Michael Pollan: Congratulations on the book. It is very rare that a book can ignite a national conversation and you’ve done that. I was watching CNN on Monday morning and they did a whole segment on “abundance” — the concept, not your book. They barely mentioned you, but they talked about it as this meme. It has been mainstreamed and at this point it’s floated free of your bylines and it has its own existence in the political ether. That’s quite an achievement, and it comes at a very propitious time. The Democratic Party is flailing, in the market for new ideas and along comes Abundance. The book was finished before Trump took office and it reads quite differently than it probably would have had Kamala Harris won. It’s kind of an interesting head experiment to read it through both lenses, but we are in this lens of Trump having won.

Ezra Klein: One of the questions I’ve gotten a lot in the last couple of days because of things like that CNN segment is actually, what the hell is happening here? Why is this [book] hitting the way it is? The kind of reception and interest we’re getting inside the political system — I’ve been doing this a long time, this is something different. And I think it’s because the sense that if you do not make liberal democracy — and liberals leading a democracy — deliver again, you might just lose liberal democracy, has become chillingly real to people.

And so this world where Joe Biden loses for reelection and his top advisor says, “Well, the problem is elections are four-year cycles and our agenda needs to be measured in decades” — the world where you can say that is gone. You don’t get decades. If you don’t win on the four-year cycle, your agenda is undone and you’ll have serious conversations about what elections look like in the future at all.

Pollan: But a lot of what you’re proposing is going to take a while, building millions of new units of housing.

Klein: No.

Pollan: How do you demonstrate effectiveness within the frame of — 

Klein: This is a learned helplessness that we have gotten into. We built the Empire State Building in a year. When Medicare was passed, people got Medicare cards one year later. It took the Affordable Care Act four years. Under Biden, it took three years for Medicare to just begin negotiating drug prices. We have chosen slowness. And in doing so we have broken the cord of accountability in democracy. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill’s median road completion time is 02027. That’s not because asphalt takes six years to lay down. The reason we didn’t get rural broadband after appropriating $42 billion for it in 02021 isn’t because it takes that long to lay down broadband cable. It doesn’t. It’s a 14-stage process with challenges and plans and counter-proposals. We have chosen slowness because we thought we had the luxury of time. And one of the parts of this book that is present, but if I were rewriting it now, I would write it more strongly, is we need to rediscover speed as a progressive value.

The idea that government delivers at a pace where you can feel it? That’s not a luxury; that’s how you keep a government. And so, this thing where we've gotten used to everything taking forever — literally in the case of California high-speed rail, I think the timeline is officially forever. In China, it’s not like they have access to advanced high-speed rail technology we don’t, or in Spain, or in France. You’re telling me the French work so much harder than we do? But they complete things on a normal timeline. We built the first 28 subways of the New York City subway system in four years; 28 of them reopened in four years. The Second Avenue Subway, I think we started planning for it in the 01950s. So it’s all to say, I think this is something that actually slowly we have forgotten: speed is a choice.

We need to rediscover speed as a progressive value. The idea that government delivers at a pace where you can feel it is not a luxury; it’s how you keep a government.

Look, we can’t make nuclear fusion tomorrow. We can’t solve the hard problem of consciousness (to predict a coming Michael Pollan work), but we can build apartment buildings. We can build infrastructure. We can deliver healthcare. We have chosen to stop. And we’ve chosen to stop because we thought that would make all the policies better, more just, more equitable. There would be more voice in them. And now we look around. And did it make it better? Is liberal democracy doing better? Is the public happier? Are more people being represented in the kind of government we have? Is California better? And the answer is no. The one truly optimistic point of this book is that we chose these problems. And if you chose a problem, you can un-choose it. Not that it’ll be easy, but unlike if the boundary was physics or technology, it’s at least possible. We made the 14-stage process, we can un-make it.

Pollan: You talk a lot about the various rules and regulations that keep us from building. But a lot of them, of course, have very admirable goals. This is the environmental movement. These were victories won in the 01970s at great cost. They protect workers, they protect the disabled, they protect wetlands. How do you decide which ones to override and which ones to respect? How does an Abundance agenda navigate that question?

Derek Thompson: It’s worthwhile to think about the difference between laws that work based on outcomes versus processes. So you’re absolutely right, and I want to be clear about exactly how right you are. The world that we built with the growth machine of the middle of the 20th century was absolutely disgusting. The water was disgusting, the air was disgusting. We were despoiling the country. The month that Dylan Thomas, the poet, died in New York City of a respiratory illness, dozens of people died of air pollution in New York City in the 01940s and it was not front page news at all. It was simply what happened. To live in the richest city, in the richest country in the world meant to have a certain risk of simply dying of breathing.

We responded to that by passing a series of laws: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act. We passed laws to protect specific species. And these laws answered the problems of the 01950s and the 01960s. But sometimes what happens is that the medicine of one generation can yield the disease of the next generation. And right now, I think that what being an environmentalist means to me in the 02020s is something subtly but distinctly different from what being an environmentalist meant in the 01960s.

There was a time when it was appropriate for environmentalism to be a movement of stop, to be a movement of blocking. But what happened is we got so good at saying stop, and so good at giving people legal tools to say stop, and so efficient at the politics of blocking, that we made it difficult to add infill housing and dense housing in urban areas, which is good for the environment, and build solar energy which is good for the environment, and add wind energy, which is good for the environment, and advance nuclear power.

We have to have a more planetary sense of what it means to be an environmentalist. And that means having a new attitude toward building. 

