It begins as a profile of a state senator working to make Kansas a zero income tax state, and then chronicles the legislative session in which he and his colleagues attempt to balance the budget without destroying K-12 education in the face of much lower than expected tax revenue.

The author, a Kansas native by the name of Chris Suellentrop, does an admirable job of making the details of tax package debate palatable and easy to understand.

But even better, he attempts to give the readers of a liberal newspaper a deeper understanding of why these conservative politicians are attempting to eliminate income tax.

Namely, in the face of mass exodus from the state, they hope lower taxes will spur new business and bring companies looking to relocate to Kansas.

What allows the author intimate access, and makes the anecdotes he peppers into policy talk so interesting, is that the state senator he profiles is his uncle.

It’s a wonderful piece of journalism because it didn’t just entertain or inform me, it gave me a new understanding of how people that I don’t agree with think.

I also got a thrill from realizing that not only do I know and collect the photographer who took the photos for the piece, Portland artist Holly Andres, but I also have corresponded with and bought a piece of art from Paul Windle, half of the design team that illustrated the magazine cover.

It reminded me why I love getting the New York Times delivered on Sunday.

And it got me thinking about where I get the rest of my news.

Besides once a week delivery of the Times, I get a magazine called The Week which sums up the past week’s news very much like a website aggregator, but comes printed and in the mail.

Other than it, it’s Facebook.

I get whatever my friends share. Or whatever Facebook thinks I want to see of what my friends share.

Which tends to be the same story or stories on the same subject for about a day or two straight.

Sometimes real journalism fights it’s way into the top of my feeds. But too often I see a link to a piece about what someone who has no business running for president said in an effort to remind us he has no business running for president.

I miss balance and breadth in my news cycle.

When I was growing up we got the paper every day. We also got Time and Newsweek and lots of other magazine. Often we also watched a television program called The News.

Even just five years ago my wife and I got the Oregonian every morning, and the New York Times on Sunday, and had as a dozen magazine subscriptions.

Now we’re down to once a week newspaper and a magazine.

Our monthly news bill is about $20.

That is the sum total we pay for journalism and reporting.

You know, reporting, where someone actually leaves their computer and travels outside their comfort zone and talks to people and covers things and relies on first hand experience and observation and testimony.

Don’t get me wrong; I like opinion pieces, so much so that I’m writing one in the form of this blog post. But in order for people to properly form opinions they need real reporting to inform them.

A good piece of journalism might take weeks or even months to research and write. I’m sure The Kansas Experiment did.

And because so few of us are paying much for our news, there’s a lot less money going to fund this kind of work.

Now I realize journalism is mostly supported by advertising, not subscriptions. But what newspapers and magazines can charge for advertising is directly linked to subscriptions. Or more recently page views.

And I know, because I work in advertising, that advertisers pay a lot more for ads that go to subscribers than ads that are viewed on free websites.

So I’ve decided to pay more for my news.

We’re going to get the New York Times every day, and the New Yorker, and Portland Monthly, and maybe the Economist and maybe a few more.

And at my wife’s urging I’m going to like the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post on Facebook.

That way they’ll get more subscriptions and page views, which will help their advertising, and hopefully I’ll get more of what they want me to see.

And hopefully less of that guy Facebook keeps reminding me is running for president.

Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

Dear Mayor Hales and City Council,

I’ve met a few of you before.

Mayor Hales, we met at the opening reception for the “We Build Green Cities” video a few years back. Soon after that, I showed you around Wieden+Kennedy, so you could learn about the agency’s unconventional school, WK12, and the Portland Incubator Experiment. Your curiosity and interest in what the tech community needed in order to grow impressed me.

Mr. Fish, we have spoken at numerous Harper’s Playground events and I always appreciated how eager you were to hear my thoughts on the city.

For the rest of you, I appreciate the hard work you do on behalf on Portland. And I’ll quickly introduce myself.

