You could label the people I met as “woke.” But I can’t see calling them whelmed. I’d call them “paddling.” One potential factor supporting all the civility and cope sprung to me in the dark on my last morning run.

In this cartoon of a drainage pond (next to a drainage pond), a red-winged blackbird says that the area used to flood a lot, but the ponds “have sure made a difference.” A fish on an old-fashioned phone says the pond can store excess water and “send some to Minnehaha Creek if we have to,” after the culturally vivid “you betcha.” And in this way, the city advertises its ongoing amid the tumult of climate change.

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By showcasing the upsurge in chaotic weather and its response, Minneapolis joins a grounded crew. When I visited Phoenix, I saw public art spanning above the downtown Arizona State campus and historic markers about overuse near our hipster hotel. The city stands to suffer from drought and devilish heat despite these ornaments. But I’m betting that citizens who know a bit about what’s happening and what their government means to do about it will be more peaceful and more agile.

Look above for a bit at downtown Phoenix. The whorl overhead catches the sun, then your eye, then your consideration. The air will fry my flesh, you might think - but this doesn’t make me a sitting duck. Instead, it poises me to learn from history.

The guess I’m hazarding here remains a guess. If anyone is studying the relationship between climate-frank public design and civic strength, please be in touch. Until I learn data, though, the intuition seems worth a bet. If authorities share what’s dangerous in a place and how they are addressing the danger, people will see more openings to tolerate and support each other. They’ll also build skill at managing threats to freedom and decency in an orderly and coherent key.

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You could sun-dry the concepts about context and confidence with a thought experiment. Imagine three coastal cities. In a city where nobody expects floods, a high tide can bring looting and fleeing. In a city where informed people expect a flood and see no lifeboats or sandbags, hypertension would spread like a common cold. But in a city where people know that they might drown, people would learn to swim and steer.

I’m raising the bet with the idea that vigilant but confident public space can support attentive, creative living in a digital world. Today, most airports and urban parks choke with signs showing where to go and how long it will take to arrive: these places are, as has pegged it, imitating screens. Places like the drainage pond or the shady art surmount the work of distracting from distraction. They invite you to contend with complexity while putting some node of your mind at ease.

And that frees the rest of your mind to discern other maulers on the horizon.

When threats extend but lack shape, fear takes root. In a fearful climate, people in power often like to exploit widespread fear for their own personal gain. The president who hogtied the Congress who succumbed to the manipulators mainly seem to like to steal. Nobody leading Fox News or Congress seems up for an honest exchange of ideas, evidence, and principle. If they steal your attention and distract you with false enemies, they can take more of your/our money.

The thieves predicate their wealth on people doubting their own freedom to listen to what’s around them and figure out exchanges. We could talk about how those in office with a mandate to defend freedom might do so with more potency, but I’ll defer political analysis to the many abler Substackers who work in that sphere. I’ll settle on this idea: it’s much harder for people to steal from you or mistreat your neighbor if you see them coming. And so an informed group of residents can more quickly and durably become an engaged, vigilant, and organized group.

In Minneapolis, a coalition of neighbors has made visibility a key to its operation. Every shop I visited sported stickers defending neighbors - and detailed information about how neighbors would defend each other on walks, in stores, and in the legal system. (Note here that we are not debating immigration policy, just insisting that people get fair hearings and public employees follow public laws.) When I went to buy coffee on a run or made a wrong turn in the park, I saw these signs. You’d have to work hard to miss out on the patience and resolve around you.

Living in an altered climate resembles walking out on this Minneapolis fishing pier, or climbing a rope ladder. Nothing is assured, but most people can discern the intense from the minor perils. And most people need help realizing how close some dangers are, relative to how close they feel or how easily they trigger a stress response.

How people learn these skills recalls how people learn to climb ladders. They learn how, with and from other people, ideally in a varied ecosystem. To understand how bobbing and steering in a storm or riptide might happen, watch somebody else steer. To understand how life with torrents might earn effort and investment, see your town show off a drainage pond or a spray shower.

Again, we’re in the realm of guesses. I’m not saying a cartoon about a pond led Minneapolis residents to turn back state-sponsored abduction by ICE agents, stay unified after those agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and keep protecting neighbors with walks, signs, and whistles today. I’m saying that the discipline to sustain a society with due process would seem to grow from daily life in a city where you know that both danger and response seep through every day.

The drainage-pond sign in Minneapolis works at scale with bright colors. That public ground-level information, in its size and cheer, can also compete with swipes and shocks on your screen. You could say the same for construction sites molting into new public space on the waterfronts of my town: they might all pass you by, but odds seem strong that you’ll take note of both the coming storms and the coming adjustment.

This all rolls over the thinking about cities that prevailed in the early 1990s, when scientists sounded clarions about climate change. In those days, stuffing city nodes with amusement compelled billions. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, San Antonio’s Riverwalk, and Denver’s LoDo starring a new ballpark showed suburbanites and retirees that legacy cities could stay afloat with enough visitors.

These strategies availed in some places and flailed in others. In my town, Lower Manhattan became a busy 24-hour area despite the mall-ish South Street Seaport which itself eventually became sleeker. However history judges these strategies in terms of equity, it’s hard to argue that a rallying cry of “now, frolic!” prepared society for floods, bots, or the hijacking of a once-legitimate political party.

To be sure, Minneapolis today crams entertainment palaces into its downtown. But the football stadium and ballpark stand close to the Stone Arch Bridge across the Mississippi. That’s the site of a park on ruins of the old flour mill and abuts a new public landscape project. Signs there remind you that Indigenous people never voluntarily ceded their home and promise fuller river access for everyone soon.

By the time that project sprouts, I’ll betcha, more cities will need more drainage ponds or sun shelters or both - and more of us will want to know where they are.

I don’t voluntarily use AI as a reader, researcher, or writer. Maybe this means I fritter time poring through peripheral documents and abiding in a world where I don’t know how to code. I know how to read critically, interview, listen, guess, observe, take photos, and write. Here and elsewhere, I strive do those things with more kindness, precision, and durability. I want to build my skill at grappling.

As Chris notes, we all tango with AI once we share writing or images on the Internet. I run tetchy enough that I sometimes try to throw the algo off course (see how I just didn’t take Exit 14 for the Hutchinson Parkway?). If I see search results via AI (or at all) I check them on Wikipedia or a verified source. And everything I write comes from my head via my fingers. I hope to infuse more of your suggestions and would never turn away an editor’s proverbial blue pencil, but digital bots curdle my recipe.

My work here asks how humans can share space with each other, history, other life, and climate change in ways that increase flourishing. The picture above, from Tettegouche State Park in Minnesota, hints at why AI text doesn’t fit in my toolkit.

The photo reminds me of my favorite quote. Nachman of Braslav, a Jewish mystic who worked in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, dealt in maxims. One says: All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to be afraid.

If it’s important to be unafraid, then I should open my thinking to a world that might correct, mock, or ignore it. And if my being afraid is unimportant, then I shouldn’t let my worry about getting the words wrong eclipse my willingness to see what’s across the divide separating what I’m thinking from what I’m sharing.

Either way, what appears after my name is stuff for which I’m answerable. I hope you’ll tell me where it needs more intel and less artifice, and where it takes you. I’ll be back with a fresh essay later this week.

See, back in 2015, to set up my own writing shop after some time in comms, I found a desk in a coworking space near the Manhattan Bridge. The lessor wasn’t WeWork, with its distressed wood and wine tastings, but a humbler outfit called Green Desk. The appeal, above the shoestring rent, rested on the community : sharing carrels with other LLCs and contractors would fortify my network and liven up my day.

And for a while, that more or less happened. Alison sat next to me, speaking patiently but authoritatively on the phone most of the morning to the effect that her clients in fact would have to complete government forms and would have to pay employment taxes. She sometimes pivoted toward me when her patience drained. Eventually she moved to an onsite desk at her firm, and some parents with kids my kids’ age, working in PR and graphic design, settled in. It was they I overheard talking about “the virus” “from Wuhan” that “was now in Italy” and “coming for Seattle.” They were the first to break their lease in March 2020.

I followed soon: the landlord said given the conditions, I could stop coming in and come back whenever I wished. When I came back it was May 2021.

When I overheard Alison, Slack was a two-year-old startup and Zoom had just grabbed Series C funding. Today, students in a preprofessional course at my alma mater practice talking on the phone as coursework. Unlike Alison in 2020, I’m frisky for more reminders and lessons and cues, both to give and to absorb.

That’s true because three shadows spread across our lives since 2020. Tech barons and the politicians they hypnotize have siphoned most sales and questions and introductions and check-ins to screens’ staccato dialogue. News has followed the shock-first vibe-next pace, so we fail to debate how we should make tradeoffs in our democracy. And the planet on which we lived has, faster than I feared it might in 2020, tilted toward a recurring roar of flames and floods and burns.

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I’ve always believed that parks and public space catalyze humor, problem-solving, and answerability across people in cities that otherwise let us run anonymously. I’ve also cherished the theory that as the climate becomes a cauldron, parks can act as society’s towel and its terra firma.

But as Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald warned from my parents’ station wagon AM radio in 1979, “no one can tell what the future holds.” Posting on Insta in 2015, I didn’t grasp how the near-monopoly providers of social media, online shopping, and decentered workplaces would suffocate a lot of Americans’ knack for politeness and chitchat. Americans had already grown testy and semi-sealed from decades of sitting in cars, living in sorted subdivisions, and trying to parse (or giving up on) news that gorged on polls, gossip, and polls about gossip. Oh, and nobody dealt effectively with income inequality. Or school shootings. Social media players exploit the antsiness as best they can, which turns out to be pretty well. And the rollout of spiffy new parks across the world couldn’t match the onrush of bad faith, broken grammar, and people filming or flaming instead of talking to each other.

And so people grow up or grow old without an intuitive reason to chitchat on their stoop, walk around the neighborhood, run out for milk, or ask for directions. At which point, it’s unclear what happens if you plop these people in a park, In that triple-tined chaos, you can build strength by sharing talents and humor and ideas with others. You can build strongholds that repel others who might hurt you. Or you can tuck your chin and your knees, cede your attention, and ignore it all.

So I have learned to mute my Gen-X snicker when I see running clubs or biking clubs or poodle clubs or when I see flyers like the one below.

People have needed to learn skills since the first hominid picked up an analog tool at Olduvai. Now they need to voluntarily or academically learn things that we used to learn because food and sex and work lay on the other side of learning them. This includes chatting in the park, charming people you find cute when you’re next to them in bars, reading maps, and playing pickup sports.

But here we run into a rut. When most people learned more from the Alisons in their lives than the apps, expertise converged on a few. Alison had to pass the bar exam to practice law: I had to earn the trust of an editor to publish journalism. Now anyone can concoct legitimacy on a platform like Substack…

…which means that the people purporting to teach you running or kayaking or sewing might not have accrued the sharp ears and depth of vision that teachers once had to earn before they could claim the label. We need to learn to socialize, but we need to look cautiously at the people who say they can teach us. What’s the way out? Who should be regulating whom, and how often?

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All I can insist is that humans, for the sake of cultivating freedom, should be doing the regulating and machines should play only curtailed support roles. Humans grow patience, reciprocity, and the capacity to refract as well as reflect.

So AI programs or bots could guide you to the nearest pickup game, public bathroom, parking space, or scenic view. They could not teach you the skills that mingle and strengthen when you toggle from needing help to giving it and when you intuit how far to push yourself past your demonstrated ability. And even if they could teach you how to navigate the rocks on the East Coast promontory below, they wouldn’t teach you how to teach yourself - or how to enjoy it.

They wouldn’t make you any sharper at regulating yourself, or any abler to show mercy or encouragement to others. They’d do nothing, you see, to help Alison.

Does this lead me to advocate for some credentialing requirement to drop on run clubs, dating apps, and stitching circles? I haven’t learned enough to say. It does lead me to wonder where and how the places we cross can condition more of us to more frequently start a conversation, try a new trick, or teach a trusty technique.

So I keep seeking the mix of policies, profit-seeking paths, designs, and engineering to cue people toward higher levels of kindness and creativity. That’s the business of this Substack. And as I work to regulate my writing tendencies, I hope you out there in Substackistan will lay down landmarks of places you love or policies you admire.

*Alison is not her real name.

Places I show in this essay include a range of past and present. At top, you see the Dumbo Archway Plaza as it looked in 2015. In the middle, you see a flyer I saw this summer in Manhattan. At bottom, you see Sachuest Point in Rhode Island as it has looked since the US Navy and Audubon Society turned it over in 1970.

Some sage in a parenting book taught me, years ago, to invert how I speak when I want to be useful. I had been saying do you need anything?. So I’d been asking the person with the burden to break it down into components, decide which one matched my profile, and pitch me. The author advised revising to: what can I do to help?

This reset the offer. It asserted, first, that I was going to do something to help. The person carrying the crates or washing the dishes or changing the diapers took a reprieve from the need to also decide whether help was in fact necessary and worth requesting. I was going to give it - whatever occurred to the person, as a start.

I’ve come to think of public space through a related frame. Society needs a lot: prosperity with dignity, adjustment on the fly to a new climate, learning and cohering in sturdy coalitions of ultratargeted, phone-addled individuals. Do people need places to sit together, kick a ball, watch a parade, hear a bird warble? Heck yeah. But to what end? Near the end of a dangerous summer, what can public space do?

Unlike the menschy person running to the store for more Pedialyte, I’ve concluded, public space can mainly serve by compelling people to consider more things at once. By tossing life needs and sculpture and twisty slides in an open plane, public space can coach people to pay sharper and kinder attention to a spectrum of signals.

Not that this is how public space tends to advertise itself. At places like the Hudson River waterfront in Manhattan, where I and hundreds of others got to see a free jazz/dance performance Saturday night, relaxation seems like public space’s calling card. Public space can “celebrate beauty,” to quote Raju Mann, head of New York’s Battery Park City Authority. But hold on -so can gates in the Forbidden City.

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The next intuitive pitch for public space is that it offers fresh air and room to roam for free. Nah- nothing’s really free. That’s why I argued in July that public space needs hefty investment to do its mightiest work. That work involves stirring up response and attention. I don’t mean the formal and abstract response and attention like you see from the dancers and musicians, but something more habitual.

When professionals with realistic budgets tend it, program it, and staff it, public space can feed perception and compromise. Its power to brew compromise came forth when Mann walked onstage to introduce the concert.