We made it harder to do the things that are necessary to, I think, be an environmentalist in the 02020s, which is to care for global warming, to think about, not just — in some ways we talk about the tree that you can save by saying no to a building that requires tearing down that tree, forgetting about the thousands of trees that are going to be killed if instead of the apartment building being built over that tree, it’s built in a sprawling suburban area that has to knock down a forest. We have to have a more planetary sense of what it means to be an environmentalist. And that means having a new attitude toward building. 

We need to embrace a culture of institutional renewal and ask: what does it really mean to be an environmentalist in the 02020s? It means making it easier to build houses in dense urban areas and making it easier for places to add solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear and maybe even next-generational enhanced geothermal. We need to find a way to match our processes and our outcomes. The Clean Air and Water Act worked in many ways by regulating outcomes. “This air needs to be this clean. This tailpipe cannot have this level of emissions.” That is an outcome-based regulation. What NEPA and CEQA have done is they have not considered outcomes. They are steroids for process elongation. They make it easier for people who want to stop states and companies from doing anything, enacting any kind of change in the physical world, to delay them forever in such a way that ironically makes it harder to build the very things that are inherent to what you should want if you are an environmentalist in the 02020s.

That’s the tragic irony of the environmentalist revolution. It’s not what happened in the 01960s. I don’t hate the environmentalists of the 01960s and 01970s; they answered the questions of their age. And it is our responsibility to take up the baton and do the same and answer the questions for our age, because they are different questions.

Pollan: So I came of age politically in the 01970s, long before you guys did — or sometime before you did. And there was another very powerful meme then called “Limits to Growth.” Your agenda is very much about growth. It’s a very pro-growth agenda. In 01972, the Club of Rome publishes this book. It was a bunch of MIT scientists who put it together using these new tools called computers to run projections: exponential growth, what it would do to the planet. And they suggested that if we didn’t put limits on growth, we would exceed the carrying capacity of the earth, which is a closed system, and civilization would collapse right around now. There is a tension between growth and things like climate change. If we build millions of new units of housing, we’re going to be pouring a lot of concrete. There is more pollution with growth. Growth has costs. So how does an Abundance agenda navigate that tension between growth and the cost of growth?

Klein: I’ve not gotten into talk at all on the [book] tour about really one of my favorite things I’ve written in the book, which is how much I hate the metaphor that growth is like a pie. So if you’ve been around politics at all, you’ve probably heard this metaphor where it’s like they’ll say something like, “Oh, the economy’s not... You want to grow the pie. You don’t just want to cut the pie into ever smaller pieces as redistribution does. Pro-growth politics: you want to grow the pie.”

If you grow a pie —

Pollan: How do you grow a pie?

Klein: — which you don’t.

Pollan: You plant the pie?

Klein: As I say in the book, the problem with this metaphor is it’s hard to know where to start because it gets nothing right, including its own internal structure. But if you somehow grew a pie, what you would get is more pie. If you grow an economy, what you get is change. Growth is a measure of change. An economy that grows at 2% or 3% a year, year-on-year, is an economy that will transform extremely rapidly into something unrecognizable. Derek has these beautiful passages in the book where it’s like you fall asleep in this year and you wake up in this year and we’ve got aspirin and televisions and rocket travel and all these amazing things.

And the reason this is, I think, really important is that this intuition they had was wrong. Take the air pollution example of a minute ago. One thing we now see over and over and over again is that as societies get richer, as they grow, they pass through a period of intense pollution. There was a time when it was London where you couldn’t breathe. When I grew up in the 01980s and 01990s outside Los Angeles, Los Angeles was a place where you often couldn’t breathe. Then a couple of years ago it was China, now it’s Delhi. And it keeps moving. But the thing is as these places get richer, they get cleaner. Now, London’s air is — I don’t want to say sparkling, air doesn’t sparkle and I’m better at metaphors than the pie people — but it’s quite breathable; I’ve been there. And so is LA, and it’s getting cleaner in China. And in the UK, in fact, they just closed the final coal-powered energy plant in the country ahead of schedule.

Progressivism needs to put technology much more at the center of its vision of change because the problems it seeks to solve cannot be solved except by technology in many cases.

I think there are two things here. One is that you can grow — and in fact our only real chance is to grow — in a way that makes our lives less resource-intensive. But the second thing that I think is really important: I really don’t like the term pro-growth politics or pro-growth economics because I don’t consider growth always a good thing. If you tell me that we have added a tremendous amount of GDP by layering coal-fired power plants all across the country, I will tell you that’s bad. If we did it by building more solar panels and wind turbines and maybe nuclear power, that would be good. I actually think we have to have quite strong opinions on growth. We are trying to grow in a direction, that is to say, we are trying to change in a direction. And one of the things this book tries to do is say that technology should come with a social purpose. We should yoke technology to a social purpose. For too long we’ve seen technology as something the private sector does, which is often true, but not always.

The miracles of solar and wind and battery power that have given us the only shot we have to avoid catastrophic climate change have been technological miracles induced by government policy, by tax credits in the U.S. and in Germany, by direct subsidies in China. Operation Warp Speed pulled a vaccine out of the future and into the present. And then, when it did it, it said the price of this vaccine will be zero dollars.

There are things you can achieve through redistribution. And they’re wonderful and remarkable and we should achieve them. But there are things you can achieve, and problems you can only solve, through technology, through change. And one of the core views of the book, which we’ve been talking a bit less about on the trail, is that progressivism needs to put technology much more at the center of its vision of change because the problems it seeks to solve cannot be solved except by technology in many cases. 

