Paul Lewis

Congestion pricing improved air quality in NYC and suburbs | Cornell Chronicle Cornell researchers tallied the environmental benefits of New York City’s congestion pricing program and found air pollution dropped by 22% in Manhattan, with additional declines across the city’s fiv...

NYC’s congestion pricing cleaned the air. This is also what happened when EZ-Pass was put in place in NJ.

Three-year-old child forced to serve as her own attorney in Tucson immigration court More than a dozen undocumented minors were forced to make their case in front of an immigration judge as the Trump administration ramps up removal proceedings.

There is no sight that more efficiently puts the lie to immigration “court” than the common sight of children “representing themselves.” Children too small to climb into the chair, children in pajamas who don’t know where they are, children not yet old enough to speak.

YouTube video by Steely Dan - Topic Black Friday

Lest we in the U.S. forget, Black Friday used to refer to (among other things) a financial crash, societal crisis, or as in this song, an imminent catastrophe. Probably more apropos than the current usage. youtu.be/neJorQci-wI?...

Replaced "orthodoxy" with "evidence" in a edit of the NYT piece about how RFK Jr is dismantling federal support for vaccination- THE GREATEST INNOVATION FOR PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY (shout outs also to closed sewer systems and safe municipal water systems!).

Fixed it for you, @nytimes.com

My Top 2000 Songs #1153: Shoot The Singer Music-obsessed retired lawyer, sharing a few thoughts on some choice cuts from my obscenely oversized music collection each day.

2000 Great Songs #1153: Shoot The Singer. Pavement achieve maximum understated banality (someone took in these pants!) yet rivet you with a spine-tingling twangy bass sound. Plus la-da-dadas galore.

AI-powered nimbyism could grind UK planning system to a halt, experts warn Tools that help people scan applications and find grounds for objection have potential to hit government’s housebuilding plans

I regret to inform you the NIMBYs have discovered AI. Shut it all down

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

It's different though, in that unlike the taco spot, none of the doctors will be open on nights or weekends.

The Soothing British Radio Show That Blew My Mind — and Put Me Right to Sleep

Free link here: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/m...

My editor on the Arts desk at the IDS was the not-yet-famous Ryan Murphy.

Glad to see that IU student journalists are once again free to print the news. (I wrote for the IDS my freshman year, where I learned something valuable too: my anticipated career as a reporter was not a good fit for me! Given what's happened to the news biz since, I'm glad I changed my plans.)

Walkable city baseball edition:
Andrés Giménez on how you get the feeling of a city by walking it.

The expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, combined with premium increases by ACA insurers, will mean that 22 million subsidized ACA enrollees will see an average out-of-pocket premium increase of 114%.

GM will introduce eyes-off driving in 2028 | CNN Business General Motors, the 100-year-old car company, plans to offer Americans hands-free driving and the freedom to watch a movie on the go.

“Imagine you step into your vehicle, you push a button, and it drives you to the office. You catch up on work, send emails, or watch an episode of your favorite show,” said GM CEO Mary Barra.

This exists, it's called a bus

www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/c...

Former US Sen. Kyrsten Sinema lobbies for data center developer at Chandler AZ Plan Commission. Says she's working "hand in glove" w Trump Admin & warns city to embrace DCs or face federal intervention. City Council vote on Sinema's DC scheduled for Nov. 13.

We're two weeks out from Virginia's election. Almost no state's electorate has realigned as much as Virginia's over the past decades. When Mark Warner won the 2001 Gov. election, he did so with a coalition that included the Western coal counties and Hampton Roads, but mostly lost NOVA. 1/x

Can you imagine the adverse selection issues if every young person who is (or thought they were) healthy abandoned the insurance pool to maybe save a few bucks?

The Other Reason Americans Don’t Use Mass Transit People will take buses and trains only if they feel safe while riding them.

The American centrist punditocracy has decided that what the US transit industry needs are endless lectures about the importance of security.

These writers misunderstand the problem, and are making things worse. 1/

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

"Sincerity, if you can fake that, you've got it made."

Interesting how they have Subway capitalized in US but not Canadian English. Maybe that's a tell: we're not building many undergrounds, just sandwich shops.

Hollywood farmers market

Your war correspondent on the ground in battle-ravaged inner northeast Portland

I hope the military stays safe in Portland. When I took my family there we were terrified of the largest Japanese garden in the US, the independent book store selling banned books, the massive & free rose garden, and urban green spaces. What a hellscape.

Do we know how lay publics define "corruption"? I've encountered quite a few folks (incl. undergrads) who conceive of corruption as something far broader than using public office for private gain. Instead they seem to think of it as "politicians taking any action I vehemently disagree with."

Chance of having ticket checked on Phoenix light rail is 150%, per my recent experience (checked 3 times in 2 trips).

Journal publishers *are* bundling your papers up in "data licensing agreements" for big tech companies to use for AI model training. Our publisher, T&F, got £75m from Microsoft for that last year alone.

i.e., *through* a red light

@waymo.bsky.social I just saw one of your driverless cars make a left turn at a red light (from a stop) into a busy intersection in Tempe, AZ.

Tom Fishburne commemorated this a couple years ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-w...

Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity - Nature By analysing the smartphone data of 2,112,288 participants, in particular observing and comparing the activity of the same individual in two different environments, we find that increases in the walka...

"moving from a less walkable (25th percentile) city to a more walkable city (75th percentile) increased walking by 1,100 daily steps, on average. These changes hold across different genders, ages and body mass index values, and are sustained over 3 months." www.nature.com/articles/s41...