Jointly with a local arts council, the Battery Park City Authority hosted this concert while much of its public waterfront sits behind plywood and wire, as crews work to fortify it ahead of sea level rise. Mann perhaps wanted to send a balm to tetchy neighbors with this high-profile show. If so, his predicament reminds us that public space usually sits at the crossroads of competing claims. You wanna relax on a Saturday night with a sunset and a bag of Trader Joe’s cheese puffs: you need to wait out construction to keep a neighborhood from going underwater.

And so public space can pull us into complexity, complicating our captions. I can’t remember the concert without thinking about churning hurricanes and upward-creeping sea levels. Living in public, I have to hold conflicting facts together.

Much of the economy that the techlords have made consists in shearing away surprise so that you can document what you see and they can code it. A QR code on a Central Park placard tells you where you can find a bathroom. The letters “winnem” in the AirBnB search box spin out 12 listings in late September in Winnemucca, NV (one is a block from downtown). But at a farmer’s market, a riverfront walk, or a museum plaza, people you’d never match with cross your visual field. Birds, squirrels, and what park rangers refer to as animal “sign” can too. It’s not always pretty, but is usually vital.

Beyond complicating your photo, public space can overlay complexity on itself. Rather than pummeling you with faux-immersive swipes, it lays out unaligned stuff and leaves it be. Sharpshooting basketball, chatty older folks on play equipment, cops in a megaphone, glowering birds and conversation I couldn’t hear with a man in a propeller hat all skeetered across the Lower East Side park where I took the picture above. Public space, unlike so much of what we see, isn’t for bleeding away the things you would rather not confront or you can’t define. It’s for negotiating them. And it’s for knowing without mewling that a couple brings a little girl to a place feet away from cops and propeller hats, because it’s their place to visit as they choose.

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And public space can complicate how you read what’s in front of you across time as well as space. Look up and see stone walls and tall trees that have hung around for centuries. When Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan became a landmark in 1983, city staffer Jay Shockley noted that a museum archaeologist had recently reported finding “pottery, projectile points, and claim and oyster shells.” (Thanks to Adrian Benepe for hipping me to this designation report.) Look ahead and find a scratchiti heart someone supplied with keys last week. Notice a fence spike or net that someone on the Parks staff repaired over the winter. Look to the future and you’ll see those louder, taller waves. (In places where local authorities have concluded that floodplains already look too fragile for homes, governments will sometimes buy out homeowners and replace their land with parks.) These stories don’t disappear in a day.

Once you name it, this complexity flows in and around parks’ more obvious provisions: play space, platforms for entertainment, zones to veg out for a while. With enough ducats, anybody can have those in private domes. What public space can do begins with what it can invite each member of the public to try to understand.

Fair warning: the fact that public space can spark this kind of patience and curiosity doesn’t imply that it always does. In public, many of us exist only in flickers to others: a woman at Jefferson Street who thought I braked too abruptly at a red light walked through the crosswalk shaking her head, while a woman two blocks away on Clinton Street for whom I held a door thanked me as if I walked on water.

Lots of competing forces, from the software powering your smartphone to the lawfare powering the American president. push against patience and curiosity. Policy to keep parks orderly and up-to-date, and to keep streets legible and useful for a range of public tempos, encourages the encouragement. So does policy to spread and reward science literacy. With that literacy. people of all ages and health profiles can make sounder and rounder decisions about sharing space during extreme heat, smoke, storms, and all the other plagues our fossilized economy has bestowed us.

To nourish demand for those policies, people would need to know and cherish what public space can do. Along those lines, I’m learning to respect the scheduled, formalized hanging-out that occurs in run clubs, meetups, and such. In a society where potentates push us apart, people may need to expressly and sometimes goofily pull themselves together. (My friends Greg Lindsay and Nick Kaufman are bidding to explore organized play in a panel at South by Southwest this year - give it a look.)

So I’ll grapple with those clubs and their promise soon. In the next couple of weeks, I plan to take vacation from my town and often from my screen. Expect a couple of rerun posts, and please reach out with thoughts or arguments until I return.

The parks you see here sit at edges and attract a lot of passers-through.

Wagner Park in Battery Park City fronts the water and backs up to the Financial District. Its new flood-ready design includes barricades.

Sara D Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side draws crowds for weekend basketball. Across the street from Whole Foods, the Public Hotel, and Yonah Schimmel’s knish place, it also draws a busy heroin trade (a little further south).

And Seward Park (pictured near the bottom) and Tompkins Square Park (at the top) both run big enough for movies, concerts. civil unrest, and the enigmatic exercise class I’ll describe next time I’m writing.

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So as I wax about city pools, my learning about what it costs to run them and fill them, staff them and market them lies ahead of me. I’m invoking them here as the trampoline in a thought experiment if we organized our public life around surviving climate change and noticing each other, wouldn’t we see a lot more pools?

The climate-tinged case for investing in public pools requires no PhD. With carbon trapping heat in the air, summers get hotter. Until the electric grid fully evolves to run on clean sources like the sun and wind (we’re getting there), air conditioners will cost a lot to run and make climate change hairier. When in public and hot, you become cooler by dunking yourself into a pool. In really soupy weather, swimming can be a much safer form of exercise than running for even the halest and heartiest.

Wait, there’s more.

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I’ve dropped in on a lot of New York City pools since 2003: my wife loves to swim and the price and pace of an afternoon of swimming made sense when our kids were little. And while my own swimming will never win any prizes, my time on the deck and climbing down the ladder has sharpened my appreciation for some behavioral rules of swim culture that echo loudly in an era of fires and floods.

In a pool, you learn to share. Whippet-quick competitors in neoprene swim caps use the same footprint as dog-paddlers like me. Kids get in on Marco Polo and Fishy Fishy Cross My Ocean because the game either appeals to them or surrounds them. Unlike running or riding bikes, swimming in a pool doesn’t put the world at your back. It puts you in the same rectangle as other people who’ve left dry land.

In a city pool, you learn to negotiate your bureaucracy. Every New York City facility requires you to show a lock and a towel before you enter. That’s true except for the ones that don’t, or the ones where folks ask just for the lock, or the ones where you need to show the lock to change clothes but the towel to leave the locker room. Likewise, Parks staff at each pool make you shower before you swim. Unless you don’t. You memorize the procedure at each location, and as you do it sinks in that administrative rules come not from a screen you scroll past fast but from people with the responsibility to keep order and decorum, and fun, flowing as they judge best.

(At Central Park’s glittering new Davis Center pool on July 4, I heard one guard say to another about a teen: “If you want to show me attitude instead of showing me your towel, I can show you where you can sit inside!”)

In swimming, you intuit a rhythm that drowns out scrolls and taps. You can stay in one place, cooling off and kibitzing, as some older gentlemen did in the Central Park pool during the heat wave. You can cannonball and dunk your friends. You can swim around little kids and flirting teens without colliding, which my wife does expertly. But you are sharing space and doing whatever you do steadily, at least most of the time. Going from one objective to another that catches your eye won’t flow.

So to harp on how people lock up their phones when they go to pools overstates the obvious. There’s no use for a phone. You aren’t going to swim for that long, so you needn’t worry about the time - and there are usually two clocks, one stopped and one correct. Your body feels loose and put to good use, so you drift toward a book rather than a scroll through updates. At John Jay Pool near where I grew up, people cradled their books in a range of settings. One woman stood near the edge for my whole visit, resting her library book on it. The Odyssey has looked popular this summer.

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Hence, people are learning at pools. To improve your stroke at all means you are learning mechanics: the timing of breath, the parallel motion of arm and calf, the conservation of energy. To navigate narrow space means you are learning manners. To convert a dangerous day of 100-degree air into a chitchat with your body hovering around 76 means you are learning to endure a climate that leaders have let go haywire.

Climbing out and drying off, you can imagine some policy direction from this exploration. To gimmick up the thinking, imagine that public investment in Chromebooks and chatbots for kids sluiced over to pool upkeep and swim lessons. Chromebooks and chatbots teach that a definitive answer arises out of a screen, lands only with you, and steers you to stay still and receive more word of God.

Swim lessons teach you to breathe in new ways and move with fresh self-control. New York governor Kathy Hochul sports a mixed record on climate, having played politics to inhibit legally binding progress toward clean energy. She has, though, implemented a program called NYSWIMS that steers north of $250 million to 79 pool and freshwater-swimming projects. Her office calls it “the largest investment in public swimming infrastructure since the New Deal.” One investment is bringing swim lessons for all ages to Jones Beach, a summer destination on Long Island. (WXY, a firm I admire and for which I’ve done some editing work, led that project’s design.)

The initiative points up a proposition that will gain weight as summer heat gains deadly force. Cities and towns can set up rivers and lakes for swimming with sensible investment. This past weekend I got to visit Croton Point Park, about 45 minutes north of Manhattan by train, and swim in a pool-sized section of the salty Hudson.

The compact swimming area, which you had to sometimes manage around a lifeguard in a kayak, exposed another instructive tint of public swimming. Places that people share to swim teach you to read and adjust, listen and assert. People might drown, so you need to communicate with authority. People might need your space. Stay in motion, stay flexible, and keep your senses attuned for surprises.

When your senses attune, you also appreciate more about what makes human negotiation the source of surprise and mystery. For example, at the pool where I swim on weekday mornings this summer, a young man and young woman hold registration cards while people take laps. (You register for a spot because, in theory, the pool might reach capacity. ) There seems to be a meet-cute evolving between them: the other day, they were talking baseball. Lifeguards, likewise, look more at each other and at the goings-on in the water than do parking lot attendants in beach towns (though when they whistle, they often need to then explain what they mean).

When you pop out of a pool, you feel limber and hungry with more precision and depth than you do after running or playing soccer: you’re done with a workout but not sweaty. Things look and feel fresh. As the streets and highways and flyways beyond the pool grow more congested and the communication grows more manipulated, that fresh feeling’s half-life figures to compress and pop. So while I can’t snap my fingers and conjure more pools for every point of strain, I am lucky enough to plan for a morning swim soon and expect to think a little more creatively when it ends.

The New York City pools I know best are at Hamilton Fish Park (which you see above), Dry Dock Playground, Sunset Park, and the newish Davis Center in Central Park. At Sunset Park several years ago, we and some friends brought our kids to swim on Labor Day. At closing time, staffers called out “The summer is over!” and I promise you that the sky turned grey and a single leaf fell from a tree onto the pavement.

The swimming is easy but not free at Croton Point Park, which also includes trails and ballfields and a lawn that you have to share with geese (the birds, not the band).

My friend and I sat drinking coffee at Pier A, which juts into New York Bay north of Battery Park. The Statue of Liberty raised her iguana-green arm behind us, and the Ritz-Carlton glinted gray on our right. My friend was expecting a baby, and we’d been talking about how that would alter his days. He noticed something and guffawed.

“Hey!” he said. “Kids on a leash!”

My friend didn’t seem amused, but startled. Maybe only New Yorkers out during the preschool day know what he saw. It’s a group of two-to-four-year-olds walking through a park or along a sidewalk. Each holds a bright-tone plastic ring that attaches to a canvas harness. Some wear loops of the harness like belts around their waists. Often the kids wear neon construction safety vests that hit them at the knees. Adults walk at the front and back of the line, sometimes looking at phones.

My friend now has a two-year-old and is expecting another kid. And if he is lucky enough to find any place his kids can go while he and his wife work (salaried jobs with unpredictable hours), I assure you he is no longer laughing about the policies.

The practice came from some mix of worry, market demand, and lack of alternatives. And if his daughter’s preschool leaders carry too little trust in other pedestrians or drivers or kids themselves to let them walk in pairs, holding hands with buddies, then my suggestions for change ramp up in ambition.

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This inquiry into how little kids move from preschool to public fits within a broader concern. Buzzing around the city, I sputter at the choking traffic when ride-hail drivers all follow the same algo. I worry at the volume of adults riding e-bikes while staring at phones, passing on the right into oncoming runners, and foregoing helmets. And like Brock Colyar in New York magazine, I fret to see hundreds of urbane spendy peeps slouching in lines for yogurt or ciabatta. All this rings hollow and suggests a mood of passive ridership in public life. It says: others decide where I go and how fast, and while maybe I can look around I can’t exactly chart a new course.

Now, I have no license to mock or sneer at parents who send their kids to preschools where teachers guide kids in harnesses from classroom to playground. I have no knowledge of how this practice emerged, though I hope to learn. So instead of mocking or sneering, I’m lofting some alternative ideas for policymakers and property owners to bounce around. These ideas spring from some baselines that I hope make sense to most of us. Just to be sure, the baselines now get their own paragraph.

We’d all gladly inhabit a city where parks appear so frequently, look so legible, and offer so much fun that kids can roam through them. We all ought to train ourselves and the next generation to adapt and adjust to changing weather. And we all ought to learn to notice each other’s meanders and stumbles, if only to build skills that will keep us free from the need to sign up for robot caretakers as we age.

For this week’s reset, in honor of all the kids I see on leashes around town, I’ll assume the harnesses prevail because parents concluded it’s too risky to let two-year-olds walk on the sidewalk holding only other toddler hands. I’ll decline the chance to argue that premise on its merits: I don’t know the kids in question, or the parents. I also only see the kids in the harnesses briefly. For all I can tell, they get where they’re going and start roaming like scavengers or battling like samurai. Instead, I’ll suggest a hidden cost to the practice and imagine an alternative.

It’s at least incomplete and at most deceptive to tell little kids that they should learn to follow an orderly path into the future. As anyone without permanent Meta glasses and earbuds can tell you this summer, climate assures nothing. One day your sky fills with smoke, the next day your streets course with rain. If you grow up learning when and where to dart for shelter, when and where to find help, and when and how to aid someone who’s fallen, then you seem much likelier to ride out rough seas and build sturdier societies. Walking without a tugger seems to frame a path to those skills.

You can build those skills on instincts, and you can detect those instincts during play. So if worries about distracted drivers or head-down pedestrians are keeping little kids on the street in harnesses, what if cities figured out ways to amp up the quantity of parks and playgrounds for kids to explore? What if every empty storefront or partially-used parking lot became a destination for hiding, seeking, and shifting tacks?

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We New Yorkers are paying into a city that’s promised free childcare for everyone age two or older. We’re also living in a city where adults choose more often to have kids later or not have kids at all. And we’re living in a climate where even Elon wouldn’t necessarily trust AI to predict what will come down next. Maybe you are too. Imagine that place evolves into one where parks are so common anybody can walk there quickly. Let’s also make it a place where parks help kids become street smart early. The rewards would also rain on parents whose kids can become more helpful earlier, on seniors who’ll find more engaging and thoughtful places to go, and on adults without kids who’ll see fewer safety vests and more (contained) rounds of Red Rover.