Pollan: There’s a logic there though. There’s an assumption there that technology will arrive when you want it to. I agree, technology can change the terms of all these debates and especially the debate around growth. But technology doesn’t always arrive on time when you want it. A lot of your book stands on abundant, clean energy, right? The whole scenario at the beginning of the book, which is this utopia that you paint, in so many ways depends on the fact that we’ve solved the energy problem. Can we count on that? Fusion has been around the corner for a long time.

Klein: Well, nothing in that [scenario] requires fusion. That one just requires building what we know how to build, at least on the energy side.

Pollan: You mean solar, nuclear and — 

Klein: Solar, nuclear, wind, advanced geothermal. We can do all that. But Derek should talk about this part because he did more of the reporting here, but there are things we don’t have yet like green cement and green fuel.

Pollan: Yeah. So do we wait for that or we build and then — 

Thompson: No, you don’t wait.

Pollan: We don’t wait, no?

Thompson: Let’s be deliberate about it. Why do we have penicillin? Why does penicillin exist? Well, the story that people know if they went to medical school or if they picked up a book on the coolest inventions in history is that in 01928 Alexander Fleming, Scottish microbiologist, went on vacation. Comes back to his lab two weeks later, and he’s been studying staphylococcus, he’s been studying bacteria. And he looks at one of his petri dishes. And the staphylococcus, which typically looks, under a microscope, like a cluster of grapes. (In fact, I think staphylococcus is sort of derived from the Greek for grape cluster.) He realizes that it’s been zapped. There’s nothing left in the petri dish. And when he figures out that there’s been some substance that maybe has blown in through an open window that’s zapped the bacteria in the dish, he realizes that it’s from this genus called penicillium. And he calls it penicillin.

Left: Sample of penicillium mold, 01935. Right: Dr. Alexander Fleming in his laboratory, 01943.

So that’s the breakthrough that everybody knows and it’s amazing. Penicillin blew in through an open window. God was just like, “There you go.” That’s a story that people know and it’s romantic and it’s beautiful and it’s utterly insufficient to understand why we have penicillin. Because after 13 years, Fleming and Florey and Chain, the fellows who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the discovery of and nourishing of the discovery of penicillin, were totally at a dead end. 01941, they had done a couple of studies with mice, kind of seemed like penicillin was doing some stuff. They did a couple human trials on five people, two of them died. So if you stop the clock 13 years after penicillin’s discovery, and Ezra and I were medical innovation journalists in the 01940s and someone said, “Hey folks. How do you feel about penicillin, this mold that blew in through a window that killed 40% of its phase one clinical trial?” We’d be like, “Sounds like it sucks. Why are you even asking about it?”

But that’s not where the story ends, because Florey and Chain brought penicillin to America. And it was just as Vannevar Bush and some incredibly important mid-century scientists and technologists were building this office within the federal government, a wartime technology office called the Office of Scientific Research and Development. And they were in the process of spinning out the Manhattan Project and building radar at Rad Lab at MIT. And they said, “Yeah, we’ll take a look at this thing, penicillin. After all, if we could reduce bacterial infections in our military, we could absolutely outlive the nemesis for years and years.” So, long story short, they figure out how to grow it in vats. They figure out how to move through clinical trials. They realize that it is unbelievably effective at a variety of bacteria whose names I don’t know and don’t mean grape for grape clusters. And penicillin turns out to be maybe the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century.

It wasn’t made important because Fleming discovered it on a petri dish. It was made real, it was made a product, because of a deliberate federal policy to grow it, to test it, to distribute it. Operation Warp Speed is very similar. mRNA vaccines right now are being tried in their own phase three clinical trials to cure pancreatic cancer. And pancreatic cancer is basically the most fatal cancer that exists. My mom died of pancreatic cancer about 13 years ago. It is essentially a kind of death sentence because among other things, the cancer produces very few neoantigens, very few novel proteins that the immune system can detect and attack. And we made an mRNA vaccine that can attack them. 

Why does it exist? Well, it exists because, and this is where we have to give a little bit of credit if not to Donald Trump himself, at least [Alex] Azar, and some of the bureaucrats who worked under him, they had this idea that what we should do in a pandemic is to fund science from two ends. We should subsidize science by saying, “Hey, Pfizer or Moderna or Johnson & Johnson, here’s money up front.” But also we should fund it — and this is especially important — as a pull mechanism, using what they call an advanced market commitment. “If you build a vaccine that works, we’ll pay you billions of dollars so that we buy it out, can distribute it to the public at a cost of zero dollars and zero cents. Even if you’re the ninth person to build a vaccine, we’ll still give you $5 billion.” And that encourages everybody to try their damndest to build it.

So we build it, it works. They take out all sorts of bottlenecks on the FDA. They even work with Corning, the glass manufacturer, to develop these little vials that carry the mRNA vaccines on trucks to bring them to CVS without them spoiling on the way. And now we have this new frontier of medical science.

Left: A mural in Budapest of Hungarian-American biochemist Katalin Karikó, whose work with Drew Weissman on mRNA technology helped lay the foundation for the BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines. Photo by Orion Nimrod. Right: President Donald J. Trump at the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit, December 02020.

Pollan: Although it’s in jeopardy now. Scientists are removing mRNA from grant applications — 

Klein: That is a huge —

Thompson: Total shanda.

Klein: That is a shanda, but also an opportunity for Democrats.

Pollan: How so?

Klein: Because Donald Trump took the one thing his first administration actually achieved and lit it on fire. And appointed its foremost — I feel like if I say this whole sequence aloud, I sound insane — and appointed the foremost enemy of his one actually good policy to be in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. And also: it’s a Kennedy.

