticulously folding a stack of spaghetti strap tank tops at 2 am.

Later, I worked at a nonprofit for which Les Wexner’s wife sat on the board and was the major funder. This nonprofit, I thought, was a tiny bit weird. The rumor in Columbus at that time was that Les Wexner was gay and closeted. And that his wife was like an employee to him, managing his business affairs. Anyway, people in Columbus at the time, at least felt something was off with Epstein, but boy did they underestimate it.

Since his ties to Epstein have become more public, Wexner has come under increasing heat but has faced really no legal consequences. I have been watching the latest release of the Epstein files, wondering if this is the moment he will face consequences. It’s hard to believe nothing incriminating has come up all this time.

For reasons, that in my opinion, have never been adequately explained, Wexner, this business genius, self-made billionaire, put Epstein in charge of his money. His explanation is that he was simply too stupid and gullible to know better (absurd imo). They maintained a close friendship for years.

In Columbus, as the Epstein stuff has gained increasing attention, he has been quietly stripped of public roles within his company, his name has been removed from buildings. He is scheduled to testify before Congress this week (Feb. 18th), which feels like a new territory in public scrutiny, a tiny bit of a comeuppance. But he has not been arrested.

Some of the stuff that has come out in this latest files dump is pretty incriminating imo. Wexner appears in a number of photos that are redacted (presumably because they include a minor or victim?) YIKES to this one.

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Every once in a while, someone who I am mostly aligned with on a lot of things, writes an article or post about how parents should just suck it up and send their kids to the neighborhood public school, even if it’s just “okay.”

I don’t want to be too hard on these folks because I was 100% this person a few years ago. Also it’s good we’re even sorta at the point in cities where middle class folks have established enough of a foothold in a few neighborhoods and are considering sending their kids to the neighborhood public schools. I’m honestly jealous of these folks who live in urban neighborhoods where they deem the public schools “okay” or good enough.

I don’t dispute for one minute the benefits to a neighborhood school. I agree that ideally, having your kid attend a great neighborhood school they could walk to would have huge benefits.

THAT BEING SAID, there is a national trend away from neighborhood schools and it’s worth taking a serious look at why, not just writing it off as “parents being selfish dummies again,” which has been sort of a liberal/media habit, especially around education.

There are some ways in which the movement against neighborhood schools is rational or even good, I have to admit even though I’m an urbanist who wishes kids could walk to school. Families whose kids have special needs, for example the kid is autistic or dyslexic or prone to bullying for whatever reason, benefit from having alternatives to a single option. We should acknowledge that families are weighing the tradeoffs of brutal car lines and long distance school commutes rationally. Something is wrong at their neighborhood public school most likely, if they’re going through all this trouble to avoid it. A my kids school, a charter school, there are a lot of “refugees” even from suburban districts — who left after experiencing big problems.

Anyway, my public school district — Cleveland — did away with the neighborhood school model more than a decade ago and makes every school (outside of a tiny specialized minority) available to every kid. What happens very commonly is students commute from a poorer neighborhood to a little wealthier and more stable neighborhood to attend school. In Cleveland that’s a lot of east side-to-west side commuting for school. If parents, or students have a big problem with another student, or an administrator, or transportation or something, they have other options. When parents were surveyed about this recently, they overwhelmingly affirmed they liked having that choice. For the record, these parents are almost all non white and low income based just on the demographics of the Cleveland public schools.

Where I live, on the west side of Cleveland, there is also a whole ecosystem of charter and catholic schools. Ohio uses a voucher system so kids can attend almost every neighborhood catholic school without paying anything out of pocket (very controversial, I know!). Anyway, as a result, many of those catholic schools are similar demographically to the public schools although they may admit far less kids with disabilities.

I am a bit agnostic on the question of school model: private, public or charter honestly. Just under half of children in Cleveland attend either a private of a charter school and so I think the amount of energy this debate hogs in discussions is a little misplaced, honestly. (Some districts, like Detroit, are 75 percent charter/private at this point and New Orleans is 100%.)

Originally, I had been inclined to the public schools myself, because I attended public school, and I knew the teachers got paid better at the public schools. Plus my district was investing a lot in rebuilding schools in my neighborhood.