Now. all this is easy for me to say. I work for myself so I could watch my kids a lot when they were little. I also had the good fortune to send both our kids to pricey, holistic, and nurturing preschool where they walked (in pairs, holding hands) each day to neighborhood parks. I also know lots of families without my dumb luck. I keep thinking parks should show up more frequently and instructively for those families.

The photo above shows some enviable real estate, north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the entrance to Central Park. But its strategy could inform paths from supermarket parking lots or plazas in quiet downtowns. Enviable details in urban property in the new climate include trees, shade, water, and space for kids and adults to coexist. Cities might program parks to replace dead space or anchor new mixed-use space. And they could aim to keep them big enough, findable enough, and mysterious enough for kids to frequently visit and interrogate them.

The assumptions strapping little kids into harnesses would give, after a while, to a different ethic. Playgrounds build moxie: forced pace builds conformity. I trained my daughter in dialogue when she was two and three, stamping around the soft surface on Lower Manhattan playgrounds. I’d say: what do you do when you fall? She’d say: Get right back up. I’d say: who’s your friend? She’d say: gravity. Kids pick up cues easily: caregivers without my luck or my manic energy should get more chances to deliver cues to adapt, recover, and observe.

Of course, this notion imagines more parkland than any city can create. Its logic, though, encourages kids and families to approach public space with more peripheral vision and intuitive logic. This sets them up to absorb more about other cultures, as kids in my neighborhood do every year during the Lunar New Year parade.

If you know more about your neighbors who don’t speak your language, literally or otherwise, you’re likelier to extend hands to them in the next flood or burn.

Or the next abduction, or the next troop deployment.

Finally, instilling a quantum of adventure in kids could hoist upgrades in every group’s sense of balance. For starters, it can save parents thousands each year. I overheard a couple dudes in my coworking space chatting the other day. One had his lunch in a grocery bag and said he was heading home to pick up his daughter from camp, and asked what the other guy’s kids were doing for the summer. That guy said his daughter was two and still in day care, but his son is almost 12 and had had six weeks of camp. “It was too much…” he began, and I twitched and braced myself for structure, sociality, behavior modification. But what the guy said about his son’s camp was: “It was too much money.”

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What if this 12-year-old had learned early to steer around his neighborhood and had no shortage of parks to visit, or no shortage of pals whom he knew from around? And when we’re thinking about neighborly ties, imagine the ripple effects of these kids bouncing from park to park without a harness in the mix.

People who never have kids could grow used to seeing them not as roadblocks or attachments but as neighbors with distinct personalities and strengths. People whose kids are grown could see prompts to step back, listen to, and model for kids. And the day care professionals who these days keep little kids in line could instead encourage them to keep telling stories.

While none of this musing can affect real estate dynamics in the next little while, it can cue changes that can build support for changes in land use. Pick your nearest public space, imagine how kids might wander it without restraint or danger, and imagine how that use would alter your day. I bet you don’t guffaw and do smile.

Parks you see in this essay bank on New York City quirks like the harbor or the Manhattan skyline, with adaptable design logic. From top to bottom, they’re these:

Maria Hernandez Park is a crossroads in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Hunters Point South Park greets a ferry hub near new high-rise rentals in Queens.

Ancient Playground sits beside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park.

Hester Street Playground in Manhattan’s Chinatown draws seniors at sunrise and a whoosh of tourists looking for rice rolls later in the day. It’s in a troubled park.

Flooding on Saturday followed smoke on Friday, with public space in lounges and on paths cuing more careful decisions about how to speak to, and give to, others. The app that calculated our payout became a background force. Let’s think about why.

First, I’ll tell you that the frolic I planned in Michigan went by the boards due to smoke. My wife and I went to pick up our son from a music camp a couple hundred miles from the fire source. We rented an AirBnB next to a bike trail in Traverse City. This town drips in that to which late-capitalist America aspires. Nearly every strip mall I saw boasts a brewpub. People trot out their Love is Love yard banners and Statue-of-Liberty-in-dismay bumper stickers on their SUVs. There’s a necklace of parks along Grand Traverse Bay, and Boardman Lake, and the Boardman River. There’s a crisscross of clean, lucid bike trails. But smoke overtook all this.

So my wife found a Y where staff and neighbors showed us around and made room for our reps, and we confined our bike ride to a four-mile loop. And my wife pointed out that even though we weren’t reaping the images to recycle those on the AirBnB site, we were lucky. Rather than consuming the Upper Peninsula as airbrushed and AI’d, we were experiencing it in its tribulation.

Which got me thinking about the upsides of absence, something I’d wrestle harder as we reckoned a way home after an East Coast storm canceled flights home. If public space can imbue greater patience and endurance in a changing climate, what can public space do when it’s unwise to spend too much time in public space?

Its simplest role is as a testifier, showing you what you’re missing (and trashing so you can ask Claude how to buff your Yukon). So on our full day in town we pulled out our Covid-era masks and rode a four-mile loop trail around Boardman Lake. You had plank bridges rising and swooping by the shore. You had ducks in formation. You had reason to think that this place would lift your eyes and spread lightness through your chest if it were safe for you and your fellow earthlings to breathe.

You could remember what we collectively ceded to the oil majors and the tech barons who joined Donald’s omerta. Rather than transform the capitalist system to run on clean fuel, as keeps reminding us, consumers left all this glory to char.

Call me That Guy if you will and I won’t deny it, and here I go. You could remember that the economy into which you pour blood and treasure puts a higher value on driving an SUV to pick up coffee every day than it does on making it possible to inhale clean air every day. Put the picture above in your pipe and smoke it.

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And this reminder cues another use for public space when climate extremes flare. It reminds you what you can do now.

The day after the smoke cleared, climate change’s yang messed with my yin as a row of storms and flash floods in my town downed my hopes of getting me, my wife, and my son home. Every ticket to fly into New York City that day became a ticket to figure out another way to get to New York City. You heard people returning from the rental car counter (“NO CARS LEFT!”) or purring to confidantes on the phone (“it’s a smaller airport than Shreveport, but everybody and their brother is here.”). It was a small enough airport that you could get rental-car updates from your gate or the other five gates. What you didn’t hear included snarling, bellyaching, or outtamyways.

On the app, I’d keep flicking off a chat bubble calling me “Alexander” and saying that the airline “certainly apologizes.” Here, amid a cloud of widened eyes and scrunched-up shoulders, I remembered I was in public and shifted instantly to polite words and problem-solving. We seemed to swallow that we were tromping in front of little kids and a lot of teenagers, and we shared tips on one-way drives (you could go as far as Grand Rapids) and neighborhood plays (you could get flights to Philly, which I did). We wished each other good luck.

A group of teens cut up about the situation: “Why don’t they just put an umbrella over the plane?” “Planes go above clouds, so what’s the problem?” We helped a mom we’d just met decide what to bake for a cookie exchange. My son and I counseled a family visiting New York to hang out in Riverside Park. (I wanted to make sure it was cool to recommend Classic Playground, with its intact 1930s equipment, so I asked the girl her age. “Ten, I’ll be eleven on Thursday.” I suggested the playground.) Another marooned parent told me I’d get Wi-Fi if I stepped outside.

So public space in a storm creates a surge of humanness, and in my experience puts humans back in the saddle. We didn’t ditch our devices: in fact, I made all my alternate arrangements on apps and websites while muddling through the baggage claim/car rental/cherry festival information mist. (If I had waited for my turn to talk to the agent, someone else in cyberspace would have bought the tickets I got.) I fed Delta’s and American Express’ and Google’s bots lustily while there, but I didn’t swallow the bots’ logic. You could even argue that I used them.

So sit with the distinction for a minute. Daily chitchat between clerk and customer has stilled, and Covid lockdowns taught us that buying and selling rage on even when silence falls. The digital barons have strip-mined face-to-face contact from commerce. But public space lets us adapt. Plazas and pathways and delays give us time and spark to talk to each other to brainstorm, reassure, joke, and entertain. So public space can encourage each person to act a little more human - even when they’re in public space that’s keeping them from their favorite public space.

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Note the word adapt in the paragraph we just finished. It’s our one-word mantra, the code to write backward across our foreheads, the message that crochety Once-ler would have sent if it really were rooting for humanity. Climate change crossed the threshold from threat to fact decades ago. Our species’ task now consists in counting what it costs, what each of us and all of us cherish, and where to make changes of all scales. Public space, especially when you have to look at it through a window, can also help you separate what’s beyond your control from what you can change.

I can’t make it stop raining in Queens on a day I planned to travel. I can’t stop it from raining so much harder than it used to, or stop flames from rising to heat domes and pasting the air. But I can figure out how to make an ugly outcome from this witch’s brew of climate change a little sweeter. Public space sets space for those decisions.

After we FaceTimed with our daughter who was visiting Boston, my wife and son and I headed out to a strenuously honorable grocery store for breakfast supplies ahead of our 6:45 am flight the next day to Detroit. After the clerk rang us up and sent us on our way with “stay safe out there!” we took the long way back to our hotel. Trudging down the main shopping street past the tourists in regional pastel sweatshirts and bachelorette parties in uniform, we passed some kids playing guitars on a park bench. My son recognized them, from camp, and we said hello to their parents.

The three boys and the other boys’ sister kept busking for a while, sometimes cuing people to pause. (Not often.) I sang along as they cooked their way through “Hey Jude,” with Sir Paul’s injunction don’t make it bad guiding what I said and didn’t say to and about the other tourists and bachelorette parties. The baseline of smoky, crowded, tired, out a lot of ducats and far from home remains. Above that, you find choices. The benches and walkway offered an air purifier to convert aggravation into harmonies.

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Climate change gives the lie to the myth of human agency. If people could control outcomes, would billions let ourselves give in to the deceit of a few thousand polluters? Climate change proves that, rather than being free to assert control, we humans are free to attempt collaboration. Without collaboration, more and more living things suffer. And here, compromised public space yields another clue.

The serrated edge of the climate crisis tells you that you can do something, but that any one person doing any one thing will ping off the problem’s rim. Compare and contrast the following. If you gave a major airline a bunch of money and its airplane was missing a part and then it started to rain, you have two choices. You can part with a bunch more money to take some facoccta route to the place you had already paid the major airline to take you. Or you can shrug, realize that sometimes it rains and sometimes machines fail, and in the haze of time you must spend getting home you can play cards or write an essay or give somebody else a little lift with a friendly word.

Once you start down that path, you confront the choice churning inside the climate crisis. As spells out in her new travelogue Monster of a Land, broad chunks of supposedly public space in the US belongs in practice to the wealthy. She shows people getting kicked out of parks for being homeless, seeing tourists pause in liberal pabulum to mock them when they beg, finding themselves tailed by state employees at campsites for looking poor. You can sit on a bench and strum “Hey Jude” if nobody kicks you off the bench for smelling too ripe. You can stand and sway to the strumming if you have the coin to visit a tourist town.

On Friday in Traverse City, I unhooked my KN94 to step inside a bike shop and return our rentals ahead of schedule. The clerk, looking into the screen to close the rental, asked me: “And was nothing wrong?” Then we both laughed. The wrong shows its face in public space, or else it becomes insidious and harder to heal.

As with suddenly buzzy regional airports, so with abruptly silent parks and trails. Your choice, once you’re surviving, runs between burrowing in resentment about not having as much comfort as you want or extending comfort to others. When the offal of human consumption causes smoke so thick that it hijacks breathing in a different time zone, you can’t make it all right all at once. But you can get your heads together with others who wish they could sit in the park or get on the plane. If you look around and take a mental Ginsu knife to the word start, you can start to make it better.

The parks I salute here all make for easier visiting when the air is clear, but reward a first look in bits and bytes.

Riverside Park, along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, includes cliffs and kayaks and Classic Playground, where the seesaw still goes all the way to the ground and as high as a kid can push it.

At Clinch Park in Traverse City you can fly a kite, buy soft-serve, swim, and dock at or gawk at a marina.

Elsewhere in Traverse City, the Boardman Lake Trail runs four miles and takes in a big library, a wooden bridge past ducks and swans, and of course a brewpub.

On the west, see a new hangar for playing Padel, with tinted windows and walls the color of Grand Moff Tarkin’s uniform. On the north, notice a trapezoid-shaped gym with an internal climbing wall. On the east, through the trees, you can make out the “McCarren Tennis Center,” with leaves and branches fallen over blue courts that you can use with a (scarce) Parks permit. I pass this spot daily on my way to my office. On Friday, people clustered at the Padel redoubt and the tennis courts. Guess where they were louder, and laughing, when I stopped to take this phot.

We’ll come back to that in a second. First, let’s talk Substacker-to-Substack.

When treed about what to write, I slip into ‘s clips of our duly elected president using his office as a bank run /bidet. And I wonder: if society puts up with this kind of graft, then how seriously can I expect anyone to take my cheerleading for side-street pickleball and chitchat by the pier?

At that point I tumble back to earth and resume typing. Well, today I hit a conclusion whose roots come back to the fruit I hope this writing bears. It’s about money.

You can look at Trump’s election as a wide vote of no confidence that American capitalism, as currently construed, can bring wide prosperity. Some may have voted in hope of a shake-up. Some may have wanted revenge on a real or imagined cheat. A ton didn’t vote at all. But the common assumption looks to be about unfair allocation of money. Americans with money exploit Americans without money, that’s not on track to change, we are living in a gambling den where the oddsmakers have been bought.

Oh, and the gambling den has caught fire.

So if America runs on funny money and serious greed, our president might as well set a new standard for greed and thievery.

I can’t say whether that logic resonates with the people whose votes put Trump over the top. Most Trump voters I know prioritize pro-life policies, or always vote Republican, or expected Trump to make progress in the Middle East. But don’t doubt that Trump validates the idea that you can equate success and agency with money.

So let’s go back to my North Brooklyn crossroads.

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It’s true that at 10:30 on a Friday, I heard more chuckles and shouts from the tennis courts than the Padel fortress or the Vital stronghold. But not everyone can CitiBike to work at 10:30 on a Friday, much less play tennis. If you’re out on the court, you or your pal the AI unicorn probably has a permit. And if you’re not chitchatting outside the Padel command post, it’s probably because you work for a living.

I can stand here in my air-conditioned office and say: be nice to each other in parks, help elderly ladies cross the street in tree-shaded neighborhoods, upload yourself into this riverfront tableau I snapped last night. But that means: make sure all these public places and the people who manage them face no danger of running short on money.

The solutions to the knots choking our collective trachea begin in public space. Now, pivoting from the umbrella term “solutions” to the diffuse term “public space” means skipping some steps. So please let me retrace them.