I’ve lived here in Portland for most of the last 20 years. I’ve been involved in the art community, the film community, and most recently the advertising community, where I’ve been lucky enough to work with Travel Oregon and Travel Portland. In fact I came up with the idea for, and wrote, the 7 Wonders of Oregon campaign.

I have also taught at PSU, I host most of the Moth storytelling events here in town and do some auctioneering for non-profits I believe in, as well as my daughter’s elementary school, Abernethy.

Which is to say I’ve been lucky enough to come in contact with a wide spectrum of Portlanders and while I can’t speak for anyone but myself, I think there are lot of people who are feeling the way I am. So here goes.

I love Portland.

I love that we’re an epicenter for zines and the performing arts, and food and drink and urban planning. I love how as a city we figure out how reuse and recycle not just cans and bottles but cruiser bikes and old buildings. I love how many unique local businesses we have and support. I love how we’re a city that feels like a big town and I love how nice and friendly the people are who live here, how open-minded and unafraid to be themselves.

That said I’m loving it a little less than I used to.

I’ve always been a supporter of build up, not out. But it feels like we’re building up and filling in so fast that our city is changing very quickly.

I can stand in my front yard and see three massive houses being built where modest, affordable middle class houses once stood.

I live near Division and 32nd, so I’m in the heart of it.

But it’s happening all over Portland. Heck, it’s happening all over America.

I know this transformation has positives for the city.

The construction industry is booming and new businesses with good jobs are being created and moving here, which means a higher tax base, so more road improvement and public transportation and better schools.

But I also fear we are losing some of what makes this city so amazing.

Our famously livable city is becoming less livable. Traffic is worsening which is annoying, but also dangerous.

Just this past weekend there were two pedestrians hit in our neighborhood, one at 31st and Division Friday night, another at 32nd and Division on Saturday minutes after the Division/Clinton Street parade ended and with dozens of kids right there, including my own.

(And let me remind the bike and transit advocates that traffic affects bikes and bus schedules as well.)

Portland is also becoming a lot more expensive.

So much of the new housing being built is high-end and it’s often being built where more affordable housing once stood.

Artist studios and small businesses are making way for new developments.

As a result, many of the people who have made this city so interesting and distinct are becoming disenfranchised and are being pushed out. It’s affecting artists, service workers, teachers.

I hear many of them ask can I afford to stay? Do I want to?

But I also hear concerns from my older Richmond neighbors, the ones who were born into and grew up in the houses they still live in.

What happening to my neighborhood? Why are the builders of these big new houses so disrespectful of everyone who lives nearby?

It’s difficult for folks to have to consider moving from somewhere they love and helped shape.

But I also fear it could spell trouble for the city.

If Portland becomes less livable and we lose too much of our unique culture and diversity, we’ll stop being a destination for tourism and businesses looking to relocate.

I’m not opposed to change. It’s inevitable and it can be good.

Personally, I like all the new restaurants and shops on Division, but I also like the old businesses that have managed to hold on.

And I’m pro-growth.

In fact we’re turning our garage into an ADU for my mother-in-law, doing our best to work with neighbors, recycle as much wood as possible and match our house, working with BDS to meet every requirement and code.

I just hope we can change and grow in ways that work for all Portlanders and don’t change our city so radically we lose what makes it’s special.

So

I have a few things I’d like to ask.

Very specially I’d ask that you consider ensuring that “lots of record” and “lot remnants” be removed from the section of the Zoning Code that covers single dwellings (Title 33.110)

My understanding is this will slow down the lot splitting that incentivizes single family residential demolitions.

More generally I’d ask that you to do anything in your power to promote the building and saving of affordable housing.

I think this is so important to Portland’s future.

And I’d ask that you continue to find ways to make cross streets like Division and 32nd safer. We got a notice that work is going to be done to make the area around 26th and Powell safer, which we’re thankful of.

Finally, what can I do?

