Rachel Aviv, reporting for the New Yorker on Tyrone Hayes’s research on the herbicide atrazine:

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

I arrived at UC Berkeley a few years after Hayes had cut ties with Syngenta, and rumors of this sort were definitely in the air. Couple that with other controversial university funders—Novartis and BP among them—and you can see how it was an interesting place to be at the time.

The unsealing of the Syngenta documents isn’t new, but Aviv has used them along with extensive reporting to craft a riveting narrative of the whole saga.

Ellen Berry, writing for the New York Times:

Hunt for an apartment in New Delhi’s wealthy neighborhoods and this immediately becomes clear: Spacious homes feature tiny, airless spaces known as “servants’ quarters.” Elevators are sometimes marked with signs reading “Not for use by servants.” Landlords asked about installing dishwashers often respond with blank stares, because servants wash the dishes.

That excerpt makes it sound pretty callous, which it is in many ways, but the reality seems far more nuanced.

Sarah Malsin Nir, reporting for the New York Times:

Behind the Golden Arches, older people seeking company, schoolchildren putting off homework time and homeless people escaping the cold have transformed the banquettes into headquarters for the kind of laid-back socializing once carried out on a park bench or brownstone stoop.

There’s an element of the “everyman’s Starbucks” to this article, but it’s more than that. People will always find places to socialize. If owners of the private spaces don’t like it, then we as a society need to consider investing more in public spaces where everyone is welcome.

Daniel Altman, writing at Foreign Policy:

If you believe that poor people are poor because they are stupid or lazy — and that their children probably will be as well — then the issue of inefficient allocation disappears. But if you think that a smart and hardworking child could be born into a poor household, then inefficient allocation
is a serious problem. Solving it would enhance economic growth and boost the value of American assets.

Coral Davenport:

Today, after a decade of increasing damage to Coke’s balance sheet as global droughts dried up the water needed to produce its soda, the company has embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force.

“Increased droughts, more unpredictable variability, 100-year floods every two years,” said Jeffrey Seabright, Coke’s vice president for environment and water resources, listing the problems that he said were also disrupting the company’s supply of sugar cane and sugar beets, as well as citrus for its fruit juices. “When we look at our most essential ingredients, we see those events as threats.”

It’s a step, but if Coke were really serious, they’d have made the CEO available for comment, not the VP for the environment.

Lydia Depillis, reporting for the Washington Post:

“It’s the dumbest idea in the world,” said Phil Levine, mayor of Miami Beach, Fla., speaking at this week’s U.S. Conference of Mayors winter meeting. “People cling on to things that are not the highest and best use for their city. Miami Beach is never going to be a high tech hub. As much as it sounds great, it’s sexy, that’s not who we are.”

Why not? Well, the city has neither a bunch of cheap office space nor good universities, which are two of the key ingredients of a successful start-up culture. But it does have a lot of cruise ships. Instead of buying into the “creative class” dogma, Levine — who himself built a huge cruise ship concessionaire in Miami Beach from scratch — thinks the city should focus on the things it does well.

A chance discovery by a pair of Vermont researchers suggests that densely-planted saplings might be all the maple syrup industry needs, not the mature forests they currently use.

It’s an interesting data point in the “spare or share” debate about agricultural land use, which asks, do we use more ecologically integrated farming techniques over more land, or do we intensify our production on less land? Maple syrup is one of the few crops that harvested exclusively from “natural” land. That it could be produced like a row crop suggests the trend toward intensification is inevitable.

Nicole Perlroth, reporting for the New York Times:

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s domain name system servers.

Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo.

A simple Google search reveals that the address on Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne is not a corporate headquarters, but a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn.

Krystal D’Costa:

When the temperature drops during the winter months, it’s not uncommon to see articles about how to help the homeless. The advice is generally the same: call a city hotline and a special team will be dispatched or consider donating warm weather clothing—and you should of course do both of these things if you know of someone who must be out in the cold. These articles also highlight a large segment of homeless people who turn down help to avoid having to spend the night in a shelter, where they worry their safety and well-being will be compromised in the company of strangers. Where do these people actually go in the face of extreme elements?

Keith Barry, writing for Wired:

Currently, it can take nearly two hours to make the journey between Vila Prudente and Cidade Tiradentes by car. When the monorail is accepting passengers, that time should be cut to 50 minutes. Half a million passengers a day are expected to ride the new Silver Line.

Maybe the reason so many monorails failed was because they were built where there wasn’t a need for any mass transit.

Alex Schmidt, reporting for Boom:

To see what a city formed around a power center looks like going forward, one need look no further than Phoenix, which has been dependent on sales tax for a long time. The incentive is to continue to build sales tax generating centers at the edge of the city, nearer the highway, to capture the consumption of people who live in surrounding areas, and development simply keeps sprawling outward. On the other hand, a property-tax-dependent city has no interest in moving the border of the city. It is interested in increasing the value of land and one way of doing that is having more dense areas, more amenities located in proximity to population.