Pollan: I know, you couldn’t make this shit up.

Klein: Look, there is a world where Donald Trump is dark abundance.

Pollan: Dark abundance, like dark energy.

We’re not just hoping technology appears. Whether or not it appears is, yes, partially luck and reality, but it’s also partially policy. We shift luck, we shift the probabilities. 

Klein: Yes. And it’s like: all-of-the-above energy strategy, Warp Speed for everything, build everything everywhere, supercharge American trade, and no civil liberties and I’m king. Instead, he hates all the good stuff he once did or promised. Trying to destroy solar and wind, destroyed Operation Warp Speed and any possibility for vaccine acceleration. And you could just go down the line. 

And what that creates is an opportunity for an opposition that isn’t just a defense of American institutions as they existed before. One of the most lethal things the Democrats ever did was allow Donald Trump to negatively polarize them into the defenders of the status quo. What it allows now is for an opposition party to arise, yes, as a resistance to what Donald Trump is trying to do to the federal government, but is also a vision for a much more plentiful future. And that’s plentiful, materially, but plentiful scientifically. The thing that Derek, in that beautiful answer, is saying in response to your very good question, to put it simply, is that we’re not just hoping technology appears. Whether or not it appears is, yes, partially luck and reality — whether or not the spore blew in on the heavenly breeze — but it’s also partially policy. We shift luck, we shift the probabilities. 

Democrats have these yard signs which have been so helpful for our book. They always say, “We believe in science.” Don’t believe in science, do science and then make it into things people need. We focus a lot in the back half of the book on the way we do grant work and the NIH because it’s really important. No, it shouldn’t be destroyed. No, the scientists shouldn’t all be fired or unable to put the word mRNA in their grant proposals because the people who promised to bring back free speech are now doing Control+F and canceling grants on soil diversity because Control+F doesn’t know the difference between DEI “diversity” and agricultural soil “diversity.”

But it’s also not good that in virtually every study you run of this, the way we do grant making now pushes scientists towards more herd-like ideas, safer ideas, away from daring ideas, away from things that are counterintuitive. A lot of science requires risk and it requires failure. And the government should be in the business of supporting risk and failure. And by the way, we give Democrats a lot of criticism here, but this is a huge problem that Republicans have created and that they perpetuate.

Great science often sounds bizarre. You never know what you’re going to get from running shrimp on a treadmill. We got GLP-1s because somebody decided to start squeezing the venom out of a lizard’s mouth and seeing what it could do. And nobody thought it was going to give us GLP-1s. And they didn’t even realize for a long time really what they had. You need a system that takes science so seriously, that believes in it so much that it really does allow it to fail. And so when Donald Trump stands up there and is like, “We're making mice transgender” — which, one: we’re not. But two: maybe we should?

Pollan: San Francisco answer.

The first monograph on goldfish published in Europe.

Stefan Sagmeister looks at the world from a long-term perspective and presents designs and visualizations that arrive at very different conclusions than you get from Twitter and TV news.

About Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister has designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, and the Guggenheim Museum. He’s a two time Grammy winner and also earned practically every important international design award.

Stefan talks about the large subjects of our lives like happiness or beauty, how they connect to design and what that actually means to our everyday lives. He spoke 5 times at the official TED, making him one of the three most frequently invited TED speakers.

His books sell in the hundreds of thousands and his exhibitions have been mounted in museums around the world. His exhibit ’The Happy Show' attracted way over half a million visitors worldwide and became the most visited graphic design show in history.

A native of Austria, he received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright Scholar, a master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York.

The first full-length work of apiculture published in English.

It was at the invitation of The Long Now Foundation that I visited Mount Washington for the first time as a graduate student. Camping out the first night on the mountain with my kind and curious Long Now friends, I could sense that the experience was potentially transformative — that this place, and this community, had together created a kind of magic. The next morning, we packed up our caravan of cars and made our way up the mountain. I tracked the change in elevation out the car window by observing how the landscape changed from sagebrush to pinyon and juniper trees, to manzanita and mixed conifer, and finally to the ancient bristlecone pines. As we rose, the view of the expansive Great Basin landscape grew below us. It was then that I knew I had to be a part of the community stewarding this incredibly meaningful place. 

I’d entered graduate school following an earlier life working on long-term environmental monitoring networks across the U.S. and Latin America, and was attracted to the mountain’s established research network. My early experiences and relationships with other researchers had planted the seeds of appreciation for research which takes the long view of the world around us. Now, as a research professor at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and a Long Now Research Fellow, I’m helping to launch a new scientific legacy in the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve. Of course, no scientific legacy is entirely new. My work compiling the first decade of observational climate data builds on decades of research in order to help carry it into the future — one link in a long line of scientists who have made my work possible. Science works much like an ecosystem, with different disciplines interweaving to help tell the story of the whole. Each project and scientist builds on the successes of the past. 

Unfortunately, the realities of short-term funding don’t often align with a long-term vision for research. Scientists hoping to answer big questions often find it challenging to identify funding that will support a project beyond two to three years, making it difficult to sustain the long-term research that helps illuminate changes in landscapes over time. This reality highlights the value of partnering with The Long Now Foundation. Their support is helping me carry valuable research into the future to understand how rare ecosystems in one of the least-monitored regions in the country are adapting to a warming world. 

Left: The Sagebrush East Weather station is a key monitoring post within the NevCAN network. Photo by Anne Heggli. Right: Anne Heggli, Bjoern Bingham and Greg McCurdy working on upgrading one of the 8 stations that make up the NevCAN network. Photo by Scotty Strachan.