How can I, and others like me, help Portland grow and change in a way that is more inclusive and enjoyable?

I really do love this city. I can’t imagine a better place to raise my kids and grow old.

But I also find myself asking my wife where the next Portland is.

And I really want to stop asking her that.

Thanks for listening, and I’m eager to hear any thoughts.

Best,

Andrew Dickson

Music:
2 Bears – Money Man
Challenger – Science of a Seizure
Wendy Carlos – Rocky Mountains
Jib Kidder – Appetites
Fantastic Palace – Life’s Orchestration

Yes, of course there is. You have to live in Oregon.

Here in Oregon we have something called the Oregon Cultural Trust. It’s basically a legal money-laundering scheme that helps you help the arts.

Here’s how it works.

Donate up to $500 to any Oregon arts and heritage non-profits organizations you love.

Anything from PICA to Disjecta to the IPRC to Friends of the Gorge to the Oregon Zoo, or better yet spread your donation to some combination of. The full list of 1300 plus eligible groups is on the Oregon Cultural Trust website here.

Then you give a matching $500 donation to the Oregon Cultural Trust.

They’ll distribute the $500 you give them to the entire group of organizations they support around the state.

So you’ve given $1000 to a host of wonderful organizations. Good on you.

Then come tax time, you can take the $500 Oregon Cultural Trust donation as a full tax credit. You get the entire $500 back, every last cent of it.

And then, assuming you itemize your deductions on your schedule A (as opposed to taking the standard deduction), you get a tax deduction on the entire $1000 you gave on your federal taxes.

If you’re like most folks you pay 25% in federal taxes. So that’s another $250 back!

And you can take a tax deduction on the $500 you gave to arts organizations on your state taxes.

So in addition to getting the $500 you gave to the Cultural Trust back you’ll get another $45 back assuming you pay 9% to Oregon.

So all told you’ll get the $500 plus the $250 plus the $45.

Giving you a $795 tax refund in April. Even more if you make the big bucks and are in a higher tax bracket.

So for only $205 you’ve given $1000 to help make this place a place worth living in.

That’s insane!

Show you me any other way to quadruple your money in a few months and I’ll show you a Ponzi scheme.

Which I know this sounds like. Or one of those crazy tax loopholes that corporations use to get out of paying taxes. Which it is.

But this one is for us. For ordinary Oregonians to make a difference and support film and dance and kid’s painting classes and the symphony and history and so and so forth instead of subsidizing factories or sports arenas.

And check this out. If you’re a couple filling jointly, you can double up.

You can contribute up to $1000 to arts and heritage non-profits, and another $1000 to the Oregon Cultural Trust.

So you outlay $2000 now. But get the $1000 to the Cultural Trust back in April on your state taxes. Plus get $500 back on your federal taxes, and then another $90 on the arts donations on your state taxes.

So for only $410 you’ve given $2000.

Now keep in mind $500 for individuals and $1000 for couples are just the maximum amounts you can donate to get the full tax advantage. You can give lower matching amounts and still get the same tax advantage. Anything helps.

And it gets better.

You can donate to a lot of wonderful arts groups as well as the Oregon Cultural Trust through Willamette Week’s Give Guide.

Not only is it super easy, you’ll also get awesome free stuff donated to you from their partners. Stuff like Stumptown coffee and Widmer beer and the Chinook Book and so on. They’ll even drop them off at your door if you like.

So go! Get giving.

You’ll feel good and you’ll never know just how much it means to these organizations to get a donation.

Extra credit: Find out if your employer has a matching donation program. If they do, you might just be able to help your favorite non-profits out with an additional $500 or even $1000.

Take the recent discovery of life in Lake Vostok, for instance: not a lake in the normal sense, Vostok is an underground Antarctic water reservoir, isolated from the outside world for 15 million years, a time-capsule long untapped. It has long been a question mark for science, a sort of myth. Dare we unseal this vault? In doing so, would we contaminate one of the last untouched places on Earth? Lake Vostok is, in essence, a frozen crypt, blocked from the sun by 4,000 meters of ice, laden with pressure, the coldest place in the world.