But pretty quickly, I found out why middle class neighborhood families had been avoiding them so conscientiously. I was only enrolled for 2 or 3 years, depending on how you count that year of Zoom school, which was a true nightmare for both me and my son. During my short misadventure, I couldn’t help but notice how much more responsive to parents’ concerns the catholic schools seemed to be, even though in many cases, they had worse facilities and lesser trained and experienced teachers.

For example, the neighborhood catholic schools reopened in fall 2020, while my public school remained fully closed until spring and then only opened a few days a week. Neighborhood kids who attended the catholic schools got a good six months more classroom instruction. A doctor friend of mine told me they handled it perfectly from a public health perspective. They took a few precautions, but generally stuck with the program. And there were no huge problems.

I loved all the teachers we had and the facilities at the public schools, but I was also stunned and furious about a few things. The district was just not professionally administered, imo. That was one of my big takeaways. The district couldn’t seem to stick with the school calendar. They’d decide to end a few weeks early (because they added an optional summer school, for eg).

They didn’t make their process for enrolling transparent. I ended up spending months sleuthing to see if the neighborhood school was even an option for us for pre-school and then struggled to confirm we were enrolled. Lots of calls not returned. Lots of dead ends. This was for a parent seeking to enroll a child!

I felt like they were only marginally committed to their actual mission. The full year we were enrolled in zoom school, they didn’t offer us any instruction on Wednesdays, for reasons I thought they never adequately even explained. This is the kind of nonsense, a middle class parent just will not put up with, especially if they have other options.

My experience living in a very poor city like Cleveland, is that a lot of agencies that serve primarily poor people treat them like crap, frankly. Because they can get away with it.

I might have stuck it out honestly at the public schools, if I had a sense that any of this was going to change. Instead, any time I raised a complaint, a bunch of parents shouted me down. It was extremely toxic. The school board listened to my public comment, that was a huge struggle to figure out how to offer, and had the Superintendent write me a letter saying — paraphrasing here — I really don’t blame you for leaving. 🤯

I think it’s worth considering some valid reasons the public school district has seen its enrollment decline. My district is facing a $150 million deficit even though we have passed five levies in the 15 years I’ve lived here. (I voted for all of them with decreasing enthusiasm!) The district used the Biden cash infusion to hire new teachers and pay operational expenses, even though it was a one-time infusion — smdh. And then all the sudden were like “oh shit, we’re broke, we just noticed!” The district is now preparing to close almost 30 schools, something that will be tremendously, tremendously painful for neighborhoods and for the students and staff. I genuinely shudder just thinking about it and feel so bad for the committed staff and the families.

My kids attend a charter school now. The charter school my kids happen to attend is within walking distance — although not the absolute closest to my house — and a handful of their neighborhood friends there also attend. In my neighborhood, there actually isn’t one “neighborhood school,” I would say. That is a bummer in some ways. HOWEVER, the charter school my kids attend draws from the entire county, so it’s actually much more racially and economic diverse than a public school would be most likely. I’ve met a ton of interesting people I wouldn’t have otherwise. About half of students at the school are from Cleveland and half are eligible for free or reduced lunch, fwiw.

Having this option has been a godsend for me. I do think one of the goals with “school choice” was to stabilize some neighborhoods that had just been devastated by disinvestment and abandonment. In Cleveland, school desegregation efforts, busing, contributed a lot to that trend in previous generations. Without access to these charter and private schools, would reinvestment in a handful of Cleveland neighborhoods have happened over the last decade or so? I think it’s doubtful. According to recent Census data, the city notched its first population gain in decades.

I was speaking with a Chicago woman recently who said that the governance problems in cities all stem from not having enough middle-class families. This theory strikes me as not entirely unreasonable.

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I have a new puppy and she needs exercise. So yesterday, I walked her over to the schoolyard park next to my house. It was cold, I admit. I can never remember a winter like this in my 15 years in Cleveland.

It was sunny though. And the light created these blue-yellow contrasts in the snow. I don’t know how long I was out there, maybe 15 minutes. It really wasn’t too big of a deal.