The Nevada Bristlecone Preserve stretches across the high reaches of Mount Washington on the far eastern edge of Nevada. Growing where nearly nothing else can, the bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) that lend the preserve its name have a gnarled, twisted look to them, and wood so dense that it helps protect the tree from rot and disease. Trees in this grove are known to be nearly 5,000 years old, making them among the oldest living trees in the world. Because of the way trees radiate from their center as they grow, adding one ring essentially every year, scientists can gain glimpses of the past by studying their cores. Counting backward in time, we can visualize years with plentiful water and sunlight for growth as thicker, denser lines indicating a higher growth rate. Trees this old provide a nearly unprecedented time capsule of the climate that produced them, helping us to understand how today’s world differs from the one of our ancestors. 

L: The view from the mine site midway up Mt. Washington, looking west. Photo by Anne Heggli. C: View from the Montane station looking at Mt. Washington. Photo by Dan McEvoy. R: The field crew uploading gear to upgrade the highest elevation station in Nevada in the subalpine region of Mt. Washington. Photo by Bjoern Bingham.

This insight has always been valuable but is becoming even more critical as we face increasing temperatures outside the realm of what much of modern life has adapted to. My research aims to provide a nearly microscopic look at how the climate in the Great Basin is changing, from hour to hour and season to season. With scientific monitoring equipment positioned from the floor of the Great Basin’s Spring Valley up to the peak of Mount Washington, our project examines temperature fluctuations, atmospheric information, and snowpack insights across the region’s ecosystems by collecting data every 10 minutes. Named the Nevada Climate-Ecohydrological Assessment Network, or NevCAN, the research effort is now in its second decade. First established in part by my predecessors at DRI along with other colleagues from the Nevada System of Higher Education, the project offers a wealth of valuable climate monitoring information that can contribute to insights across scientific disciplines. 

Thanks to the foresight of the scientists who came before me, the data collected provides insight across ecosystems, winding from the valley floor’s sagebrush landscape to Mount Washington’s mid-elevation pinyon-juniper woodlands, to the higher elevation bristlecone pine grove, before winding down the mountain’s other side. The data from Mount Washington can be compared to a similar set of monitoring equipment set up across the Sheep Range just north of Las Vegas. Here, the lowest elevation stations sit in the Mojave Desert, among sprawling creosote-brush and Joshua trees, before climbing up into mid-elevation pinyon-juniper forests and high elevation ponderosa pine groves. 

Having over 10 years of data from the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve allows us to zoom in and out on the environmental processes that shape the mountain. Through this research, we’ve been able to ask questions that span timelines, from the 10-minute level of our data collection to the 5,000-year-old trees to the epochal age of the rocks and soil underlying the mountain. We can look at rapid environmental changes during sunrise and sunset or during the approach and onset of a quick thunderstorm. And we can zoom out to understand the climatology by looking at trends in changes in precipitation and temperature that impact the ecosystems. 

L: Anne Heggli working analyzing the snowpack from a snow pit measurement. Photo by Elyse DeFranco. C: Anne Heggli, Greg McCurdy and Bjoern Bingham working and enjoying lunch while upgrading the Montane station on Mount Washington. Photo by Dan McEvoy. R: Anne Heggli jumping for joy at Sagebrush West station that the team is putting the necessary time and upgrades into the NevCAN transect. Photo by Bjoern Bingham.

Scientists use data to identify stories in the world around us. Data can show us temperature swings of more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in just 10 minutes with the onset of a dark and cold thunderstorm in the middle of August. We can observe the impacts of the nightly down-sloping winds that drive the coldest air to the bottom of the valley, helping us understand why the pinyon and juniper trees are growing at higher elevation, where it’s counterintuitively warmer. These first 10 years of data allow us to look at air temperature and precipitation trends, and the next 20 years of data will help us uncover some of the more long-term climatological changes occurring on the mountain. All the while, the ancient bristlecone pines have been collecting data for us over centuries — and millennia — in their tree rings. 

The type of research we’re doing with NevCAN facilitates scientific discovery that crosses the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines. The scientists who founded the program understood that the data collected on Mount Washington would be valuable to a range of researchers in different fields and intentionally brought these scientists together to create a project with foresight and long-term value to the scientific community. Building interdisciplinary teams to do this kind of science means that we can cross sectors to identify drivers of change. This mode of thinking acknowledges that the atmosphere impacts the weather, which drives rain, snow, drought, and fire risk. It acknowledges that as the snowpack melts or the monsoonal rains fall, the hydrologic response feeds streams, causes erosion, and regenerates groundwater. The atmospheric and hydrological cycles impact the ecosystem, driving elevational shifts in species, plant die-offs, or the generation of new growth after a fire. 

To really understand the mountain, we need everyone’s expertise: atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, ecologists, dendrochronologists, and even computer scientists and engineers to make sure we can get the data back to our collective offices to make meaning of it all. This kind of interdisciplinary science offers the opportunity to learn more about the intersection of scientific studies — a sometimes messy process that reflects the reality of how nature operates. 

Conducting long-term research like NevCAN is challenging for a number of reasons beyond finding sustainable funding, but the return is much greater than the sum of its parts. In order to create continuity between researchers over the years, the project team needs to identify future champions to pass the baton to, and systems that can preserve all the knowledge acquired. Over the years, the project’s technical knowledge, historical context, and stories of fire, wildlife, avalanches, and erosion continue to grow. Finding a cohesive team of dedicated people who are willing to be a single part of something bigger takes time, but the trust fostered within the group enables us to answer thorny and complex questions about the fundamental processes shaping our landscape.  