And yet, as we seem to discover with all our planet’s most forbidding places, it harbors life. Over 3,500 DNA sequences, in fact, suggesting a complex ecosystem of relatively ordinary organisms, the type we might find in the bodies of fish and crustaceans, or in lakes and oceans around the world. “The bounds on what is habitable and what is not are changing,” wrote the lead scientist on the genetic study of the Vostok water sample.

The ripple effect is this. Lake Vostok is a mighty fine analog for another seemingly inhospitable place for life: Jupiter’s sixth moon, Europa. So this discovery of life beneath the ice is being welcomed not just by planetary biologists, but astrobiologists too. It might seem like a stretch to compare a frozen lake on Earth to a hunk of rock 390,400,000 miles away, but it’s not rare for scientists to draw from Earth findings in making assumptions about space. Astrobiologists often study Earth’s extremophiles–organisms which thrive in extreme conditions like hydrothermal vents, acid lakes, and deserts–snooping out their environments and evolutionary pathways, in order to understand how such life might evolve elsewhere in the universe. Finding microbes that can survive the glacial embrace of Lake Vostok, hidden away from the sun, provides clues about other, similar environments. Like, improbably, an alien moon.

Beyond any scientific purpose, Vostok to Europa is a tantalizing parallel to make. For one, comparing a place on Earth to an outer-space ocean serves to remind us how strange and wonderful our planet really is. It recontexualizes us. All of the aliens on Earth, from deep sea creatures to strange microbes, and maybe the conscious bipeds too, look different through this lens. As for the ocean on a faraway moon, both recognizable and horribly, horribly strange–it’s just the kind of uncanny setting we love to create myths and fantasies about. To wit: the science-fiction film Europa Report, very recently released on demand, runs with the notion of subglacial life, launching its international cast across the solar system and onto Europa’s harsh, sulfurous surface, where they discover, at great cost, the slumbering mysteries looming beneath. Hint: they’re not microbes, unless those microbes were dreamt up by H.P. Lovecraft.

Europa’s mystique might also have a little to do with its star turn in the kinda-underrated sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in which a cryptic final message is transmitted to Earth:

ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE

However, the recent media coverage (and science fiction) regarding Europa/Vostok ignores something important: of these two desolate places, we are asking two very different questions. We know that Lake Vostok, some 35 million years ago, may have been open to the air, surrounded by a forest, and relatively warm. In boring through its icy ceiling, no one was trying to discover whether life could have arisen there, only if it could have survived the changes since its temperate origins. On Europa, that’s not a distinction we have the luxury to make–under its hulking ice, survival and existence would be compounded into a single discovery.

And what a discovery it would be! My friend, the writer & scientist Fred C. Adams, once speculated to me about creatures trapped beneath Europa’s ice, completely ignorant of the vast cosmos above and around them, blind to the stars. Imagine breaking through to such a hidden world. It would be a first contact of the purest order. It reminds me, too, of Carl Sagan’s loopy imaginations, in the opening chapters of Cosmos, of lifeforms that could exist on a gas giant like Jupiter. Billowing like jellyfish, the size of cities, they’d ride the buoyant gases of the Jovian atmosphere, eating the sun. “Physics and chemistry permit such lifeforms,” Sagan wrote. “Art endows them with a certain charm. Nature, however, is not obliged to follow our speculations.”

If you’re a dad, or you like dads, and want to spend an evening with dads and non-dads alike, thinking about dads, and eating some awesome food cooked by Olympic Provisions, I recommend coming to the Association tonight.

It’s a new dinner series at Union/Pine here in Portland that pairs a different chef or restaurant with a different speaker every month.

Tonight, I’ll talk for about 15 minutes about fatherly advice between the salad and main course.