Younger people rightly believe a gappy, skewed system mostly slams doors in their fiscal faces. Sara Myklebust, a researcher specializing in economic justice, told a Shelterforce magazine webinar on July 9 that she never expects to be able to afford to buy a house. For many educated people, work produces debt and disconnection, plus a front-row seat for watching wealth flow to people who openly cheat and bilk. Meanwhile, the floodwaters of real life and BS waves of online life only rise. A solution for a whole country needs to prove that competition and hard work, and attention and caring and cleverness. can bring on security and growth.

You might assume that a solution like that rides on better and broader education. Kind of. For sure, a shored-up society would build stable lifeboats on wide and deep waves of learning. People would learn to critique and interrogate - and to hush up and listen. People would master the difference between disagreement and revulsion. People would see through instant rushes. People would know that honorable projects take years to gel. Schools and houses of worship, shareholders and summer camps, teams and managers should all work toward those goals. But think about scale.

Education needs years. It also needs thousands of teachers taking deep breaths, millions of students squaring their shoulders, bureaucrats grokking what teachers and parents are saying across kilobytes of Zooms and reports. Political organizing also takes years, mountains of coffee grounds, hundreds of thousands of unanswered calls, and thousands of people dragging themselves to meetings after long shifts at work.

But in public space, what surrounds you can surprise you. When public space looks generous and legible, like the new riverfront you see above in Philadelphia, surprise opens a logical gate. The Philadelphia riverfront surprised me. The playground and hoops oasis at the Obama Presidential Center seems to have surprised one of our nation’s leading design critics. The infinity pool nestled under a bridge on the north side of Central Park surprises lots of people. Despair loses a handhold. Public space, when it shows that public servants and professionals can sometimes experiment at public scale, gives cue for smaller and instant experiments.

In healthy, intriguing, and navigable public space, a person can build skill in friendly nods. A person can practice chitchat, or swing into teamwork when someone collapses from heat, or notice how a person in a hijab and another in a kipah are bantering about what is or isn’t on a QR code. While systemic reform yawns across generations for scattered crowds, sweeter vistas in public space can wake people up to patience and effort in groups.

Public space can invite in moments what schools and campaigns need to build over years. Without those moments, given the barrage of loneliness and illogic and thievery and chaos coming at us all, I don’t know how those longer projects can get the fuel to begin. Across furrows of religion, language, education, wealth, and assumptions, I don’t know where else many people can perceive an opening.

The knot we might untie together consists in the fact that these openings aren’t free. When I started covering public space policy in 2005, I learned quickly that parks managers and urban designers worry as often about grants and creative financing as developers of affordable housing do. Working in 2015 for a parks advocacy group in New York and talking to simpatico folks from Chicago, I learned the same thing. If parks need to stay inviting, ecologically abundant, safe, and fun, then parks need the money to hire and retain qualified people and manage a web of needy life. You know, grass and pear trees and ducks and stuff like that. It’s a delicate system.

Once you accept that, things that looked free come to look a lot pricier. The ocean is free, but you’ve got to cross some thresholds to get into it. My family needed a ferry ticket and a hasty Lyft to get to the beach above on July 4 weekend, and people we asked down the road at a bar didn’t know how to get there.

Likewise, walking in the park is free, but you need to get there. You need to consider it safe. You need the actual free time and the perception that you control your time. Otherwise, WiFi worms in, carrying supposedly free message from those free riders of the spectrum. Moments available for no putative cost on social media have colonized moments people once spent asking for directions, summoning memories they’d forgotten, telling other people the time or listening to intricate stories.

So peace runs dry, fast. Many of us work on immediate notice with no hope of advancement. Many of us care for little ones and our own parents. Most of us struggle to hold onto a thought or remember how one got in our heads. Do you think you can plop us in a generic park and we’ll immediately gin up a local economy of friendship bracelets and craft beer? If so, then I have an island in Albania to sell you.

And that’s where money drives decisions.

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The argument for lusher, busier, and friendlier public space is an argument for money. And as an argument for money, it rests on evidence. So advocacy organizations are starting to document who uses public space and how they might use it more robustly. In my town, the Urban Design Forum has worked with partners to launch a survey of every group using open space. (It looks like this.) The idea, executive director Dan McPhee told me at an event, involves sharpening the picture of who is tapping, minding, and bringing benefit from the nonprivate real world. That sharper picture will show points of strain or blanks to drive future fundraising.

(I have paid dues to Urban Design Forum and applied to one of its fellowships.)

Arguments for money also rest on broad understanding about roadblocks and systems. If you believe broad and deep experience in public life makes people kinder and redeems some of our critical thinking, then parks move in from the fringe. You need to invest capital in making it hard to not get into public space.

That goal differs in intensity and breadth from efforts to make public space easy to get to. It absorbs a lot of efforts underway: making permits for events less cumbersome, helping citizens adopt parks, and making field trips part of school. All the research I just linked deserves serious (maybe printed-out serious) reading. But the idea of treating public space as public medicine implies studying, testing, optimizing and sustaining a broad mix of plants and animals, and professionals to manage them, inside and outside defined park boundaries.

Imagine these arguments with me for a second. If you’re up for it, imagine a debate with one camp standing outside the Padel fortress and another on the street in front of the tennis courts. Imagine you didn’t hear politicians or lobbyists using code like “burdens on the taxpayer.” Imagine reckoning.

Reckoning would mean counting costs. As a society, we’d work up the cost of making more places bring more of the breadth, prospect, and peace New Yorkers can tap by ferrying to Governors Island (in the picture below). We’d also work up the benefit. We’d discount the risks of floods, brawls, pests, and petty crime in public space. We’d share and see all this data, and post how long it takes to bring projects forward.

In that outcome, a view like the one below would still belong to special occasions or the especially lucky. But work could progress on making life more patient, more reflective, more independent and more connected. It could even let the premise sit (at least for this generation) that success only comes with money.

And I’ll bet more people would play sports outside than behind tinted glass - weather permitting, as you have to say these days.

Parks you see in this essay take a certain amount of doing to get to, but feel like the whole world while you’re there. From top to bottom, they are:

Grand Ferry Park, a small public park next to splashy Domino Park in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Schuylkill Banks, a new riverfront park in Philadelphia.

Gateway National Recreation Area - Sandy Hook Beach D, Highlands, New Jersey.

Picnic Point on Governors Island, New York City.

And “Stuck in the Middle with You” is by Stealers Wheel, and evidently Elvis’ production team produced the single.

I once argued that people will rally to solve their local problems when they have to visually face them each day. Now I say: people need to rally to solve a hornet’s nest of problems everywhere - and we should train ourselves to see those problems’ results.

We’ll get to the baseball bat (unused) and the addicts’ fight (unresolved) in a minute. We’ll end with some hope for conversions of streets to pedestrian and bike paths. To get there, indulge me for a paragraph of misty over-the-shoulder reminiscing.

See, in 2011 I’d been writing journalism about multimillion-dollar urban projects and about grassroots work to green up city neighborhoods. I’d piled my ideas about visionary public planning into a 34-page book proposal for a project I called Face the City. I meant to speak to city and national officials. I meant to suggest that by siting sleek new parks and towers next to switching stations and wastewater treatment plants, they could compel the rich to grapple with inequity and climate havoc. My showcase was the High Line, an abandoned rail trestle that had become a popular “park in the sky” after a citizen-led campaign to save it from demolition.

The guys who saw it through told me in several interviews that they dreamed of the High Line as a beautiful place for everyone, and took care to show respect to public housing tenants nearby at events and in planning.

Over time, the High Line became a fixture and my project winnowed into essays in a 2016 anthology. The thesis weathered some blows. In already-crowded Manhattan, neighbors in a ritzy area rally to oppose a new waste transfer station across a highway from some luxury homes. A project to charge drivers a fee for entering Manhattan’s most crowded section dragged out over more than a decade. Income gaps became chasms, and homeless people and chronic users of drugs spent more time in the streets. Doomscrolling dovetailed with antidemocratic forces. So I sunset the idea that a more visible urban challenge must become a more attended-to one.

So roll forward to this summer, when climate change leaves its thumbprint over fatal heat in Europe and fire in Colorado, and come back to the guy with the bat.

I was riding north to work on Bedford Avenue, the main commercial stretch of gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn, seeing red over the fact that Delta Air Lines had lost a loved one’s musical instrument on a flight to the Midwest and then sent it to the Caribbean. I normally travel a block west on Berry, which is closed to cars, but this morning traffic lights sent me on the shopping street. On my left, I saw a guy in a sleeveless shirt with grey curly hair, shouting and waving the bat. I went that way.

The man was somewhere between forty and sixty, with a traditional Brooklyn accent. He was shouting at a traffic cop who evidently had stuck a parking ticket in his windshield. A bigger man, leaning on braces, seemed to be the bat-waver’s friend and stood between them. The traffic cop waving the ticket showed his f-word mastery and then skulked around the corner.

I said that all I had seen was a guy waving a bat and yelling, and that I was curious what was going on. “Educate me,” I said. The guy said I didn’t have to worry about anybody getting hurt: I said he seemed upset, he’s a person, I’m a person, I wanted him to feel better. He said he would feel better if I minded my business. I said it was my business if somebody might be about to get hurt.

Both men waited for the scold that I had no intention of making, and perhaps for the filming I wasn’t about to do. A beat went by.

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The guy’s friend, closer to my age and standing on metal braces, explained that the cop had seen the guy walking to his car and, rather than talk to him to say he couldn’t park there, walked over and put a ticket under the windshield.

“Working from the neck down,” I said to the friend, who nodded. I had spent five of the past 24 hours trying to get a Delta agent to explain to me how an item that went on a plane to the Midwest ended up in the Bahamas and how it would get back. My sympathy for the guy getting a ticket rather than a human conversation was as big as an idling 18-wheeler.

“You think that’s cool?” he asked me once his friend had taken the ticket.

“No, I think it’s garbage!” I saw his shoulders drop and knew the conversation was pretty well over, and I doubted whether he ever would have used the bat anyway. He walked back toward his car.

The friend leaned a little toward me and lowered his voice. “He’s just upset.”

I know the feeling. We said our all-right-guys and have-a-good-ones, and I made my next right onto the bikeway.

I will bet all the lost-luggage unclaimed value in the world that the car owner had no intention of using his bat and is not proud that he had it in his hands. I will more cautiously bet that a dispute over a traffic ticket, one block west on the bike-and-pedway, would have fizzled right away or faded faster among more peacemakers.

No longer can I say that parks breed public harmony, as I tried to say 15 years ago. Time has shown how our phones condition us to tune out content that stings our eyes or clangs in our ears. But parks make it likelier at the margin that one person will catch a glimpse of another, communicate on matters of safety and decency, and agree to manage something like a common respect for space and for freedom.

I tend to think that virtuous cycle kicks in more durably in parks that look at or abut public works like barges or transfer stations, but I can’t prove it. And even when you see signs of your city under strain, you can blur them as if the world were your Zoom background. In the park I celebrated last week, I normally work out once a week before the sun comes up, jumping rope. This Friday, I got there about an hour later than usual. And so I saw the heroin addicts.

A neighbor who waters plants in the park’s center saw me seeing a fight between two of them. (You may accuse me of assumptions, but bear in mind that a woman screamed at a man: “What about all that heroin I bought you?” And lest you assume, both of them were white.) My neighbor said she’d called our councilmember and the city’s troubleshooting phone line, and would soon put up posters.

“They’re people too,” she said, “but can’t we have one nice place for ourselves?”

A few minutes later, I saw one of the Chinese-speaking women who dance outside the library yelling at one of the users, who stumbled down the path filming her. My neighbor spoke with others. “Where have you been?” she asked one. “I never call the cops on anyone,” she told another. “You know me.”

I’ve been in that park thousands of times, and at least twice a week since lockdown. This situation caught me flatfooted: I’d been blind to it. I got back to my building, left a message and an email for the councilmember, and stressed that I wanted the people I’d seen to get help. I don’t know how treatment for addicts works: my guess is, fitfully and slowly. But on my neighbor’s question of whether we can have someplace nice for ourselves, my answer is a regretful no.

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We’ve tried isolating ourselves by highway, and by distortive income tax treatment, and by algorithm. All the cleaving leaves many people lonelier, likelier to jump at shadows, and addicted to something.

We also know from history that Americans also yield to drugs and violence in small towns and sprawl. A screenwriter with David-Coverdale-grade tresses told me in 1989 that you could find as many stalkers in LA as in Manhattan. The fictional perversity of Twin Peaks, Washington broke through in the Clinton and Trump administrations because it reminded us that people can exploit or collapse or come through anywhere we settle. It also suggests that behind closed doors, illnesses can fester ever deeper.

And as the pressures of climate change compound our headaches, tooth decay (really! - see ‘s latest Substack post) and fatigue, two facts solidify. One is that we’re smart to reinforce the carbon-sucking stuff we know as trees, shrubs, and soil because the worlds we have built can’t handle the carbon we’ve already added. The other is that escaping others’ maladies only works if we’re willing to make ourselves more brittle and willing to let others’ pain redouble.

So what I once embraced as an antidote now looks like a baseline. If places near infrastructure look welcoming, like the pier above that’s next to a Sanitation garage, then they can become more popular. And if using them gets one person more affection for the coastline, or the fishermen, or the recycling process, then the odds of us keeping peace and dialogue get a little stronger.

And so remaking streets for walking, biking and lingering deserves serious discussion. As a policy, it’s earned a track record in Europe and South America and has traction across the USA. Like this Substack hopes to do, it provides a chance to reset and look at what’s wobbly as the climate warps.

But yo: looking is just a start. Talking takes more work and builds more strength.

It also counters what other writers have noticed, about how people mainly come together in cities to watch things. My friend has sussed out what’s rolling through FIFA FanFests and began with summer movies in Manhattan’s Bryant Park during the Clinton administration. Most of the time people are cheerfully forming a big urban crowd, they’re watching something in more-or-less unison.

But for a small urban crowd, the United States’ original playground on the Lower East Side of Manhattan shows something else.

Older men with rounder bellies exercise slowly on benches, extending their legs in and out. A boy with Ringo Starr’s 1964 haircut and today’s kicks plays hoops with a bigger crowd, aged maybe 13 to maybe 24, and hits his mark from deep. A grandma in a Panama hat watches me and my classmates groan and grunt through our free-weight workout as we lunge around rubber squares and try (always successfully) to not run into four-year-olds on scooters. And another fitness class goes through its reps in the corner near the volleyball: one member wears a t-shirt that says “NOT FRIENDLY.” They use a selfie stand to record their form.

One guy working out tells a kid: “It’s been a journey.”