Being a Long Now Research Fellow funded by The Long Now Foundation has given me the privilege of being a steward of this mountain and of the data that facilitates this scientific discovery. This incredible opportunity allows me to be a part of something larger than myself and something that will endure beyond my tenure. It means that I get to be a mentee of some of the skilled stewards before me and a mentor to the next generation. In this way we are all connected to each other and to the mountain. We connect with each other by untangling difficult scientific questions; we connect with the mountain by spending long days traveling, camping, and experiencing the mountain from season to season; and we connect with the philosophy of The Long Now Foundation by fostering a deep appreciation for thinking on timescales that surpass human lifetimes. 

To learn more about Anne’s work, read A New Tool Can Help Protect California and Nevada Communities from Floods While Preserving Their Water Supply on DRI’s website. 

This essay was written in collaboration with Elyse DeFranco, DRI’s Lead Science Writer. 

Eighth instalment in our series of extremely small and free-form cryptic crossword puzzles, themed on our latest essay.

Papal elections begin, in 2025 and 1268.

In the 19th century, dyed ostrich feathers were haute couture, adorning the hats and boas of fashionistas on both sides of the Atlantic. Whitney Rakich examines the far-reaching ostrich industry through a peculiar do-it-yourself-style book: Alexander Paul's The Practical Ostrich Feather Dyer (1888), a text interleaved with richly colored specimens.

Aby Warburg spent his life finding forms that could hold their own against the flow of time. All the while, as Kevin Dann explores, he was churning on the brink of madness with the sense that he himself was changing — into a terrifying animal. What kind of history would a werewolf write?

Images gathered during a survey by Ferdinand V. Hayden, who was responsible for the designation of Yellowstone as a national park.

Woodcut knots likely inspired by Mamluk decorative metalwork.

2 special screenings of a new LOST LANDSCAPES film by Rick Prelinger will be on Wednesday 12/3/25 and Thursday 12/4/25 at the Herbst Theater. Long Now Members can reserve a pair of tickets on either night!

Each year LOST LANDSCAPES casts an archival gaze on San Francisco and its surrounding areas. The film is drawn from newly scanned archival footage, including home movies, government-produced and industrial films, feature film outtakes and other surprises from the Prelinger Archives collection and elsewhere.

A 1925 Soviet Children's book about a little screw whose importance is overlooked.

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The post Spring Eases In first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

In January, 2025, my girlfriend Barb Ash and I took a two-week trip to Quintana Roo and the Yucatan in Mexico. The hand of the woman sitting in front of me on the plane looked like an alien flesh-crab. Those nails! What if it hopped loose and scuttled around? The spacetime of air travel is […]

The post Quintana Roo & the Yucatan first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

And now came bad news from Louisville. My big brother Embry was suddenly dying of cancer. It came on very quickly. I flew back to Louisville, with my son Rudy Jr. along, and we had a chance to say our goodbyes to Embry. He was very weak. It was good to be together. I held […]

The post Embry's Death. Christmas 2024. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

As a product builder over too many years to mention, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.

Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people's real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it's tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here's why:

When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, "If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they'll love me!" But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don't like it? When a hard-fought feature isn't as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?

This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried's book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn't always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by "the Columbo Effect"… when there's always "just one more thing…" that someone wants to add.

The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

So what's a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?

That's where the concept of "bedrock" comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It's the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.

In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.

Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy's at.

But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the "MVP" approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.

It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you're not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional "opinionated user interface design" (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.

So what are the key strategies I've learned from my own experience and research?

1. Start with a clear "why": What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company's objectives, too.
2. Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
3. Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
4. Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn't a fixed destination—it's a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
5. Stop, look and listen: Don't just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.

There's an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.

So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), "The best way to predict the future is to create it."

Seventh instalment in our series of extremely small and free-form cryptic crossword puzzles, themed on our latest essay.

In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal at the age of 19. Rereading this often-forgotten debut, Hunter Dukes finds a voice that hungers for worldly experience, brims with bisexual longing, and rages against the injustices of youth.

Lynn J. Rothschild is a research scientist at NASA Ames and Adjunct Professor at Brown University and Stanford University working in astrobiology, evolutionary biology and synthetic biology. Rothschild's work focuses on the origin and evolution of life on Earth and in space, and in pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration.

From 2011 through 2019 Rothschild served as the faculty advisor of the award-winning Stanford-Brown iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) team, exploring innovative technologies such as biomining, mycotecture, BioWires, making a biodegradable UAS (drone) and an astropharmacy. Rothschild is a past-president of the Society of Protozoologists, fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club and lectures and speaks about her work widely.

Photographs of the life-size doll that Kokoschka had made to resemble his ex-lover Alma Mahler.

Images from a ritual practised for 127 generations.

Pamphlets on sea beasts produced for the International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883.

I'm probably going to be scarce around these parts (my blog) for the next several weeks, because real life is having its say.

In the short term, it's not bad news: I'm going to the British Eastercon in Belfast next weekend, traveling there and back by coach and ferry (thereby avoiding airport security theatre) and taking a couple of days extra because I haven't been back to Belfast since 2019. Needless to say, blogging will not be on my list of priorities.

Yes, I'm on some programme items while I'm there.