Later that night, a neighbor texted me. She said to check out the moonrise over the school. So I walked outside. Just in my normal clothes. The moon was, indeed, stunning. It was low and large and yellow and clearly visible just above the street by the horizon. It was a nice moment.

I try to enjoy winter. And one thing I think really helps, you gotta get outside a little. Even a short walk, you need that vitamin D on your face. You need to notice the birds already chirping excitedly. They know spring is on the way, even though I think they’re over excited and delusional, considering how long we have to go.

I guess I’m the weird one though, for thinking this. Meanwhile, I was over on Substack complaining about weathermen. (This is my personal vice. I literally don’t know why I do it. I have no self control.) Anyway, people were kind of mad and yelling at me (lol) because I said “wind chill” was sorta BS.

My point wasn’t that it doesn’t feel colder if it’s windy. I get that. I was just kind of pushing back on the tendency on the local news to sensationalize the weather. This “wind chill” number, it sounds so scary. “Oh it’s 7 degrees but it FEELS LIKE -15” or something, that’s what they say. What does -15 degrees “feel like?” How often is it negative 15 with no wind? I’d rather just know the real temperature and if it’s windy.

My dad, a boomer, and a tough-guy type who grew up in Toledo when they still drove cars on the ice to go ice fishing, says wind chill is fake. It wasn’t invented until the 1970s. Apparently, it IS a little controversial. I don’t need to die on that hill though I guess. If you love wind chill and it makes sense to you, more power to you.

I think it’s smart though, these days, to take what you hear on the news with a little bit of a grain of salt. To be a critical news consumer. And I can’t believe I think that since for a long time I worked in the news.

It’s bigger than just the wind chill, this phenomenon. Earlier this week, my husband had the local weather on. They were interviewing parents about the high number of weather-related school closures. One woman said she prioritized her children’s “health,” and that’s why she supported the school closures. As if simply being outside for a few minutes right now as a kid was a major threat. I’ve already written about how I think we are overly cautious about sensational risks like extreme cold, and are too chill about less sexy risks like car crashes and illiteracy and depression.

The whole idea that home is safe and the outside is scary and threatening, for some reason right now that is the conventional wisdom. I‘m just out here shouting into the wilderness, trying to make this point that one of the biggest threats to our well being right now seems to be NOT leaving the house and scrolling ourselves into mental illness. The last surgeon general said loneliness was as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day! It’s important for people’s health that they leave the house. It’s important for children’s health that they see their friends. For lot of kids, without school, they maybe won’t.

Anyway, the news interviewed another woman — I thought this woman was much more reasonable and sympathetic. She said she had a kid with autism, and changes to his/her routine were really difficult for the kid to cope with.

This weather man, well in fairness, it wasn’t even the weatherman, it was this charmless backup anchor, he presented both sides. Then THEN out of nowhere, he said temperatures were so cold children risked hypothermia and frost bite (🙄) standing at bus stops. I don’t know his source was for that, but I just thought, what a load of nonsense.

I’ve lived in Ohio my whole life. I’ve never know anyone who had frostbite — with one exception. A homeless woman from the neighborhood I’m familiar with, she has pretty serious mental health issues and apparently refuses shelter, I noticed had lost the tips of almost all her fingers. I don’t deny this weather is literally life threatening for people like that.

It’s cold in Cleveland right now. Colder than usual by probably 15 or 20 degrees. But children are not in danger of getting frost bite standing at the bus stop. I’m sorry. A friend of mine said to me, we’re teaching these kids a lack of resilience. It’s cold. You put on a few extra layers. We’re in the minority I guess though.

The districts use this “wind chill” composite score to decide whether or not to open schools. But in the summer, they never say, it 95 degrees, BUT with the wind chill, it feels like 87. Then they’re using “heat index.” It seems like these concepts are only useful or applied to weather people to make the weather sound scarier than it maybe is. Not to reassure. I think by refusing to reassure, from time to time, they let the public down.

Obviously, I’m obsessed with school and school closures but it’s bigger than that. We saw this during covid too. In Europe, they didn’t experience the same political polarization around covid that we did. And they didn’t experience the same loss in public trust afterword.

