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You aren’t indifferent to the current state of the world. You are human.

Two changes could reduce the interactions police have with homeless people. The first is simple: Portlanders could call someone other than the cops. [...] Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who took office in January, is looking at a second fix. She wants to change who the city sends to talk with people living on Portland's streets.

Widening highways is bad for property values in the short term—indeed, the construction of I-5 through Portland in the 1960s kicked out homeowners, depressed home values, and helped set the neighborhood up for decades of disinvestment. Over the longer term, however, there’s evidence that highway caps, just like any other “adaptive reuse” project (think: High Line), can and do help property values rise. In the absence of intentional policies to preserve affordable housing and opportunity—something that Portland has long failed to offer, though that may be slowly changing—there’s really nothing to guarantee that the “restoration” of Albina’s grid will serve the people who have lived there, and suffered the disconnecting presence of I-5, the longest. And that’s on top of the environmental harm that more lanes and more cars are likely to bring. If Portland wants to reconnect neighborhood grids and provide transit and biking infrastructure, why not just do that? Rather than pour half a billion dollars (a cost that is all but sure to rise) into what is, at the end of the day, a wider freeway, the city and state might first try taming traffic with tolls or congestion fees, as New York City is again contemplating. That’s a solution that might help Portland live up to its ultra-progressive reputation. Finally.

When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon’s founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.

This suggests that sun is better for us than previously thought, and the potential risks of minor skin cancer outweigh the risks of not getting enough sunlight. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ever wanted to clear the gunk from your earbuds or headphones? Cleaning earbuds is easy and will make them last longer. Read on for our recommendations.

Everyone needs a base to start from. We are DesignBase. DesignBase is a database of highly curated free resources for all designers.

They are hoarding knowledge and blocking preservation. At some point, the investors who dumped a quarter billion dollars into it will want a return on that investment. Last year, founder Adam D’Angelo indicated they expect to eventually IPO. But market conditions, combined with the results of their ad platform, may force them in different directions — a pivot, merger, or acquisition are always a possibility. When Quora shuts down, and it will eventually shut down one day, all of that collected knowledge will be lost unless they change their isolationist ethos.

It’s not pumpkin or pumpkin spice that’s the problem; it’s the commodification of our resources as somehow exotic when used in non-white foods and comfort when used in white foods. And when we mock certain foods as “white foods,” particularly in America, we’re capitulating to a lie—the lie that anything we eat in the diaspora isn’t touched and flavored by people of color. It’s the ahistorical denial of the complexities of the role of colonialism, slavery, and genocide in the spice trade. And it further snarls the delicate balancing act all diasporic people are forced to embody, in constantly having to understand their selves in relation to the trauma of separation from home and capitalist violence.

Since I’ve been doing the majority of my regular commuting by bike for over 20 years, I thought I’d put up a quick list of my tools for staying warm and dry.

As the city became more progressive and “weird,” full of artists and techies and bikers, it did not have a conversation about its racist past. It still tends not to, even as gentrification and displacement continue in Albina and other neighborhoods.

But the disparities are disconcerting. According to 2010 data, income for white Portlanders was about $62,000 per year. For Black Portlanders, it was $35,000—lower than the national average for Black Americans, which was $43,300. These statistics, sadly, are the story of America. It always has been and Oregon is no exception. But residents of color told me that a bigger problem is that far too many white Portlanders are knowledgeable about these discrepancies, but remain complacent, even dismissive.

How can you “engage” in transportation advocacy? You’re in the right place, since one of our missions here at BikePortland is to get you inspired and informed enough to have a valuable role in local policy and project decisions. But you need tools. Our activism editors Catie Gould and Emily Guise of BikeLoudPDX have put together a list tools they use to sharpen their activism skills. For every person who considers themselves a transportation advocate, there are ten more who are interested in learning more but don’t know where to start. Below you’ll find some of the best tips and resources we’ve come across or learned in our advocacy work.

If you’re a man unsure of what you can do right now to support women, instant changes you can make this very second in your daily life that will make life better for women (and, bonus, for men too!), here you go.