At issue is how new cities can incorporate in California. Incorporations surged, if I’m not mistaken, following the allocation of vehicle registration fees to localities. But now with that money gone, they’re stuck unless they have a sales tax base (property taxes in the state are severely restricted, depriving municipalities of revenue). 

Justin Gillis, reporting for the New York Times:

Another 15 years of failure to limit carbon emissions could make the problem virtually impossible to solve with current technologies, experts found.

A delay would most likely force future generations to develop the ability to suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and store them underground to preserve the livability of the planet, the report found. But it is not clear whether such technologies will ever exist at the necessary scale, and even if they do, the approach would probably be wildly expensive compared with taking steps now to slow emissions.

I can see this report having an unintended consequence—that people who don’t think we should do anything about carbon emissions today will point to this, saying that it’s already too late, that we don’t have the technology now, so it’s up to future generations to develop that capacity.

Emily Badger, reporting for the Atlantic Cities:

To understand how CalFresh interacts with users, one Code for America fellow, Rebecca Ackerman, signed up for the benefit (after committing not to actually use any of the money).

“We started seeing what it was like to be a client,” says Jacob Solomon, another fellow on the team. “We started seeing what the nature of the communications was. We started getting these letters.”

Some 20 letters, in fact, came over the next seven months, and Solomon has documented all of them in a maddening interactive timeline here. The letters are oddly hostile in tone.

Appalling, really. I know a lot of it is written with legal concerns in mind, but I don’t think anyone wants to be on food stamps, so why not be a little nicer about it?

Nick Stockton, writing for Quartz:

The problem, says architect Tim Stonor of Space Syntax, Ltd., who helped design the London plan, is that segregating cyclists just perpetuates the “us vs. them” mentality that drives the current uneasy dynamic between bikes and cars.

That’s like saying we shouldn’t grade separate trains from roads, that every train track should cross every road so we don’t perpetuate the “us vs. them” mentality of train passengers and cars. It’s a pretty weak argument. 

Eric Jaffe:

Boarnet argues that one branch of the Interstate Highway System should have been reserved entirely for intercity roads. These would be highways running through remote areas with cheap land and sparse populations, so it would make sense to prioritize traffic flow and vehicle capacity. Paying for this branch with a pooled fuel tax would also make sense, because the benefits of low-cost transport and trade redound on everyone.

The other branch of the system would be made up of intracity roads, those running within the city limits. Given the high cost of land and density of population in cities, creating sufficient road capacity and swift vehicle flow would become a pipe dream, so the wiser aim would be transport balance. The logical way to finance these roads, given the great demand for space on them, would be with direct user fees — ideally priced to reduce congestion.

It’s difficult to envision what this two-part system would look like, though we can get a good idea of how the first half would function if we keep the the auxiliary loops and abandon any through-city trunks or spurs.

In that case, I think we’d see a very different world, one where interstates aren’t relied upon for commuting. That would have changed the city-suburb dynamic drastically and perhaps given rail a fighting chance.

It’s from an old article, but Eric Jaffe points out this interesting bit of trivia:

Even in the early years of America’s highway construction craze, a few people recognized the folly of placing major roads through the hearts of cities. In her 1970 book Superhighways – Superhoax, Helen Leavitt famously wrote that Dwight Eisenhower, the president who signed the Interstate Highway Act into law, didn’t realize these roads would run through downtown districts until he saw construction of Interstate 95 in Washington, D.C. Officials looked into relocating the system’s urban highways, but by then it was too late.

Never knew that. Though given how development tends to follow Interstates, it’s inevitable that some would end up bisecting cities. The difference would be that they wouldn’t be disrupting an already functioning urban area, which is significant.

Mark Kinver, reporting for BBC News:

“We found that within a group of lottery winners who had won more than £500,000 that the positive effect was definitely there but after six months to a year, they were back to the baseline.”

Dr White said his team wanted to see whether living in greener urban areas had a lasting positive effect on people’s sense of well-being or whether the effect also disappeared after a period of time.[…]

“What you see is that even after three years, mental health is still better which is unlike many of the other things that we think will make us happy.”

No surprise, really, given that office workers who have a view of just one tree say they’re happier. But it also highlights why we need to deal with the arboreal disparity between rich and poor.

Tuan C. Nguyen, writing for Smithsonian:

One particularly intriguing proposal that futuristic-minded engineers have batted around since the 1960s is the notion of a high-speed train that can transport and pick up passengers at various stops along the route without ever having to actually, you know, stop. A true express train from say, New York to Los Angeles, would offer a much shorter overall commute time and, without the constant stop-and-go, cut down significantly on fuel costs for train operators, which maybe—just maybe—would translate to lower fares for all.

Dan Vergano of National Geographic News interviews Lidar-expert Katharine Johnson about her use of the light-pulse technology in discovering old land-use patterns. 

Fun fact: You don’t need fancy tops like Lidar to spot such patterns—just aerial photography like the sort found in most online maps and a keen pair of eyes. For example.