One thing they did a lot more in Europe, I was told, in their public health, was reassure people, especially parents. There really was a lot of real world and scientific data that was quite reassuring with respect to covid and children. But in the US, the rare sexy MISC-C case, that was a bigger headline grabber. That was what would generate more clicks. A lot of people saw this for what it was and tuned out. But some people, I think, were really negatively impacted by it.

We’ve got literally millions of kids right now with anxiety disorders. Telling them they were going to kill their grandma if they stood to close to their classmates at recess or if their mask slides down during preschool, that is a health concern that needs to be baked in to the way we message, or we will get it wrong. It wasn’t wrong, necessarily, for public health officials and the media to encourage caution. At the same time, they should be cautious, imo, about exaggerating risks or not putting them in the proper perspective.

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For some reason, I always feel compelled to mansplain the Trump 2.0 phenomenon to my fellow liberals. I’m pretty sure it only pisses them off!

Still, it does seem like an important thing to grapple with: Why did the people choose Trump? IE what are we doing wrong? And how can we stop doing it? I think this is very important to understand.

One popular partisan explanation, which I think is not helpful, is that the voters are big, old dummies who don’t know what’s best for them. IOW, we haven’t sufficiently lectured to and finger wagged the public into seeing things from our point of view. This is a very alienating position to take with the public! It’s like a gift to Trump, imo.

I am defensive of the American public. I like them more than I like either political party. My charitable interpretation of the 2024 vote is the public kind of hated both sides. This was kind of reasonable, imo, since the Democrats had staged a big cover up of the fact that their sitting president was more or less senile for a year or more. And during that time, they were lecturing everyone in the most obnoxious possible way about the sanctity of democracy.

So the public had two choices: unstable, armed attempted coup guy, or key person in Weekend-at-Bernies presidency cover up. (I hate it here so much.)

It really is a mess though we find ourselves in. The only way forward, in my opinion, is we have to do better. Obviously we have a lot to sort through and figure out on team Democrat. But here’s one thing I would hate to see us lose sight of. Those of us who are spending six hours a day watching MSNBC, or whatever the algorithm equivalent is, overestimate the extent that other people are doing the same thing, and following every twist and turn of federal policy with baited breath.

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The homicide rate is now about 4 per 100,000, nationally. That’s low — super low, not just compared to a few years ago when shit hit the fan with covid. It’s even low compared with eras that were considered super safe. For example, in the book I’m working on, the 1960s and ‘70s, a time of much less fear and greater social trust, the murder rate was about 7 per 100,000 (before it rose precipitously).

This is a big deal. The first of this three-part good news:

#1. Reduced murders

One thing that frustrated me during covid times, was the tendency in all our discourse to flatten death. But I feel pretty strongly that not all deaths are equal in terms of the amount of harm they cause in society. I feel like this is the kind of thing that before covid and before Trump would have been uncontroversial.

For example, heart disease kills 300,000 Americans annually, and I am not trying to minimize that to be clear. But everyone is going to die eventually and something has to go on their death certificate. Some of these are natural deaths of natural causes happening at the end of a long life — not big tragedies or injustices necessarily. Not all deaths are like that.

Murder, meanwhile, is more likely to cut down someone in their prime. AND it is likely to be very traumatic to the families and communities affected. These deaths have massive ripple effects. They are traumatic and cause tremendous suffering.

I want to qualify all this but making it completely clear, I’m not expert on murder. But I am an expert (more or less) on traffic deaths. And so that gives me sort of a clumsy measuring stick for evaluating other leader killers. In an average year, there are 11 or 12 traffic deaths per 100,000 for comparison (which I still think is too high to be clear).

One of the most interesting things I read about this comes from a writer (friend? acquaintance of mine) Henry Grabar, who recently joined the Atlantic. Henry points out that police departments are still short staffed. So that doesn’t seem to be the explanation — police departments staffing up. (Although in Cleveland that is what the mayor attributes it to and is planning further hiring efforts.)