These men don’t exist in a vacuum, yet the Five frequently treat their subjects, and their ineptitude, as existing in one. The Five seems to believe that simply a lack of self-care is the problem in each of the straight men they makeover, unique to each of them, and not an issue of a systemic lack of accountability in men when it comes to household or traditionally feminine labor. The show continually begs for one of the Five to say, out loud, that straight men don’t often know how to take care of themselves because they rely on the labor of others (even, in this case, the labor of five gay men.) The makeovers at the heart of the show could be a jumping off point for a conversation more substantial than about how feeling good is the end-all, be-all goal. For example, it’s fun to joke about “can’t cook” Antoni, but continually he frames food and cooking not as a necessary skill but merely a fun instrument of entertaining. “Food is love,” he says. A nice meal is “special.” Cooking is a great “gift” you can give. What it rarely is, even for the subjects on the show who do cook, is sustenance for a man and his family that he’s rarely expected to make. It’s telling that in order to get so many men on board with cooking that Antoni needs to wrap up the experience as a special occasion and not a new, daily occurrence. [...] Queer Eye might be so in love with mapping out a heart-pulling arc that it won’t throw the Fab Five a good challenge, because freeing men (as much as you can in a 45-minute television show) entombed in ideas of what a Real Man should be is worth exploring right now. Mainstream America is just getting hip to the idea that women’s work in the home (the cleaning, cooking, date-keeping, childcare, etc.) is often invisible, unpaid, and yet implicitly expected on basis of gender alone; an American time use survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2017, on an average day, “19 percent of men did housework—such as cleaning or laundry—compared with 49 percent of women.” At the same time, there’s an ongoing conversation about how to raise boys and what we expect of them in the shadow of their innate privilege and entitlement.

To “advocate” is a verb. It requires you to occasionally stand up in front of other smart people and give voice to the politically unpopular topic that no one else wants to bring up. When you do that, people often try to talk you out of it. Here are some of the responses I’ve heard. After reading through them, I hereby grant you permission to let them roll right off you so you can get back to work.

It is in details like this, whether in the construction of a technical artifact like the French public transit system at the heart of Latour’s Aramis or a strategy game from the 1990s, that we see the texture of how people and machines produce everything around us. It reminds us not just that the world is human-made, but also that specific historical and technical contexts opened imaginations or constrained possibilities.

Note: Most of these answers pertain to the American Crow, _Corvus brachyrhynchos_. Much of the information here is from my own research on crows in central New York; where I used other sources I have tried to reference the material. —Dr. Kevin J. McGowan, Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Black & Pink's mission is to abolish the criminal punishment system and to liberate LGBTQ+ people/people living with HIV who are affected by that system, through advocacy, support, and organizing.

The ideas captured on this website, very much a work in progress, have been developed to support White people to act for racial justice. It draws from ideas and resources developed mostly by Black, Brown and People of Color, and has been edited by Black, Brown, and People of Color. I recognize that categorizing actions under the labels of Actor, Ally, and Accomplice is an oversimplification, but hopefully this chart challenges all of us White folks to go outside of our comfort zones, take some bigger risks, and make some more significant sacrifices because this is what we’ve been asked to do by those most impacted by racism, colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, xenophobia, and hyper-capitalism. I believe that for real change to occur, we must confront and challenge all people, policies, systems, etc., that maintain privileges and power for White people.

When you struggle with your mental health on a daily basis, it can be hard to take action on the things that matter most to you. The mental barriers anxiety creates often appear insurmountable. But sometimes, when you really need to, you can break those barriers down. This week, with encouragement from some great people on the internet, I pushed against my anxiety and made some calls to members of our government. Here’s a comic about how you can do that, too.

One important strategy for being an effective ally is self-education. Women are frequently expected to teach introductory feminism and entertain discussions on “being a woman in tech” with anyone who asks. It’s a great burden to shoulder and frankly a waste of their time. You wouldn’t ask Rasmus to teach you how to write a Hello World program in PHP, right? No! You would go out and find the articles, tutorials, and forum threads that already exist for beginners. With that, we introduce our list of recommended reading for allies.

Relying on members of minority groups to shoulder the burden of diversity issues is just as flawed as expecting one person to do all the work to fix a broken deploy system. You can’t excel at your job when you spend half your time dealing with other stuff. We need ways of spreading the load. We need allies. And we hope that’s why you’re reading this now.

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How many slaves work for you? There are 27 million slaves in the world today. Many of them contribute to the supply chains that end up in the products we use every day. Find out how many slaves work for you, and take action.

Now that the rich are no longer required to pay taxes, death has become the sole universal human predicament. [...] Renouncing one’s own greed, understanding oneself as one small participant in the infinitely long conga line of history, is reassuring, as is the idea that you can contribute to the well-being of those who will survive you. In fact it’s the only real (by which I mean, lasting) balm for the fear that is the inevitable companion of life.