Some kids cluster by my neighbor’s retriever (that dog earns her living as a therapy dog, so she takes the attention without ruffling even though she’s off duty). Littler kids, almost always boys, ask our teacher if they can try the dumbbells.

Our teacher last week told these boys: if you try the weights, everyone will want them.

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The space I’m describing runs less than a city block south-north and the width of maybe two building lots east-west1. Basketballs fly past grasping hands. Dogs run off leash. People, though, pretty much never bump into each other. Last week, a guy running reps of push-ups took breaks to encourage who seemed to be his son back over to the low-hoop basketball court. The boy was saying something about bigger, older boys: he looked to be about six and 80% t-shirt. “They’re not bullying you,” said the man. The boy rejoined the play. Later he shouted to his dad about something he’d done on the workout equipment.

Anyway, when the man’s next push-up set came I was lunging backward with dumbbells. I slid aside to give him space. (I was walking backwards.) He paused, saying: “I don’t want to intrude on the session.”

But intruding in a zone like this is as possible as shouting too loud at a watch party.

Ingots of experience in this park stick with me years after soreness from a given workout fades. Once a group of girls asked how old the dog was. Five, was the answer. “My age too!” observed a girl. More than a few times a dude with muscles as big as my head rolls up, proclaims his intentions in an accent born somewhere between Lisbon and Tashkent, and with lots of effort and noise brings on the curl he intends. Once we hadn’t seen him around for some months, mentioned him, and there he was.

Once a dog bit a neighbor, I ran to my apartment to get her gauze and Neosporin, and when I got back she calmly told me she was a nurse and had that stuff already. A pet owner who’d witnessed the whole episode sized it up: “well, that dog’s an asshole!” And once a family showed up, the parents seeming from different countries and different ethnicities based on their faces and accents. They gushed in such rehearsed sentences at their little kids’ acrobatics - “wow! you jumped so high!” - and left so silently that I was sure they were undercover operatives.

A little further west there’re two playgrounds and ping-pong, benches, volleyball and martial arts. It’s never a lot of people, except during the annual volleyball tournament. But people are doing a lot in a confined space. That’s what this park offers to others.

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Diana seems likely right that more people will venture out to watch parties than will choose jobs so that they can be in offices or pay for movie tickets so that they can be in a theater. Watch parties cost nothing, suffuse toxic arguing, and render moot the question of whether people are present or lost in a screen. (We’ll talk about double-device entertainment another time.) But cities sometimes draw their potential problem-solvers, rescuers, governing coalitions, and balladeers from small crews.

(That doesn’t mean these crowds always lay out plans for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: look at those enraged Englishmen in Boston Harbor. More mundanely, thousands of hours go by in my park when dudes are talking into earbuds or not at all and kids younger than ten are genuflecting into smartphones.)

And maybe while big crowds roar big plazas to merriment with big screens, small crowds guide small places to life with small spaces between them. New Yorkers and Atlantans did this when they built community gardens (really parks and heat-control stations) on foreclosed property last century. Baltimoreans and Chicagoans do it with parties in alleys. The small-space-wide-use premise powers block parties and the kind of block-by-block organizing that Zohran Mamdani managed to become New York’s mayor: when you know that the farmer’s market is also a skateboarding hangout and playground and transit hub, you campaign with more precision.

On this logic, even cities built on sprawl might cultivate small spaces for sharing. They can arise along rail right-of-ways, in underloved parks, behind schools, in sports arenas on off days. They can grow in schoolyards and mostly-empty office plazas. As a quieter, blobbier, steadier cousin of watch parties and parades, small public spaces kitted out for as many people as want to use them might help the good vibes keep vibing long after the World Cup moves on to its next port.

I lost my balance scrambling up Top Notch Peak, where but for some quick flexing of my knees and some sound advice from my hiking group my corpse would have lay in a ditch wearing a “Friends Don’t Let Friends Beer Goggle” t-shirt. I made friends from Georgia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Washington, Texas, and Louisiana. One friend held the chuppah at my wedding nine years later.

From May 15 until August 21 that year, I never touched grass. I thought of that on Saturday when I saw this poster on the Somerville Community Path outside Boston.

Now, I get that this is an expression rather than a manifesto. Still, my concern runs to the roots of discourse on what makes people thrive. So let’s leave this poster to QR-code for itself and examine more closely why the chirp to “touch grass” feels weedy. To start, I doubt a college student as unskilled as I was is following my toilet-scrubbing path at Lake Yellowstone Hotel this morning.

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This summer, per NPR, something like a third of teens in the United States have or have been looking for summer jobs. A hefty chunk of them who aren’t working, says the reporting, also don’t attend school or take care of younger kids. If these folks follow the cat’s gaze and graze their fingertips along the nearest golf course, what will lift? They may reclaim more time from the code that follows them, and they may build friendships on the same paths that I found. But we shouldn’t assume they will, because a society that meows to “touch grass” also urges “make friends.” In the whorl of climate change and digital everything, those phrases’ meaning can fly away fast.

The ecology above our heads spits hurricanes and roars to 116 degrees. The ecology on our screens makes it guesswork to say whether your friend, a stranger, or a bit of code produced the image you’re expected to rate with a symbol. Getting from one place to another safely, and then settling in that other place, means preparing with your water bottle, your rain gear, and your knowledge of direction. (Remember: never eat soggy waffles.) If your world consists mainly in winning extra game lives or scrolling For You, you might expect to touch grass and then touch ocean. What really exalts a plunge into the outdoors , and what really made me lucky to spend that summer cleaning toilets, runs slower and deeper.

Consider the scene below from a coastal Connecticut town decked out in Independence Day bunting. You’ve got no end of grass for the touching, a river for the reflecting, a gazebo for the gazing. What you lack shows up first in the rash of ice cream spoons camouflaged around the trash can.

Again: I begrudge nobody their ice cream! As the climate grows weirder we’ll likely need more supply. But the incantation “touch grass and meet in real life” swings with the hands that tossed these spoons. The phrase implies a quick fix. It presumes that, like something in your feed, the grass will pop up from somewhere and may disappear with a rant about Joe Biden to take its place. If you aim to smooth out your creaks by touching grass, you needn’t worry about who cares for the grass. You also needn’t worry about what animals feed off it or how it’s faring this year. And you certainly needn’t worry about aiming short of the trash can. You’re moving on anyway.

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What we crave from outdoor space runs counter to what we ingest from digital time. Immersion in the real world means toning down each stimulus, seeing memories and notions bleed into each other, and above all else accepting that the main motivation for simplifying things springs from recognizing how complex things will always be. It means that thinking a view from the other side of Top Notch Peak would be badass doesn’t equate to knowing how to climb across the notch.

If we need but touch grass, we don’t need to fund landscapers or botanists or zoologists. Grass will abide in perpetuity, like base in a game of ontological tag. Someone or something will cut it, feed it, and protect it from pesticides. We don’t need to control how much water we glug, and we don’t need to know how to talk to each other. Leave aside the question of how we adjudicate disputes when more than one posse wants to touch the same tuft of grass.

So you might choose to read Beatrix’s wishes less like a cue and more like a clue. It might hint at a yearning to let go, for longer than you might even record, of the commands inside the half-pound gizmo in your hand. That yearning might release another wish, to escape the commands that pop up from the phone: turn left, turn left, turn right, and buy this frappe and watch this snippet. Once free of those commands, the ethereal Beatrix might suggest, you can accept a heftier responsibility.

You can help the older person balancing a walker on rocky ground, the frightened person trying to entertain a toddler while keeping eyes out for ICE, the fidgety person not sure about sticking around. You can sign up for a shift pulling invasives from the lawn, for a class about watching for ticks, for a fund keeping janitors on the job. You can learn what I learned placing teddy bear soap in every basket on my list those summer days in 1991: I only get to relax because someone set things up for me, and I will breathe easier if I do the same for someone else.

These are steep and bumpy decisions to climb, and you’re not alone if they seem frosty or forbidding. People have tried to refine reverence for nature into something more like the fun you get from snacking for generations. If they hadn’t, who would have used all that teddy bear soap in the hotel rooms I cleaned? But what’s newly driving the dubious “touch grass” meme involves the level of impatience it implies.

Touching grass can lead to questions about the kind of grass in question, more probably if someone gets to picking up the spoons near the grass. Meeting up in real life evolves friendships if the meeting up leads to joining up in a project or an argument. If you think you can get a fix from a share of nature that compares in time and depth to anything on your feed, then you don’t have your feet under you.

Remember before you go touch whatever you touch next: the most bracing sights in nature took at least months and probably millennia to get that way. And some of the ones that can lift you into awe are ones that hardly anybody gets to touch.

If you have time on your hands this summer, you might get lost in one of them.

The parks I mentioned above all come via some hidden costs, but also all attract enough people that you can find workarounds to visit on a budget. They are:

Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Somerville Community Path, Somerville, Massachusetts

Essex Town Green, Essex, Connecticut

Shoreline public access along Tuckerman Avenue, Middletown, Rhode Island

A lot of us New Yorkers stayed up, and/or out, well into the Sunday morning part of Saturday night as our Knicks earned the NBA championship. Most celebrating occurred on streets. We mixed noise, high-fiving strangers, nearly-overwhelmed-but-in-the-mix police officers, and whooping, with drivers honking and CitiBikers rejoicing “New York, the best city!” and someone tossing a firework every so often.

While some of us behaved terribly, most of us partied like neighbors. People knew how streets could handle stress, what they were there for, who took care of them. Likewise, people assumed traffic lights, underground electric lines, and air conditioners would keep humming along. Which got me wondering.

What happens when you picture your neighborhood park at 4 am? Does it start to look more like a sewer pipe or a central electricity switching station? It should.

Unlike schools or hospitals, people tend to construe parks as places they can avoid or make do with as they are. What do you picture when someone drops the word “park”? Most likely you picture dogs running, a splash of kids playing soccer, a bike or three, some mahjong in the mix. What happens if I prompt you first with “water treatment plant” and “defensive barrier”? Parks are working when most people are sleeping or Zooming, and it’s logical to pay them by the hour.

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While only a few sots, snoggers, insomniacs and ultramarathoners visit it, the park is up all niight doing what no profit-seeking player would or should. Rainwater is going somewhere. Carbon is going up in the air or down into plants. Heat is meeting more or less shade. Vermin are or aren’t finding what they need without raiding restaurant Dumpsters. Cycles of life are cycling, and cities with sounder and deeper upkeep of those cycles’ stalks and slopes will see payoff to their bottom line.

And yet the funding comes up short. When cities think about how to finance or fund all that, imagery crowds in of ladies in chinstrap hats watering tiger lilies and young men in shirseys playing pickup. And the burden for upkeep runs to volunteers, who call themselves “friends” when “weeders of last resort” might make a fitter name.

Weeders sounds perhaps too narrow, though, to describe the “friends group” in your local park. These associations range from the Friends of the Park-Kohala Tennis Courts in Kapa’au, Hawaii through the Friends of Seward Park in Seattle and the Friends of Exall Park to the Friends of Lincoln Park in Portland, ME. These groups, sometimes with formal agreements with cities and sometimes on their own say-so, comprise a spray of volunteers, fundraisers, and small nonprofit staffs pay for gardeners, landscapers, and guys with rakes.

If it’s in an area with prestige and hotels and that sort of stuff, like Madison Square Park above, your town green likely attracted a Conservancy with a high level of commercial support and maybe a regular payment from local landowners. A park in a business district with a robust friends group, like Madison Square Park at the start of the 2023 Cranksgiving charity bike ride, sure looks like we’d like a park to look.

If this dynamic seems sweet, consider a thought experiment from a recent panel.

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Parks in a warped climate bear more responsibility than ever. They become social valves during lockdowns, ambient air-conditioning, floodwater diversion, screen relief. Yet city governments scarcely budget enough to keep them in decent shape. The New York City research-and-advocacy shop Center for an Urban Future (for whom I’ve done some work. most recently in the Obama/Bloomberg years) has been publishing reports and hosting panels on ways to meliorate that. 1 On June 9, experts talked about the tasks that friends groups shoulder to keep up public space.

Morgan Monaco heads the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit that works with New York City to run Brooklyn’s showcase. “If a water main breaks on Canal Street,” she said, “nobody’s going to wait for some Friends of Canal Street to clean it up.”

People tend to carry thin images in our heads of “maintenance.” Monaco’s sting flows from the fact that while everyone thinks of streets as the city’s bones, most of us still think of parks as bonuses. Cities get away with dealing less in budget for park maintenance than for almost any public resource2. At the panel, former deputy mayor Meera Joshi mused that libraries may win more funding because they can visibly shut their doors after budget cuts while your neighborhood park is likelier to let Cutwater cans pile up than to lock its gates.

I’d guess that most of us imagine parks as though they’re always there, but only discernible when we decide to shoot hoops or take a shortcut, host a baby-shower picnic or bring some beers and listen to a local blues band. In fact, parks aerate and run the carbon cycle and break screen monotony all year and all day. The conservancy supporting Nashville’s Centennial Park, which you see above, highlights springtime blooms and short-sleeve beach volleyball on its homepage. But the park was there when my family visited one December.

Maybe most people assume parks will be open but predominantly ugly, and that they don’t really need to go to them. Likewise, maybe most people assume that maintenance amounts to pushing a broom and pulling out dandelions, which anybody could do, and that maintenance budgeting commands less attention than keeping hospitals equipped or paying teachers’ pensions.

Maybe not. The impression fails any test, beginning with the fact that gardeners and foresters know more about what’s in each tree than I know about who played backup point guard for the Knicks in the 1983-84 season.3Even beyond this caricature, though, parks earn more support overnight than they did before floods and fires became more frequent than Knicks titles.

Where a park snuggles against a ritzy neighborhood and Goldman Sachs headquarters, like Hudson River Park above, we may expect business investment to keep it spruce. When a park blocks storm-surge waves and rising seas, like East River Park below, a logical eye turns to the taxpayer. But parks, like people, serve manifold purposes at once. Like people, parks have metabolism.

They can be more or less shaggy, more or less hearty, more or less welcoming. At all times, any tree or shrub in any park affects the city’s heat (and, to a teeny degree, the planet’s carbon count). At all times, any seating or seesaw or soccer goal in any of them gives a person some cue out of isolation. But counting their costs and counting their benefits seems like an unreachable exercise as long as most people think that they are only “using” parks when they’re within them.

None of this falls at the sandaled feet of friends-group leaders. To the contrary, they have often compelled city leaders to pay more and deeper attention to what parks do, can do, and need. My challenge to think of a park as commanding a street’s unbroken funding stream asks you to think about what can elevate the place you live.