Grabar puts forward the thesis that the Biden Admin’s infusion of cash to localities during the pandemic is responsible for the decline. I thought that was a provocative theory. That some of this funding got at the root causes of violence. Wouldn’t that be hopeful?

Just anecdotally, I know Baltimore, which was notorious for murder — forever immortalized in The Wire — has seen murder rates plummet to the lowest level in 50 years. The mayor there, Brandon Scott, credits, in part, additional programming for youth. I think this is a story and a leader that Democrats and lefties should be emphasizing a lot more right now than they are.

A local expert told the Substack Popular Information that “What Baltimore did that's so impactful is really invested in a whole ecosystem of community–oriented interventions.”

Now I love Grabar’s theory, don’t get me wrong. Back during the pandemic, we closed schools, basketball courts, swimming pools, literally every positive outlet for youth. And then the murder rate like doubled. 🥴 And I kept thinking, what were they expecting? It was like a gift to street gangs.

Anyway, Grabar’s theory basically dovetails exactly with my whole current life philosophy, which is we should be investing more in children and in shared spaces that nurture community life.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle, in my opinion. It’s my second piece of good news:

#2. Reduced traffic deaths

Traffic deaths are ALSO down. This is a big deal also, another leading killer, especially of younger people. In the first half of 2025, they dropped 8 percent year over year. Adjusted for a per mile basis — which is a metric traffic safety people like me hate, but we’ll put that aside for now — the mid-year total was the lowest since 2014.

I am excited about this, even though the numbers still aren’t great. For the last few years been traveling with this chart showing traffic deaths spiking during the pandemic and then leveling off at a higher level. And I truly just thought, this is a disaster if this continues. We’ll have thousands of additional deaths a year if we don’t get back to our more “normal” level quick. (We weren't doing well at all on traffic deaths compared to our international peers even before the pandemic.)

Well, now we see traffic deaths declining yet again. I still wouldn’t say this is a stellar outcome for us. But Ohio is reporting its fourth year in a row of reduced traffic deaths. And while I wish this reduction were more dramatic, it is much better than the reverse.

Now, I want to report about a third good trend:

#3. Reduced overdose deaths

Sam Quinones, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about drug addiction and markets in the U.S. is reporting this week that deaths from Fentanyl have dropped significantly over the last few years.

These numbers, again with my background being traffic safety, always blow my mind. About 72,000 people overdosed from fentanyl in 2025 — which is shockingly high, nearly twice as many as are killed on the roads. The toll of all this is just so massive. Staggering. And again, these deaths are super traumatic for those involved. These kinds of deaths leave babies in foster care. Parents burying their kids. Contribute to crime. Just tear communities and families apart. Just awful, awful stuff.

The good news is, the 2025 numbers were significantly lower than 2024: where 91,000 people were killed this way. Quinones’s expertise, I trust. I read his book Dream Land about the Heroin epidemic which focuses a lot on suburban Columbus, where I grew up and where prescription opioids were devastating, including for many kids I grew up with. He attributes this decline to a reduction in supply.

Federal agents intercepted more fentanyl in 2025 he says, enough to reduce supply. And that, he says, means fewer addicts ODing. He interviews a fentanyl addict, for example, who started going through withdrawal over the last year while taking the same dose, just because of the weakening potency of the supply.

I’m treading lightly here because I’m sure there are folks with alternative theories, and I am no expert on this topic. However, if drug agents seized enough fentanyl to save 20,000 lives, that is a tremendous accomplishment. This has been a profound national crisis. I have to tip my hat when I see government efforts producing those kinds of outcomes, even plausibly.

My theory about why

So, to start off I want to say, I like Grabar’s theory about murders. And I know no real reason to distrust Quinones’ theory about fentanyl supply. It’s interesting however, that we see traffic deaths — another leading killer — following a little bit of the same trend, although I would say drops in this area are not as steep as the others.

Regardless, this is GREAT news. This is one thing I found very concerning during the covid era. Here we are laser focused on reducing one kind of death, and deaths from other causes (importantly causes that are likely to kill young people — traffic deaths, overdoses and gun deaths) all spiked. My theory is a little more boring though I guess, but also something I’ve been chewing on for a long time.

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