Having attended last month’s dinner, I can tell you it’s a pretty awesome evening. Cocktail hour lasts for an hour, with drinks courtesy of Merit Badge, then dinner is a leisurely hour and a half to two hour affair with multiple courses and dessert.

It’s also a great mix of three or four dozen folks. Last month I was alone so I waited for a table of six to fill up to five and grabbed an empty seat, and I ended up sitting next to this guy, who is an absolute charmer.

What with the food, and the conversation and the wine and cocktails, it more than justifies the price. Last I heard there were still a few tickets left here.

If you miss out, or have other plans, keep it in mind for next month or the months after that.

And I’ll follow up and post the essay I’m going to base my remarks on tonight in the next few days.

To answer your question, David Bowie, no, this doesn’t mean that Curiosity scientists found life on Mars–only conditions suitable for it to exist. This is only the discovery of a setting, the stage for a primeval drama. But it’s still impressive. Mars is a huge planet and the Curiosity rover is a small, plodding thing, which cuts an unassuming profile as it diligently sifts through the dust. It moves gingerly across the landscape. It is a laborious little laboratory, and Mars is a huge jarring vista of red under a harsh, dark sky.

These discoveries, although tantalizingly vague, are testament to the power of properly applied technology: against all odds, on a distant planet we can only dream of visiting ourselves, Curiosity’s fiercely economical little corral of tools, leveraged in just the right manner, can reveal magnitudes. Pretty cool.

John Grotzinger, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist from the California Institute of Technology, celebrates the discovery of an ancient environment so benign that “probably if this water was around and you had been there, you would have been able to drink it.” It’s a satisfying mental image: instead of a souped-up golf cart preciously vaporizing pellets of rock, imagine scooping handfuls of Martian water from streams long since run dry. Your thirst slaked, you brush the red dust from your knees and stand to see the Earth, a significant blue dot on the horizon.

Which is why I’m so pleased to announce the existence of precisely such a little thing: my brand-new collection of essays and arcana, High Frontiers, fresh from the presses of Publication Studio:

High Frontiers brings together disparate pieces of my writing from all over the web, newly polished, lined up in a row, and illustrated: things that made their debut here on Universe, science fiction criticism and reviews from my sister blog, Space Canon, and articles originally penned for the World Science Foundation, Motherboard, SEED Magazine, and Rhizome.org. Subjects covered range from submersibles to mycology, surrealism, cyborgs, machine learning, love, and art on the moon; it includes interviews with Dr. Oliver Sacks, Trevor Paglen, and Ursula K. LeGuin, and a couple of weird poems, to be safe.

From the introduction:

Art, science, poetry, technology: these all create models for reality, chance forecasts for the future, incant their vision to the public, and ultimately inform complex nesting sets of shared truth. Science fiction is shockingly predictive, while science itself often demands broad suspension of disbelief. Those who seek to understand the ultimate nature of the universe are not only creating testable, theoretical models; increasingly, it’s the questions themselves which unite us. Where do we come from? How can something come from nothing?

Publication Studio is a press based in Portland, Oregon, with outposts all over North America. They print and bind beautiful books on demand, as well as maintain a digital commons where anyone can read and annotate books for free. I’m a big fan of what they do: Publication Studio is really a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense. As they say, they’re into “not just the production of books, but the production of a public.” High Frontiers is available for sale on their website, in physical and DRM-free eBook versions. The physical edition designed was laid out entirely by yours truly, with a cover design by Jona Bechtolt, and it’s a really delightful little object, a handsome addition to any self-respecting polymath’s home library.

In 2013, we may be on the tail end of print book-making in its traditional forms, and that’s a longer conversation. For the time being, I’m happy just make satisfying objects, and to find a marketplace in which to share them with people. Like Universe, this book is a labor of love, and your purchases support me (and Publication Studio) directly.

