What is the Sound of No Horn Honking?

It was Halloween morning on the warmest October 31 this New Yorker could remember, and he was pedaling his bike on the path past the block-sized supermarket within the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a gleaming white minivan turned from the road into the parking lot, not pausing to let him go as drivers normally did.

Habits dig and scratch, so the New Yorker yelled “Yo!” while seizing the brakes and pausing. Inside the car was invisible, coated in sunlight. Some force crawled up from the New Yorker’s shins to his shoulders. He pointed the back of his right hand toward the car and folded four fingers toward himself, a gesture that means “go ahead.” The driver had stopped and now had to back up, but then the gleaming white minivan sailed into the parking lot.

A woman stood nearby and seemed to smile moments earlier. The New Yorker made a summary comment about the moment, free of rancor, and looked again at the woman. She had earbuds in and, if she had been smiling, was now just squinting and not looking at the spot where no collision had happened.

Communication failed: it was instinctive reaction that saved drivers and the guy on the CitiBike from a crash.

A few blocks east at the entrance to Steiner Studios, nearly the same dance occurred - and nearly the same confusion clouded our New Yorker, as he thought people would smile or wrinkle their noses or comment. They always had before.

Now they all had buds in their ears. A few couples further along the path spoke quietly as they walked in workout clothes. But for most of the ride, two miles and some change to go, one heard no noise and saw no shared glimpses.

You can rightly fret that people don’t talk to people with whom they disagree. But nest that fret in a sob that it often just seems like people don’t talk.

Crunch and Crunch, and Then Start Crunching

Two things sting in my head as I face a future where megastorms are everyday things and where spontaneous conversations are rare. I have tried since 2001 to whip myself, alone, into stronger physical condition. And I have tried since 2001 to write about how collaboration across banking, engineering, and politics could physically prepare the world for lockdown.

Both endeavors came up short in 2020. That was when I learned that to confront the swirl you can’t fathom and to connect with folks you don’t know, you can do worse than to learn to do a few things over and over and over again, in a circle, in public.

You see, Covid found me having spent many years thinking about climate change, and always looking for the gleaming portal away from landslides and heat strokes and war.  I used to write magazine profiles about architects who sketched silent cities where everyone glided around on hovercraft. 

Now I want to help you vote, and know where to find a higher-quality stove, and knock on your neighbor’s door when the power fails. Again and again and again. 

Thank the change in my exercise routine that fall 2020 impelled. I had been working out, alone at 5 am for decades, counting on these morning runs to nourish the illusion that I was helping the city wake up. By September 2020 the city was thrashing through a nightmare. I was watching empty elevated trains rumble past, making Pavlovian grabs at my neoprene mask when a runner passed in the other direction.

Around that time, I spoke with a neighbor who I had seen around in the gym before lockdown. He has little kids and I have big ones, and he told me that another neighbor named Minh Duong would teach a kids’ workout class once a week after “school.” 

The class got our kids outside, and got them pulling tires down the street, and got them repeating knee-tucks. At a November kids’ showcase with kids swinging kettlebells and dancing with styrofoam noodles, buzz began among parents. And one adult at a time, we started taking his class in the very early morning. 

Photo courtesy of minh duong

Nearly five years on, a group of six remains in Minh’s class, building our leg strength on Wednesday evenings and our backs and midsections on Saturday mornings. What we’ve learned is that reality never runs out of capacity for chaos. When we do the same task again, even when it’s the jumping-jack-pushup blast known as a Burpee, we’re setting our composure and our command against whatever new fractal form the world has presented for itself. Habits habituate you to love a world where danger and silence seep everywhere.

This love of habit, regardless of medal or posted time or trophy, shadows a smarter way to think about the climate crisis. We got into climate chaos by repeatedly pouring extra carbon to hang heavily in the air while repeatedly hoping that someone - a physicist! A celebrity! Al Gore!- would unroll a ladder to lift us above our habits. And we will get out of it by repeatedly leaving things on the supermarket shelf, repeatedly leaving the car at home (maybe to charge), repeatedly reading the electric bill to see where using power from the sun would pay off at once, repeatedly asking our insurance agents and our town councilmember what’s going on with the floodline. Too much carbon has built in the atmosphere for anyone to erase it. We can instead hold it in place and shrink its effect, day after day after day after day, sometimes clumsily but always again. 

One thing you learn from repetition is attention. Minh’s instructions speak to a specific, rather than issuing a catchall “you can do it.” Sit down a lot more…elbows behind your ears…both feet at the same time.  The balm of repeating things involves the specificity that becomes clear when you’ve reached your nth act. When you become more aware of where you’ve placed your elbow - or how you’ve sprinkled your salt or trimmed your cactus’ spores or purled your stitch, or whatever - then you become more aware of how your decisions play out in the material world. You also see where listening to others leads you.

Changes in who’s in power come from repeated phonebanks, walks around neighborhoods, votes.  And changes in how we vote comes in repeated changes to how we define success. The future depends on how routinely and correctly the vast majority of us do many things differently -  again and again and again. 

The rest of the Group is off-camera as I (again) try to flex my calves correctly.

The City Trade: Trading What You Know for What Others Ask

Why put up with the inequality, the noise, the lumbering traffic and the stink? The answer depends on what you consider valuable. In my curriculum, I guide kids to the premise that collaboration across skills, interests and attitudes creates the strongest odds for sustaining  human society peacefully as climate and employment churn. 

In this essay just published on the Atlantic's redesigned CityLab, I dig into what I hope my wife and I are teaching our kids each December when we send them on a scavenger hunt that obliges them to talk to strangers. The essay runs to the sentimental, but the ideas it stirs should get you uncomfortably close to questions about fairness, access, and bias. 

It should also work as a fun read. If it clicks for you, and/or if it prompts hunts of your own with partners of any age, I hope you'll let me know. 

Talk (or Comment) of the Town (and Towns)

I had the good luck last week to work with Sommer Mathis at CityLab, the site where people who think about urban issues go to learn and teach. I wrote a piece reviewing zoning, court and economic data to raise and linger on the idea that the rules restricting what you can build in most towns end up enforcing racist practice. 

I expected the piece to come and go in a day. Instead, it took root. 

I humbly saw more than 900 people share it (no more than 15 of whomo could have been my dad) and watched comments unfold. The comments got into that hairy I-can't-see-you-so-I'll-egg-you territory we know too well in cyberspace. Someone called me a racist, others called each other names, and many people said the choice they faced as to where to live indeed turned out narrower than they'd hoped. 

My conclusion remains that higher sea level and heavier storms will force Americans to live in closer, higher buildings than most places have seen in a century. The reaction to this story about what preserves single-family spread shows that we could all stand a few drills in how to talk productively with each other. Please read and react as you see fit.