Longer term: I'm 60, I have some health problems, those go with the territory (of not being dead). I've been developing cataracts in both eyes and these are making reading and screen-work fatiguing, so I'm seeing a surgeon on May 1st in order hopefully to be given a schedule for being stabbed in both eyes over the coming months. Ahem: I mean, cataract surgery. Note that I am not looking for advice or help at this time, I've got matters well in hand. (Yes, this is via the NHS. Yes, private surgery is an option I've investigated: if the NHS can handle it on roughly the same time scale and not bill me £3500 per eye I will happily save the money. Yes, I know about the various replacement lens options and have a good idea of what I want. No, do not tell me your grisly stories about your friends who went blind, or how different lens replacement surgery is in Ulan Bator or Mississippi, or how to work the American medical insurance hellscape—all of these things are annoying and pointless distractions and reading is fatiguing right now.)

I have another health issue under investigation so I'm getting a colonoscopy the day after I see the eye surgeon, which means going straight from blurred vision from mydriatic eye drops to blurred vision from the world falling out of my arse, happy joy. (Again: advice not wanted. I've have colonoscopies before, I know the routine.)

Of course, with eye surgery likely in the next couple of months of course the copy-edits for The Regicide Report will inevitably come to me for review at the same time. (Again: this is already taken into account, and the editors are aware there might be a slight scheduling conflict.)

... And while I'm not dealing with medical stuff or copy edits I've got to get my annual accounts in order, and I'm trying to work on two other novels (because the old space opera project from 2015 needs to be finished some decade or other, and meanwhile a new attack novel is badgering me to write it).

(Finally, it is very difficult to write science fiction when the wrong sort of history is dominating the news cycle 24x7, especially as the larger part of my income is based on sales of books paid for in a foreign currency, and the head of state of the nation that backs that currency seems to be trying to destroy the international trade and financial system. I'm managing, somehow—I now have the first two chapters of a Stainless Steel Rat tribute novel set in my new space opera universe—but it's very easy to get distra—oh fuck, what's Trump done now?)

PS: the next book out, in January 2026, will be The Regicide Report, the last Bob/Mo Laundry novel (for now). It's been accepted and edited and it's in production. This is set in stone.

The space opera I began in 2015, my big fat Iain M. Banks tribute novel Ghost Engine, is currently 80% of the way through it's third re-write, cooling down while I try and work out what I need to do to finally stick the ending. It is unsold (except in the UK, where an advance has been paid).

The other current project, begun in 2025, is going to be my big fat tribute to Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat, titled Starter Pack. It's about 1 week old and maybe 10% written in first draft. Do not ask when it's coming out or I will be very rude indeed (also, see health stuff above).

Those two are both set in the same (new) universe, a fork of the time-line in my 2010 Hugo winning time travel novella Palimpsest.

There's also a half-written New Management novella gathering dust, pending feedback on the Laundry/New Management and what to do next, but nothing is going to happen with that until after The Regicide Report is in print and hopefully I've got one or two space operas written and into production.

Bear in mind that these are all uncommissioned/unsold projects and may never see the light of day. Do not make any assumptions about them! They could be cancelled tomorrow if Elon Musk buys all the SF publishers or Donald Trump imposes 10,000% tariffs on British exports of science fiction or something. All warranties expired on everything globally on January 20th 2025, and we're just along for the ride ...

In the early twentieth century, architects turned to a newly discovered past to craft novel visions of the future: the ancient history of Mesopotamia. Eva Miller traces how both the mythology of Babel and reconstructions of stepped-pyramid forms influenced skyscraper design, speculative cinema in the 1910s and 20s, and, above all else, the retrofuturist dreams of Hugh Ferriss, architectural delineator extraordinaire.

Sixth instalment in our series of extremely small and free-form cryptic crossword puzzles, themed on our latest essay.

Well, the executive summary for this one is that we’re probably facing VERY significant price hikes across the board that are likely to seriously impact consumers, businesses, Internet firms that build those massive data centers, basically everybody. These technologies are of course now fundamental to our everyday lives.

The administration has now announced what would be a total tariff on China of over 100%. The fact is tariffs ARE effectively taxes and they’re paid by us in the importing country not by the exporting country. And part of what likely is driving a lot of confusion is that we’re often getting conflicting statements and conflicting ideas about what the goals of these tariffs are.

Are they to raise money? To punish countries for their own tariff regimes? To punish countries for trade imbalances? Some combination? Tariffs WILL raise money for the government, but again that tariff money is coming from us not from those other countries. And not all trade imbalances are necessarily horrible things, they can represent the fact that the U.S. is a relatively wealthy country that can choose how and where to obtain products the most economically, especially when making them locally isn’t really practical.

There are conflicting signals from the administration regarding whether the tariffs are negotiation tactics and/or if they’re intended to try drive manufacturing back to the U.S., and those goals also can easily be in conflict with each other.

It’s understandable why there’s nostalgia toward the period many years ago when the U.S. was a manufacturing powerhouse before it moved more into the services sector over the decades. But realistically that’s being somewhat viewed through rose-tinted 20/20 hindsight. Right now we’re a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Not just the U.S. but the entire global trade, manufacturing, and supply chains have utterly changed since way back then, in many ways significantly to the advantage of the U.S economy overall in the long run.

Now maybe in theory, if you were willing to spend enough on factories and had workers willing to work at wages similar to those paid in countries like China for example, and you were willing to wait the years necessary to build up those factories and infrastructures — maybe theoretically you could get some significant portion of that high tech manufacturing back, assuming stable economic signals from the government.

But is this practical? Well, there’s the rub. The infrastructure, the resources (some of which like rare earths are almost completely controlled by countries like China), engineering expertise, worker structures, and all the rest do not seem as if they’re likely to ever significantly return here anything like they once were.

Take the iPhone as just one example, because as I said, this affects these industries across the board. Something like 90% of iPhones are reportedly manufactured in China. It’s estimated that it would take three very disruptive years, and 30 billion dollars for Apple to move just 10% of their supply chain from Asia to the U.S.