There’s the distance between people, who subconsciously space themselves apart, providing a reliable visual matrix of intimacy. It’s no coincidence we use the word “close” to describe our most intimate relationships: to whisper and caress, we draw near to one another, less than six inches apart. For chatter amongst personal friends, the norm ranges from 1.5 to four feet. The more estranged, the farther away we shrink. Social distance for interactions among acquaintances overlaps with the previous category, but ranges outwards to nearly twelve feet. Of course, we don’t always have the luxury of being in one another’s company: these days, intimates whisper sweet nothings across fiber-optic lines thousands of miles apart.

The study of these social distances, and their cultural fluctuations, is called proxemics, a term coined by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall. We’ve all experienced the lizard-brain unease of violated proxemic standards: the dreaded “close talker,” the gradual inching-away of cooled intimacy. These concentric circles are so engrained in our picture of normality that they seem to affect our relationship with the idea of distance, too. Things perceived at point-blank range–the faces of our loved ones, our direct sensorial and tactile experience–are comfortingly familiar. We are “close to” such closeness. Trusting, we allow the neighboring world to touch us, never pausing to question if perhaps (and why not?) the ground might suddenly cease to support our feet, or if the familiar push-back of haptic touch might dissolve to a vague nothingness.

Then there’s the distances of the global everyday, regularly collapsed: foreign stock markets, video conferences with traveling colleagues, news broadcasts from around the world, and our knowledge of people and places beyond our ability to sense directly. In the proxemic model, these might correlate with a tertiary circle–not intimate, but knowable. Although I have never seen the pyramids at Giza, I’m certain they exist. Unlike the ground beneath my sneakers, I don’t currently take them for granted, but they don’t seem impossible, either: I might conceivably, one day, stand at their cyclopean feet. I know people who have made the trip. The distance is broachable; it can be calculated in human-lengths.

But there are limits to comprehensible distance. A few exponential clicks away from our bodies–outwards to the cosmos, or inwards to the molecular world–and distance, as a human concept, loses all meaning. I’m reminded of the Ur-iconic Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten, which deals with this eventual sameness-in-quality of very small and very large scales: no matter if you go in or out, if you go far enough, distance plunges into an abstraction so total it is nearly impossible to hold in the mind. It’s like the very idea of infinity. When you picture such scales, as David Foster Wallace wrote in Everything and More, his excellent history of infinity, you “feel, almost immediately, a strain at the very root of yourself, the first popped threads of a mind starting to give at the seams.”

The prevailing cosmological model of the formation of everything (the Big Bang Theory, of course) posits that the physical universe began as a condensed point which exploded outwards throughout space and time, and which continues to expand. Feeling the insane magnitude of the universe is tantamount to understanding the massive forces underlying its expansion, because, of course, in the language of astronomy, distance is time. We measure objects’ distance by the time it takes their light to reach us; the farther away, the more ancient, the more complicit with the birth of time itself.

And the more our systems of seeing and knowing break down, incidentally. It’s in infrared that scientists peer, straining, at objects near the far edges of the cosmos–because the universe is still expanding, the farther away we look, the faster objects are moving away from us.

One of the strangest truths of astronomy is the notion that objects we see in the night sky–or through telescopes, for that matter–may no longer themselves exist, and that with truly distant things, we glimpse into the past. It’s strange precisely because we don’t associate time and distance with objects in the visible, tangible world; the pyramids aren’t old because they’re far away, after all. This is a variety of thinking about distance that is natural to science–intrinsic to our working theories of space and time–but which only applies to unthinkable scales.

When I attempt to conceive of, say, MACS0647-JD, the farthest known galaxy, I feel as though the energy which rent the universe has grasped me in its teeth and is whipping me like a rag-doll through space. I feel like I am falling at untold speeds. The distance itself is like a force. Even gazing at something visible, like Jupiter or Mars pinpricked in the night sky, feels not like standing at the foot of the pyramids but deep below them, cast into the black-pit of an immeasurable well from which I can barely see the sky.