In New York, we saw loud testimony over the past month that elevation comes from the chance to share ritualized time with others. As observed, what we did stood in bold contrast to a president who smudges our fortunes with his theft and treats our White House lawn like a pit for his calculated id. But what we did was also, mainly, we stood. Plenty of watch parties around town offered no seating, no snacks, no amenities, and they drew thousands.

Maybe this points to a way forward for park funding. Think like a fan and of course you’ll happily stand hipbone-to-hipbone with thousands of neighbors (unless, like me, you’re pretty sure that your presence at a watch party sends a mild form of evil-eye to the team). Think like a future old person and you’ll likely welcome something that keeps your house’s foundation from flooding and your air breathable that you don’t have to wait around for someone to install. Spend a minute thinking like a comptroller and you’ll start to wonder why a city that pays for street sweeping on every block can’t support a clean, workable and well-staffed park in every neighborhood.

And so maybe in addition to friends groups, parks need more park-literate neighbors.

With the “friends of Canal Street” counterfactual in your head, then, cover both sides of the court. Join a friends group and ask your local representatives about the economics, ecosystem services, costs, and benefits of park upkeep. The next time your town offers some reason to play out late, you might see your tax dollars at work.

This essay coursed through parks with fortified friends groups. Photos from top to bottom come from these sites, whose friends-of you can find via the links.

Washington Square Park, Manhattan

Madison Square Park, Manhattan

Centennial Park, Nashville

Hudson River Park, Manhattan (this one’s a special case, created by state law)

Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn

I have no picture of the tennis courts in Kamemehama Park, but the courts’ friends operate near basketball courts that look like this. Assists count for a lot.

Just like Jalen Brunson can drive the lane while Mitchell Robinson sets a screen, a city puts on several shows at once. The weekend past in New York saw Game 2 of the NBA Finals, Pride celebrations, protests around Citizens Banks for its underwriting to for-profit prisons, a jazz festival, a Hyrox race on a Hudson River pier, and - surprising a bunch of folks - a Shakespeare production outside an East Village subway stop.

About two hours before lines (!) formed at sports bars, I sat on a bench and watched “As You Like It” on a little square stage in Astor Place, courtesy the Public Theater. That’s the outfit that puts on Shakespeare in the Park each summer, which makes it the same outfit whose founder thwarted legendary urban planner Robert Moses’ plot to plunge car expressways through Central Park. The Public has mounted this “mobile unit” around town since the first post-lockdown summer, and seeing folks wander by and pause to follow the action made that investment seem brilliant.

With a whoosh, plans evaporated and notifications went unnoticed. A guy with takeout from Raising Cane’s spread his arms like he was playing Hamlet, then sat cross-legged and watched for a while. He gave another bow on his way out and back down Lafayette. Another guy parked his electric scooter for a few scenes, and a woman set down her Walgreens bags for a spell. Young women, a blondish touristish family and many others tilted their heads and steadied their feet.

Not everybody paid rapt attention - my scooter guy scrolled through some photos of physical photos on his phone. But for once I conquered my itch to sneer: none of these people had planned on an evening of Shakespeare, as far as I could tell, and those who had seemed to be laughing and swaying with the language. It takes a lot of practice to be spontaneous.

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That practice makes perseverance. When you can read the facial expressions around you and pick out spaces in rows of seats or pick up how streets flow ahead of you, options unlock. If a federal paramilitary force or a hurricane starts bearing down, you can form a team of people with different sizes, skills, languages, and stores of energy. When you can’t, you hole up or lash out when stress rises. Or you do both.

The city looks like a megasize microchip wrought to freeze anything spontaneous. It’s a place of foundations dug, throughways run, and doors locked. That sense stomps itw way into this hotel-room-height view of Columbus, Ohio.

I mean, sure, you can jump onto the plaza from the crosswalk. And as Hanif Abdurraqib chronicles in his book about Columbus, people can catch sparks of emotion and intensity anywhere. But swaths of most cities don’t seem to want you to.

Why do you care? Well, you live in an era where escaped genies soar over the shards of shattered bottles. You try to make a living, or look after your mom or your brother, or raise your kids, in a minefield of short-circuited assumptions. A hundred years ago, with industrial coming to a roar, the clarion call bounding over cities involved making new measures and projecting into the future. “Make no little plans,” the planner (ahem) Daniel Burnham reportedly said in 1910. Now capitalist systems, and human bodies, and mostly the climate that nourished life up to now, all look like mazes with hairpin turns and steep dropoffs around the next blind curve. The main thing to plan on, ie being lucky, seems to require more and more insurance. So learn spotaneity.

And where do you try? Well, places to practice it are easier to find than seats in a Lower Manhattan sports bar during the NBA Finals - but where do you start, and how do you know if you’re building any skill?

You could do worse than to take some turns from the play I saw, anti-city though it is.

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The play itself works out as a hype video for acting on a hunch. We spend just enough time at court to see sniveling Duke Frederick host a wrestling match and then cavil when the underdog winner turns out to be the son to a friend of his banished brother. The winner decides to beat it into the forest. There, the other Duke hosts, essentially, a folk music festival with a generous picnic. You’d have expected him to brood and plot revenge on the brother who exiled him. You’d wait the whole play for such a plot.

Instead, you see a lot of improvising. We also saw a certain amount of improvising on the Astor Place pavement. With no appreciable back stage, actors waited for their cues in the gap between standers and folding chairs. A few times, they crouched next to little kids who had set themselves up in that space with markers or with an orange and asked them about what the speaking characters were up to.

One of the courtiers who joined the exiled duke in the forest, Jacques, believes that pretty much everything is doom. Jacques delivers the famous “ages of man” speech, laying out with mic-drop detail how a person goes from helplessness through school, war, work, and retirement, into “second childishness and mere oblivion.”

I had remembered from college that this speech provokes a feckless parry from the Duke. Not at all. The next event involves the wrestler and the old man who’s accompanied him staggering into the clearing, where the Duke welcomes them without qualification to dig in. He reasons to his crew:

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
This wide and universal theater 
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene 
Wherein we play in. 

He seems to act from humility, not to follow cues from a YouTube video. You’d see more hesitancy from someone who’d watched a TikTok on “POV: when a weird old dude pulls up to your forest enclave and asks for your grub.” And in the production at Astor Place, the woman playing Jacques (in a punk-rock t-shirt) broke a bit to see the old stooped man. Sympathy may rank as the most precious spontaneous output of all.

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In the play, every action in the Forest springs from spontaneity. Even the schemes, as far as they go, arise on a whim. The young heroine hits on her disguise and fake name and trickery all in a rush. As you like it, indeed.

Shakespeare just wanted his audience to take a break from their trials: he was so clearly not proffering a practical strategy for life that he throws a meta-textual joke into the start of Act V. (A harmless but feckless character named William wanders into the action and then wanders out.) I, though, keep urging whoever picks up these essays to use them as resets for the business of living well with climate change. I keep cajoling you to make a project of getting lost. Spend at least an hour practicing as if you needed the people around you if you intend to survive.

So what can someone in a city do on that score? Someone can, maybe, find a forest.

Above sits one of the more popular zones in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and not a haunted glade where dapple-cheeked youth wander into the presence of ogres. (My daughter told me the park holds a secret patch for teen parties called “Turf,” but this isn’t that and I don’t know where that is and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.) Per the history on its sponsor’s website, this retreat evolved as Brooklyn leaders craved a counterpart to Manhattan’s (then New York City’s) Central Park. They pushed it as a wellspring of “healthful exercise” for all classes, an antidote to overcrowding.

In this century, as office buildings and Wernicke’s areas thin out, Prospect Park and others have added trails to their system. You can bike or walk for up to an hour in these parks and not see a building or car. You can even change your mind about where to go, with or without recourse to bright yellow signs. This “urban forest” helps cool the whole city and offers screen-free salves to senior citizens - especially when professional foresters making professional-grade salaries manage it.

So if we hop Shakespeare’s folly over to serious questions of funding, how far can one push the idea of investing more and more broadly in urban tree canopy? Can you apply it to the sunblasted plazas in Columbus? Or hey: Astor Place, where I watched the play, runs deeper and wider than many assume. It bears exploring.

Most people who cross Astor Place, where a major retail street begins, will tell you it contains a big tilted cube. But it runs wider and further south than I had remembered, and I’ve been there thousands of times. Suppose local property owners and/or the city ponied up some cash for rows of tenacious trees at each border, so someone picking up chicken wings or heading for a drink momentarily had to pass through speckled sunlight before deciding which way to go?

More broadly, what if cities treated intuition with the same reverence as they treat information? In addition to dispersing free Wi-Fi, they’d make sure to deposit chances for wandering where everybody can find and return to them, regardless of age or income or mobility. I did find a chance to get spontaneous on a morning run in Columbus, but I was at that moment the only one there.

What if nonprofits in the mold of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative worked with cities to drum up capital, and labor, to keep up paths through trees and around bends to help people move through a raft of neighborhoods? You’d have fewer car crashes, eventually cleaner air, and you’d up your town’s intuition while lowering its insurance bill. This would continue work to convert railways that’s gone on for decades.

Urging cities to plan for spontaneity may seem like something a Shakespearean fool would do to bring the Elizabethan house down. But let it sit with you next time you’re idling in line for drive-through coffee. Or picture trees and winding paths when you scan the crowd at a football-game parking lot or a farmer’s market or the line outside a Garden-variety sports bar. See how ready people, including yourself, might be for a sudden wind gust or rain storm, a tree branch turning to tinder, a phone alert that the president has gone rogue.

See how much people register each other and ask: is this the shape we want for the crew we’re sending to meet a changing climate?

Through making the banished Duke both merry and welcoming in As You Like It, Shakespeare was suggesting that strategy in the long run favors the intuitive and the friendly over the suspicious door-slammers. Intuition and maplessness make generosity readier to emerge, even if it’s as the cousin of need. Before we can skillfully act welcoming, we need to skillfully act like we need each other.

The NBA Finals continue tonight, with a watch party in Central Park. The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit rolls through June. Performances will pop up in Prospect Park itself, Sunset Park overlooking the harbor of industrial Brooklyn, Bryant Park a block from Times Square, and St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx. All invite some unplanned twists and turns, and you might find cardinals in any or all of them.

This winter, while federal agents with skimpy training murdered American citizens, I pivoted my bike around to join a crowd on Grand Street helping a bleeding man who had fallen. This spring while state governments paused elections so they could redraw districts to favor the party in power, I formed a crowd on a bridge bike path helping another bleeding man who had fallen.

We neighbors knew our apps and used them. We all used phones to call ambulances (and re-call ambulances). Mainly we talked to each other, unrecorded and untagged. Among 15 of us on the street, I saw nobody filming or posting. A Spanish-speaking guy made the first call to 911: a barber in a yarmulke rushed out from his shop with paper towels to stanch the blood: other neighbors combed the street to find someone who spoke Mandarin, the injured guy’s language.

The same went for the 40 or so of us on the bridge: one woman offered to direct traffic, another gave us her professional advice as a physician’s assistant, another handed me his water bottle, another crouched to look at the man whose head I was holding and tell him: you’re going to be okay.

The converging, coordinating, and arrival of help took about 5-10 minutes each time. Cops and EMTs surveyed the scene, spoke to the injured men, and carried the men away. I hope both are fine, though I wonder if the first guy (who was old) fell again or the second (who was young) got in the habit of wearing a helmet. I sure hope so.

So what? You could say we were being human: a neighbor who turned out to have been among the bridge crowd told me the next day in the park it was “one of those human moments.” I say we were being insurgent.

See, our instincts broke the order. Plenty of other times, folks have stayed trapped in their feeds. When a tree caught fire outside the pentagonal Seward Park near the East Broadway subway stop on my block, dozens of us whirled, froze, and filmed. I’ve seen people freaking out on the subway while a car full of New Yorkers looks determinedly down. Every day after the bridge crash, I notice when hundreds whiz by on e-bikes, AirPodded, looking down at screens, with no helmets. For too long I would look at this behavior and snort: tarnation! Insouciant whippersnappers!

I’ve learned to see all of us as targets. 1

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Who gave us the screens, pumped apps full of dopamine, replaced our compasses and checkbooks? The answer is: a few people, mostly men, running huge corporations that make money when people lose skill. Their huge bets pay off when the need for them becomes huger. Because they aim to steer global capital, it’s in bounds to call them imperialists. And because at least a few of them operate in outer space and are making backup plans to bunk down on other planets, we can label them galactic.

The message is: you don’t need to remember anything, I’ll store it for you. You don’t need to write anything down, I’ll boil it down for you. You don’t need to look hard at something, I’m a camera. You don’t need to understand how to pace, limit, or reassemble any habits or thoughts. Their timing has a curious pull.

There’s a silent dividend here, which seems calculated. It works as follows. You just have to give in to my knowing everywhere you go and drowning out your instinct to try something else. If you do try something else, I’ll absorb it and show you a bunch of stuff that now seems sure to captivate you. And this comes out like a bargain for you. If you take a pass on all that reckoning, you may be able to rip through your days without wondering how our species parched and drowned the one planet where we know we can make babies, reggae, and chocolate cake.

Most thinkers, from to , focus more on the evidence of climate change or the means of bearing it while sustaining society. I salute that. Still, it seems hard to whistle past the fact that tech that chooses peoples’ routes, news, amusement, and health advice gained force in step with climate chaos. That is, algorithms started gobbling peoples’ options faster when it became clearer that only very rich people could hope to opt out of floods, burns, and disease.

And in that context, the guidance I heed as we make our way through our cities and towns has less valence in Mister Rogers’ jingle and more echoes of the young horse trainers at the end of The Last Jedi2, swapping Skywalker stories.

Spontaneously digging into time with others may make you cheerier. It may make you more confident. It more crucially makes you a rebel.

If you roll with this idea that the barons of always-on personalized feeds and AI know their pull will grow stronger in a warping climate, you start to see neighborly moments more like political acts. Again, remember the context.

More people will fall in rushing water or in dizzying heat. More people will ride vehicles they don’t control. More cities and towns will seal up for longer stretches as streets become rivers, playgrounds become convection ovens, and air becomes soot. “ Masks and Zooms look like they won’t just be for zoonotic diseases anymore.

When those waves come, people will still have the power to pull each other up, knock on each other’s doors, bring each other ginger ale and game consoles. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg has been urging cities to invest in “social infrastructure,” including spruce libraries and parks, to help people build those kindliness muscles. But amid that call, remember the message from For You and AI-slop self-help:

….you can’t make a left on Maple without my watching where you are.

….you can’t take notes in class or in a meeting without my lodging them.

…really, don’t worry about how I know that thing I know about the thing your aunt said about the mole on your neck, because it would just stress you out.