And since you can’t reasonably expect U.S. workers to work for Chinese wages, plus so many other costs that are much higher here, you’d probably be looking at iPhones that could cost three times as much as they do currently.

Now the billionaires would still have those silly grins on their faces and couldn’t care less about much higher prices whether from tariffs or anything else. But for ordinary consumers and even firms of pretty much every size, the effects from the kinds of price increases we’re likely see from these tariffs on a vast array of tech products can’t help but have major negative impacts. The additional costs to consumers and businesses will likely be dramatic and could trigger many additional negative ripple effects.

In a short report like this I can’t really do more than address the tip of this giant iceberg, but the bottom line is that at least as far as the tech segment is concerned, it’s very difficult to find realistically optimistic aspects to any of this. We should keep our eyes open for any positive developments of course, but this is yet another one of those situations where it’s probably not a great idea to hold your breath.

–Lauren–

Sheet music whose notes have been replaced by rambunctious cats.

Edo-era prints of a loving demon with adopted or biological son.

An encyclopedic tome of health advice that unpicks the biases of its time.

Fifth instalment in our series of extremely small and free-form cryptic crossword puzzles, themed on our latest essay.

Held in Jim Crow-era Nevada on the 4th of July, the 1910 World Heavyweight Championship was slated to be a fight to remember. Moonlighting as a boxing journalist, novelist Jack London cheered on Jim Jeffries — ringside and on the page — as the "Great White Hope", a contender to take back the title from Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion. Andrew Rihn examines the contradictions of London's racial rhetoric, which is more complex and convoluted than it may initially appear.

Perhaps the first work of puppet animation, featuring a cast composed of dead bugs.

Social Security is in a DOGE-created crisis, and seniors are already at terrible risk.

DOGE moved quickly to order massive changes to Social Security, originally to essentially end all phone-based Social Security support, and then after major blowback to that — since so many people dependent on Social Security don’t use computers or have Internet — this was revised to continue phone support other than for changes to functions like payment accounts, and also for identification issues. Those crucial functions will no longer be doable by phone and will have to be by Internet — which again many of the people who need Social Security can’t use, or via in person visits to Social Security offices — which can be difficult or completely impossible for many elderly or disabled persons, especially in rural areas.

On top of this, DOGE ordered the closure of around 50 Social Security offices and the firing of thousands of their employees, so in person visits become even harder.

As I’ve said many times before, technical people often don’t really understand the situations that nontechnical people, especially older persons have to deal with. Often there’s a totally wrong assumption that pretty much EVERYBODY uses the Internet. But like I said, a large percentage of seniors do not use the Internet for anything like this, or at all.

Now DOGE originally said all of this was to fight fraud. But its early claims that 10s of millions of deceased persons over 100 years old were getting Social Security payments were apparently incorrect — it’s important to understand these systems — DOGE reportedly didn’t realize that those historical records did not mean all those dead people were getting payments, other aspects of the systems prevented payments to them.

And studies have shown that apparently improper Social Security payments amount to about 1% of overall payments, mostly errors not fraud, and 2/3 of mistaken payments were clawed back.

This all really erupted over the last few days when the administration’s new Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, made some stupendously tone-deaf and clueless comments in an interview. He said that it’s fraudsters who would complain most loudly about missing Social Security payments, saying that his 94-year-old mother in law wouldn’t call to complain — she’d assume there was something messed up and she’d get her payment the next month.

That of course means having faith that the next payment won’t also fail to appear due to the same problem, but then again having a billionaire son-in-law probably would make that missed payment of somewhat less concern. Unfortunately, most Social Security recipients don’t have billionaire sons-in-law. He said cutting off payment system payments is the easiest way to find a fraudster, because whoever screams is the one stealing.

As you can imagine, Lutnick has been widely criticized for these statements. You really have to wonder what planet he’s been living on.

Because the reality is that 40% of retirees rely on Social Security as their sole source of income, and for many more it’s a primary source. You cut off Social Security from these retirees, even for just one month, either by declaring them dead when they’re still alive — reports of that are already increasing — or by making it impossible for them to quickly fix payment or identification problems by phone when they can’t travel to a Social Security office or use the Internet, and many won’t have any way to pay for food or lodging or anything else.

And these changes that are going to so negatively impact so many seniors dependent on Social Security, were only announced VERY recently and are being rushed into effect at the end of THIS month just a week from now, leaving seniors in an even worse situation, and many of them don’t have anyone locally to help them even if they had more time.

This situation has gone from bad to disastrous. Actually improving Social Security is indeed a good goal, but creating a massive mess that will leave so many vulnerable seniors at such risk, is both gruesome and utterly unacceptable.

–Lauren–

Overlooked kaleidoscopic images of nature painted directly onto glass.

A grand, submarine entertainment in the form of a children's book.

Barb and I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks in January, 2025, on the Yucatan peninsula. I’ll blog some photos from there later, but today I want to write about this trip we just took to visit with my daughter Isabel in Fort Bragg, up in northern California, on the coast near Mendocino. […]

The post Isabel's "Time Ecosystem" first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Fourth instalment in our new series of extremely small and free-form cryptic crossword puzzles, themed on our latest essay.

After proclaiming himself the direct descendant of a 12th-century Crusader king, the Armenian priest and educator Ambroise Calfa hit upon an ignoble scheme: grant knighthood to anyone willing to pay. Jennifer Manoukian recovers the cunning exploits of this forgotten 19th-century conman, whose initially honorable intentions quickly escalated into all-out fraud.