..and don’t look to your government to represent you, because they are fuddie-duddies or in my pocket or crazy or some mix of all three.

…your riverbanks are melting, your trees are becoming Molotov cocktails, your summers are becoming death marches, and only the richest and most automated will survive with their hairlines in place, and you can’t do anything to modify that. (You can modify your jawline until the power goes out, though.)

Well, that’s the last straw. It’s enough to make someone help a little kid open a restaurant bathroom door (and then get out of the way), or hand out paper warnings to businesses about illegal surveillance by a dysregulated president’s paramilitaries, or reassure a neighbor that he’s welcome to the PTA-funded Doritos and Funyuns at a school block party…without recording any of it.

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You may have copped that I just peeled off a few things I did over the past few days. Doing them didn’t make me heroic: among other things, I know nothing about what happened on these folks’ path through their days after we spoke. Doing them did keep me curious. When someone I didn’t expect pops into view, memories and questions follow. What’s this person’s favorite way to fall asleep? What does that kid want to be when he grows up? Does that sales clerk know I have three pairs of the “vintage” 501s she’s selling in my closet that are likely older than anyone else in this store?

Doing things for people also trains you to be patient. Sometimes they don’t hear you. Sometimes you didn’t hear them. Sometimes they have fantastic stories that will daub color on your outlook for the rest of the day, and sometimes they have more fantastic stories that show they could use some more serious help.

When we listen to these folks and take the time to notice what we think and wonder, or when we move in a flash to lift someone who’s fallen, we’re turning our tech into tools. We’re training ourselves to read faces, hear silences, and act to change the likely outcome of something that’s gone sideways. We’re showing we want to understand someone else with more clarity, and that we’ll invest the heartbeats to work at it.

And we’re telling the people who want us holed up in our soundproof bunkers waiting out the pelting that they got us wrong. No mash-up of Alec Guinness or Ewan McGregor or the AI chewing up our words and images will be our only hope.

To get curious and patient, you can naturally head out anywhere in your town or on a public trail. Say you’re in New York City, though. To swig some water and maybe chill out with a book and a Frisbee after crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, you’ll do well to visit these parks. The first is newish, the second just reopened with updated flood-protective design, and the third is the oldest public playground in the United States.

Domino Park

John V. Lindsay East River Park

Seward Park

Hey, folks:

As promised, messages like this are coming as events arise. This week, I’m encouraging New Yorkers to get on the (post-labor-action) Long Island Rail Road on Saturday and on the phone next Tuesday. I’m also sharing some slides to help you help vulnerable neighbors as Donald’s stormtroopers threaten to roll into town.

Get back on the rails. As I’ve shared, Swing Left is ramping up a new canvassing approach that harnesses voters’ real worries and carries them to candidates. Emily and I have been knocking doors in eastern Queens with a local troop, traveling by short and easy LIRR connections. We need to miss this weekend’s trip for a Frisbee tournament (go Bardbarians!), but you should give it a whirl. You can register here: please also email, text, or call me if you’d like some background or an introduction to the organizer.

Dig in for Ds in North Carolina. The Tar Heel state was artificially keeping Republicans in office before that was fashionable: though the state includes a heap of progressives and moderates, Rs enjoy a near-supermajority in the legislature that confound the commonsense Democratic governor’s work. Our States Win teams are working to end that. Please join me to build name recognition in a Zoom-supported phonebank next Tuesday from 6:30 to 8: I’ll train you, keep you motivated/amused, and help you put the calls into context. You can find me for details or register here.

Know the Know Your Rights ABCs. As noted, ICE thugs are still here and could show up in greater numbers if Donald’s ego gets itchy. Our friends at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice say they were illegally swiping people the day at the courthouse a day after a judge ruled that they couldn’t do that. The interfaith/cross-sector alliance Hands Off hosted nearly 200 New Yorkers last Saturday and taught them key facts, steps, and practices. If you’ve gone to a training in the past, you know the basics: if you haven’t, the basics are quick to digest. Please review these slides and contact me to get a whistle.

I’ll keep reaching out as they keep lashing out, and I encourage you to find me with thoughts, questions, or ideas. As always, please tell me if you no longer want these emails and please share this with anyone who might want to get them going forward.

Take care, and we’ll keep lifting each other up. Be well.

Alec

Friday had melted into broken promises from AI customer service and miraculous deals with call center agents in India, and had wound down with dinner bells on WhatsApp and pins for the local brewpub on Google Maps. I got up on Saturday morning, turned right away from the Starbucks, trucked on past the CVS and the brick apartment complex rental office, and aimed for the row of trees. At the hilltop corner with the once-a-tavern-now-a-fast-casual-burger-joint, I saw the entrance to Washington Park and ran with longer strides.

As it always does, finding the park I hadn’t found on a digital map cued me to travel farther and notice more than I had planned.

Going into this trip, I had little need to wander. My group’s leaders had arranged for buffet dinners and breakfasts and my days belonged to a Frisbee tournament two towns over. But for all this certainty, I couldn’t tell you where I was. Luckily, someone in my group had mentioned “a really nice park with fountains and everything,” and I have learned to get up early in new places and look for a line of trees.

Once you find that place, Generica gives ground. City signage addresses you with its own etches and fonts. Statues anchor to taller buildings on the horizon. Trees bend and sag and reach, and the city stretches back into history rather than just popping up on a flat surface. Finding the espresso place with the blackboard whose name you’d noticed on Google Maps prompts a smile, with the depth of an animation cel. Finding the public paths and 200-year-old canals and memorial plaques to the surgery professor who founded the local hospital can fit you for a deeper journey.

Following the park’s boulevards, I saw a run of rowhouses and a downhill street. When I went to check that out, I turned up on Lark Street, passing SoHo Pizza and a few thrift stores and NoHo Pizza and an LGBTQ center with a mural. I saw two guys who looked like they’d been sleeping rough. One was gazing in the window of a sneakerhead sort of store. Nobody else was in sight.

Both looked at me and said: “Good morning.” I said good morning back and came to a four-lane road, then pivoted left back to the park.

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These pops of civility come more easily to me than to others: I look conventional, I’m white and male, and I’m already running. Actual mileage may vary, and so I proselytize for finding the treeline and stumbling on the park with some caveats. I don’t claim that you’ll follow that course and stumble into Mister Rogers’ neighborhood. Instead, I claim that you’ll complicate the work of the algorithm that’s following you - and, for at least a beat and a half, shake it.

I’ll also suggest that if you give people a fair shake, you’ll mainly find that people want to coexist and that most of us cherish a well-ordered run of sensory surprise.

And finding a place you hadn’t seen shrunken on your screen can surprise each of your senses. If you go long enough in a downtown or a well-funded neighborhood, the path will appear and sky will open. That’s how I found Posse Grounds Park on a family vacation in Sedona, Arizona and Scioto Riverfront on a business trip to Columbus, Ohio - and Washington Park on this recent bop up to Albany.

You’ll see photos from these parks as we wend through this essay. You won’t find any of them in any city besides the one where I found them. (And we’ll talk another time about why finding them in red-lined neighborhoods, like Washington DC’s Eleventh Street Park, carries a different weight.)

Finding a place with local hallmarks, funnily, makes me feel more awake to the world’s breadth than I feel when algorithms churn through the world’s information to point me toward the nearest shwarma. It reminds me that each place has distinct construction crews, commute patterns, geology, and relics. It underlines that you discover more than you thought you wanted to know when you wander.

Of course you aren't discovering these places, because folks have used them for decades, but you might record them and thus insinuate yourself into their story. You might post photos of these places and might tag #randomdeadwhitedude. You might, like me, run in place while taking photos such as the one above. In any case, you’re contending with pilings and paths that some men generations ago hammered into place. Those men likely espoused some stanky ideas. Grapple away. Via Asics or bike or blades or wheelchair or Tevas, you can cover the ground they laid. As you do, give a beat to the fact these men carried different names, made different calculations, and strove for different ideals than other white men in other towns.

That complexity prevails everywhere. It prevails even if the Chipotle and Buffalo Wild Wings and Starbucks in this town look like you could snip and restitch them elsewhere, and the indie coffee shop comes close.

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When I find the park that I hadn’t seen online, I make a deal with myself as I run. The terms unroll something like this:

Object to anything that feels itchy to you. Just know that nothing will record and refract back your objection to their racism, at least until you’ve gotten back to your rental or hotel or friend’s house and written it down. I mean, you could talk to text and post, but do you really want to? Wouldn’t you get more oxygen from seeing what’s down that curve? Don’t you wonder about that field? And hey, was that a javelina?

In Albany, after another good-morning with a birder and after passing a guy talking Hindi on the phone near a fishing rod, I saw a couple of geese and a sign about an amphitheater. I was going to nick into Starbucks shortly, but I was well awake.

You may glide on the tranquility in these places you hadn’t mapped. I certainly find myself singing or smiling. I also look at a lot of life through competitive frames, and when I find places I tell myself I’m gaining on the algorithm. What’s it calculating about my steps when I run in place to click a few photos? Or, absent Strava and wearables, is the algorithm ignoring me?

If I embrace the idea that nothing is watching me, I can watch with more precision. This brightens the overhead when I’m staying somewhere that late-stage capitalism has forced to look a lot like a lot of other places.

We negotiate these places in most U.S. cities. They show a stretch of six-to-ten-story apartment towers with bricks and logos. They offer a clutch of hotels with “shampooing” in the bathrooms, six pillows on each bed, and enough national brands to fill your prescription, your belly, and your need for caffeine. It’s as if travelers fed the algorithm and the algorithm spits out leases, which form shopping streets, with wares that feed travelers. We fuel up and feed the algorithm, and around we go.

But this array of hills and paths, these statues (including a nymph), these rowhouses cling to a mound on a map. They remind you that this Chipotle staged stories worlds away from what went down at the Chipotle on North Reserve St in Missoula or Amber Dr in Tuscaloosa. So it’s also true that what looks predictable shouldn’t look that way.

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And finding the park you hadn’t mapped gives you a bit of a 360-degree view on your stay. Once you break into the open, you might notice other forces pressing on you. These land with more dread, but still reinforce the valor of a park.

Parks become touchstones in a dangerously hot world. Imagine you’re out for fresh air in Saint Paul, There, hotels form a blinding white wall across a wide road from the Mississippi River. If you follow bridge anchorages instead of treetops, you come to a winding staircase (or elevator) and can ride it down to a blobby island. This is Raspberry Island, which I found in spring 2024.

The quiet, and the mix of roots and trunks and shoots, pushes other life to the foreground. Once it’s there, it looks anything but fixed. The trees covering poet Robert Burns’ jawline in the picture up top in Albany can drop shade on an overheated city to make time without A/C meaningfully safer in summer swelter. The bulk and bulge of Raspberry Island can blunt river flooding during storms. When multiday threats to human life from heat or storms become as common to American cities as Chipotle, more of us will make a beeline for the treeline.

Will we use our phones to check on the people we love and see when the weather will (temporarily) ease? Will the algo absorb what we do so that AI can mastermind the next round of plantings and drills? Without doubt. But we’ll be pacing through the days with a heap of doubt. We might welcome a (scrupulously constrained) AI scrape to show us where to put big batteries for our solar power or dig our geothermal-energy wells. And we’ll balance the surprises with more strength and more style if we’ve gotten in the habit of finding what we don’t expect.

You’d drink to the dregs by finding parks via the horizon wherever you go. Still, to find out more about the parks I’ve mentioned you might start with the links below.

Posse Grounds Park

Scioto Mile Riverfront

Washington Park

Raspberry Island

Visiting Philadelphia on Friday to catch up with another writer and learn from a panel of community organizers, it wasn’t hearing about ICE shoving gun muzzles in the faces of little kids or talking about shows of wealth at private school that cued my fingers to form loose fists. No, that was a bus billboard sporting the bearded mugs of Phillies Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper, with the slogan “LET FANDOM RING.”

Now, you can find (you can’t really avoid) the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and as puns go this one holds its own. Yet I flinched when I saw it because since 1982 I’ve rooted for the Mets, and the Mets and Phillies don’t like each other, and glowering at men with a certain logo on their caps feels a lot easier than confronting American decline.

Naturally, the flinch fades into a chuckle while the anger over ICE cruelty keeps ripening into resolve. And these bogus tribal marks never run deep: last summer, I gladly sold my father’s car to a Phillies fan. Yet for millions of us, watching pro sports carries a current of comfort. Something real really happens, with value you can squeeze and bend but can’t easily break, when people watch pro sports together.

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This claim carries a set of caveats longer than the Mets’ injured list. We know our owners may be greedheads who copped control of our team mainly to pounce on the parking lot next door and make it a casino (for example). We know players give up all privacy - the Pacers’ Tyrese Haliburton confessed to mental health struggles after yobbos clowned on him online for, er, not getting a lot of playing time in the Olympics. We know cities lob sweetheart deals to team owners that could otherwise go to healthcare, housing, schools, and storm safety. To sum up, we know pro sports carry the streaks of capitalist excess and spectacle that run through late capitalism.

We also know they concoct togetherness, within and sometimes beyond the screen-soaked stimulus shaker of our consumer economy. They do this in waves of sales, conformity, and, finally, maybe, a baby sibling to solidarity.

To see what I mean, slice through what I don’t mean. I don’t mean that we all come together because we all strike the same colors. I might mean that pretending to come together for that reason cues us to come together more purely. But let’s run the play.

Once your officemate, uncle, and third-grade teacher each became a self-contained brand (h/t to Megan Garber), it became standard practice for grown folks to attend ballgames in cosplay. My family and I often enjoy spotting the more obscure jerseys, belonging to retired coaches or long-traded relief pitchers. But even though I love talking baseball with strangers, more etched replica jerseys make me quieter. I imagine the conversation ramping up and down like a sinkerball:

ME: You liked Bernard Gilkey, huh?

PERSON IN GILKEY JERSEY: Yeah.

And we’re marooned from there.

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We edge closer to my meaning when I note how watching sports focuses, organizes, and spikes our yearning to see fellow humans push through adversity. I got to see a walk-off sacrifice fly at a minor-league game once, and walked to the D train a little more patient about some misunderstanding loop in my work. Athletes both marshal the result of thousands of hours of patience and show the value of a few seconds of perfect concentration. Anyone who watches that figures to feel a little more bullish about what we humans can effect. (Mets fans out there, you may imagine I’m invoking Robin Ventura. I’m absolutely thinking of Todd Pratt.)

Today, and into the foreseeable future, summer athletes will need to muster that skill and focus while glugging water and managing sweat in too-hot-to-sit-still temperatures. With smart practices in place, they can still amaze us when they do.

So watching pro sports allows us a proxy journey into something we didn’t expect. More important, though, they create the context - a bit arbitrary with regard to who’s playing and who owns the venue - that we can use to operate together in public. They prompt people across barriers of race, class, and age to a buzzy starting line: here we are, uncertain, affiliating with a role that takes on more vividness in real shared space.

This feeling lets some fans - hopefully most- enjoy games without submitting to the algo by betting throughout a contest on random events. (Note: Blake Griffin does not really do this.) It can encourage kids to sign up for autographs and mumble small talk. It can shine through, indeed, when we protest what our teams are up to.

In the past year, Los Angeleno Zan Dubin has marshaled fans to show up outside the Galactic Empire’s headquarters Dodger Stadium and other venues. Dodgers Stadium showcases a big ad for an oil company in the outfield: others gave naming rights to firms that finance or pursue climate-warping fossil-fuel projects. Zan calls this “sportswashing” climate pollution, and she wants it to be deeply uncool.

Zan and I have chatted (and she’s been kind enough to subscribe to this newsletter). As we talked through her plan to mount an action on June 21, I saw how demanding better citizenship of your team could describe a new solidarity-building practice among fans. She tells me panning for the June 21 action has kicked into gear: it spans North America, with fans calling for fossil-free sports in all three countries. I expect to be on Amtrak returning from a family celebration, but all who can should register.

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We indulge the theater of sports, pay the elephantine prices, and withstand the noise and strobes for a mishmosh of reasons. It’s easy to see pro sports as a unit in sensory assault: nearly every game comes with many distractions and screens (at Madison Square Garden, some seats have screens in the rear so the people behind them can watch the broadcast of what’s happening on the floor).

But you can also see fandom, ringing or otherwise, as a capsule through which to break through the trance. While AAPL and GOOG and UBER probe you for data on the way to and from the park so they can disgorge it in stats that make you bet, you can also duck them. You can be at the game, turn your phone off, and - once play starts- pivot from folks in the photo above and ignore the screens. The Louisville Bats, a minor league team, recently hosted a “Nothing Night” with zero distractions and plan to offer it again on July 8. If you listen, you can hear people talking.

As I’ll explore later this summer, we feed an economy with AI at its heart. AI and algos make maximal profit when people seek less and less from other people and from themselves. We’ve seen CEOs of the biggest firms attach to a president who wants to be an autocrat. In that crucible, any human solidarity holds the seed of rebellion.

If a stadium attaches to a biodiverse or climate-resilient park, that also nets it some points. The San Francisco waterfront across from Oracle Park or the multineighborhood magnet Flushing Meadows Corona Park in New York City deserve some extra spillover love from fans.

Now, again, I woke up long ago from the boyhood dream of sports-as-paradise. I cringe to know how my Mets tickets advance the Mets owner’s plans for a casino, and am lucky enough to offset those tickets with donations to neighborhood groups fighting for a more productive sort of economic development.

I also know that when we race to fantasyland, the men and women pillaging the real world love to see us in a froth. How do people boo Bo Bichette but tolerate the clown-show of Kash Patel or the corruption prance of Don Jr? I presume they do because they have concluded, from available evidence, that nobody respects them and the system contains too many tentacles and loopholes to be worth fighting. They try to ignore the louder shows of disrespect so they can muscle through the more insidious ones (late checkups, copays for dental care, wage theft).

So what if coming together to share oxygen and root for people wearing a certain uniform serves not as a retreat but as a reset? What if the Reds fan and I who commiserated in July about unreliable relief pitching remembered that we can get along fine and JD Vance probably detests us both?

It would be just the start of a start. We would need heaps of “sportswashing” protests and skillbuilding and civil leaders for that memory to burn into meaningful civic work. But as any baseball fan will tell you, good things tend to happen when you put the ball in play (and there are people there to cheer for you).

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what was…

-Dante’s Inferno, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, Bantam Books, 1982

I’ve been going to a lot of events in the past few weeks, which is entirely different from going through circles of hell. But I’ve been as puzzled as Dante about how to sum up what I’m trying to find, or to help you find. One clue lies in the flyer below.

What do this newsletter’s purpose, the Divine Comedy, and the Brooklyn Kickball Club have to say to each other? That’s the mystery.

At lectures and conferences, for a freelance writer like me, every seat (or standing place in the rear) comes with a returnable frame. You’re surrounded by people who, to some extent, do the thing under discussion for their daily work. Of course, these people have chosen a frame for their efforts, and inside the frame they ply their skills. Some people argue that in today’s chaotic context, experts need to learn each others’ language to meet the cascading crises of climate, trust, and surveillance. Most likely, all experts would acquire fresh energy from cultivating a more curious attitude.

As would I! Back when journalism carried more oomph as a business, I would go to events looking to publish something about them the next day. I’d squint to see a frame that would clarify a story. Does the frame bring into focus a few protagonists, a sudsy conflict, a proposal for something glittering, a four-letter word? No longer carrying my press pass, I am hunting a frame for something more opaque and maybe ghostly.

I see it as a phantom. It flits across the basketball court where I played pickup two-on-two against a younger guy with thick glasses and a jab step. It scampers away from the corner of the eight-field city park surrounded by public housing where my daughter stretched one leg and the opposite arm to clutch a Frisbee in a championship game. It seems to hunker down more often in some city parks than others.

It’s the activated impulse to go without a prior map: call it spontaneity. Where Dante went looking for freedom from the sin of greed, I live in an age when the machine in my pocket carries endless cues to do things for me or tell me what to do. So I’m hunting in public space for potions that help all of us do what we haven’t quite done.

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All the frames I found at events last week bear load and deserve respect. At the Urban Design Forum, the leader of a project turning an abandoned Mexico airport to a public nature district testified for the primacy of beauty. The Municipal Art Society convened a half-day intensive on converting underused buildings to beloved homes. And I learned of a laudable quest from New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and the design firm Gehl, among other partners, to look fresh at public buildings and parks as social infrastructure. (Yo: I slightly know Eric Klinenberg, who runs the institute, and I applied for jobs there in the 2010s.)

The thesis driving this event and the report it launched argues that, unlike Dante’s circles of Hell, the term social infrastructure is in Klinenberg’s words “not a metaphor.” Just as ports accept freight goods and bridges carry trucks, so do monkey-bars and bay windows and benches carry human flourishing. The argument, and the survey and observational data supporting it, suggest a to-do list for post-industrial public works. If people know how circulation desks, central fountains, and chess tables complement storm protections and cardiac health, then people will organize for these benefits. Elected officials and philanthropists and corporate leaders who thrive will help people thrive by investing in and maintaining these assets.

The vision carries sparkle and pull. Yet even as I applaud it and see the case for it all along my daily commute, like Dante I still find I’ve lost my way.

And here’s where the kickball league comes in, after a quick photo from Austin.

Austin may rank as the United States’ boomtown. The Census claims its population rose from roughly 790,000 in 2010 to 930,000 in 2020 to just shy of a million in 2024. Based on my run around the Town Lake in 2019, a critical number of newcomers who live in sparkly towers with swimming pool decks just moved there and have no better idea than a lost New Yorker how to find the way back to Hollow Creek Drive.

You can probably suss that I found my way back in time for breakfast. But I wondered that day and have wondered since how many of those new Texans ever wandered out of a tight radius, in which they met their pals and bit into their barbecue and bagged their bottled water in the oculus of the algorithm.

So while social infrastructure fortifies the city against loneliness and mistrust and while beauty can lessen the risk of depression, I keep thinking about spontaneity.

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Readers will remember that I endeavored in November to show how the compassion that powers affordable housing public finance might find its seed in the instinct that kicks in when you’re lost in the mountains. I don’t walk around bragging about the day I wandered off the Shenandoah trail, but I don’t regret it either. (And if you know me, you know that I regret plenty.) So I’d argue for adding a syringe of mystery to the social-infrastructure toolkit and to the definition of beauty.

Suggesting mystery as a vitamin for public life isn’t new. Sustainable-design theorist Bill Browning taught me and others that principle at his firm, Terrapin Bright Green, which has advised infrastructure and park projects across the globe. Landscape architect Michael Van Valkenbergh’s firm deployed it in a Chicago ice-skating ribbon, under the St. Louis Arch, and in the playspace near the ferry dock where my family and several dozen others embarked for Governors Island on Mother’s Day.1 There, plants have grown steadily enough in 15 years that kids can play in “the water lab” without adults seeing what they’re up to.

Mystery can come through a grove or a curve, through a drop-off or through maintenance that makes places feel safe before sunup. That’s easier to pull off in an affluent town like Boulder (above) than a big city, but it can still inform goals. Mystery resides in social infrastructure and coheres with beauty. But mystery imposes a level of improvisation and a departure from the algorithm. Which brings me to kickball.

This past Friday, I saw my New York Liberty drub the Connecticut Sun (starring wrongly-jailed Britney Griner). Thanks to the arena’s bag policy, I left my computer locked overnight in my office elsewhere in Brooklyn overnight. And so Saturday afternoon I was walking past a side-street playground. A woman recognized me from another context, and said hello. I walked over and we chatted while her nephew worked on swinging a bat, and I left with a lightness in the ribs from the unexpected conversation. And at the CitiBike dock, I saw a flyer like the one at the top of this post, inviting folks to sign up for kickball.

Now, I have no shred of antipathy for kickball. I hope lots of people scanned the QR code, got their heart rates up, and had some yuks over (to quote the flyer) “frozen margs” at “the bar” after the game.

But compare and contrast that afternoon with the one I broached earlier, playing pickup basketball. Or another afternoon way back in college, when a group of us played pickup touch football. My teammates were: a pal from New York who had played high school ball, a nice guy from New Hampshire who lived upstairs and was new to the sport, a custodian, and a little boy who had wandered onto the field.

Experiences like those build social strength because they deepen our trust in ourselves, sharpen our power to read other faces, and extend our freedom from the trackers recording where we go and what we say. They also stand in contrast to a lot of social sameness that you see even in well-cared-for public spaces.

Living digitally coheres with some sociable, even creative behavior. When people can locate each other using Apple Maps, they can start caroling and barnstorming that much sooner. When you can get a ride anywhere, you can wander farther.

What you can’t do, without hashing out space to do it, is find your own way.

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It seems also that you can’t reliably follow your own lead. The constant availability of every song, every review, every image and every simulation causes the chooser to crumple in exhaustion. With so many choices, the mind hits reset and chooses to be told. This explains how the public emblem of life with constant access to everyone’s opinion became an American standing in a line or sitting in a car queue, at The Place to Go To…and looking down at a phone.

It explains why my wife and I saw adults visiting wearing interchangeable kelly-green tromping through Moynihan Station five days before St. Patrick’s, why a friend saw adults in stilettos and gowns to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 in a neighborhood cineplex. These people were in or near comfortable and navigable public space. They still chose uniformity. We can tap too much variation, too many hues. We yearn to know we’ve made the popular choice. So we choose to copy.

Without fluency in finding our own way we, no less than Dante, will have to judge our own progress by pegging it to others’ sins and shortcomings. Like many in the Inferno, we will writhe or retreat when it’s time to choose a side.

So if the social infrastructure comes with thorough maintenance and dozens of places to sit, to drink water and to play, I’ll meet you there. And if it includes some share of shadows, blind spots, or unannounced program changes, we’ll learn to carve paths through it that will help us see through the lies and the storms of our century. My friend Greg Lindsay has written about “engineering serendipity.” In a simpatico spirit, I’m wondering about investing in intuition and individuality.

With these portable frames, I always remember, participants in the struggle for common effort have to start somewhere. You then probably have to stay somewhere. So I will dilate for now on the difference between enjoying social infrastructure on the one hand and growing through it on the other.

Does sauntering through a sculpture park, or thwocking a pickleball, or paddling under a skyline give you a reprieve from the addling rush of bits of content? Or does it tee you up to transcend that panic and confusion?

When and how can time in public space set you up to build stores of awareness and compassion? Awareness means perceiving someone else’s feelings and needs, whether that someone else is a benefits consultant or a beech tree. Compassion means finding space to help attend to that someone else’s feelings, whether or not you share them.

As I have done throughout this Substack, I’m grappling with where and how people can grow compassion while the economy churns on making us more addicted to convenience and customization. The social-infrastructure research breaks important ground. It supports my conviction that when a human body shares a legible place with other life, the mind inside that body looks readier to reset toward many possible states, including awareness and compassion.

A little more recognition of not knowing our way in those real places can likely help us all learn to perceive, seek help, and critique so that, like Dante, we can find the cold malevolence at the core of our social sickness.

Mystery has often resolved into some lively thought, before LLMs gorged on language and cameras saw everything. A few centuries after Dante took on corruption in Italy, John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in sorrow over corruption in churchly matters. At the poem’s end, Milton’s tone turns from thunder to tune: The world was all before them, where to choose/Their place of rest, he writes.

The world is all before us, too. Healthy social infrastructure will help us cherish it - provided we build the patience and rationality to keep it healthy.

If you guessed “a smartphone,” you get credit - but I also am rooting for you to think outside the Otterbox. The answer I started with was: a playing field.

Fields support stories, both the episodic and the elastic kind. On a field, a person acquires a defined role: the person becomes a striker, a pitcher, a fullback, a coach, a tug-of-war strategist par excellence. It’d be drivel to declare that fields sustain innocence, because in the United States at least they don’t. In fact, kids start playing sports with elite status in mind by age nine in many towns, which induces many more kids to avoid playing sports at all. But it is true that fields can sustain focus.

For our purposes, fields break the monotony of cars and maybe suspend the spell of screens. They pop up alongside public schools to give some views of refuge to parents and non-parents, and serve as public zones at the fringes of private colleges. As I’ve covered elsewhere, they roll out as peace-offerings to nearby neighborhoods for unsightly or unwelcome land uses like power plants. That’s something the techlords seeking a data center in every ZIP code might sit with for a hot second.

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Fields organize your eye in the way that Jony Ive and his others learned to imitate with apps. They sport lines and structures, signaling events that recur and run their course. Things go in their place, even if people routinely use fields for courses or zigzags or zone-outs that pay no attention to the lines. The lines remain.

Fields cue people to specific languages and activities. They cue people to remember where they are and what time it is: the clue rains down if you are wearing a certain uniform, holding a certain object, making a certain motion. They harvest real-time activity: at least so far, nobody has ever cut to open space for a pass and then responded to the pass by kicking the ball some time the next day. Likewise, I have yet to watch a game where one player makes a dirty slide, then a player for the other side imitates that slide from far away and holds up an emoji.

In a nation where affluent people exercise to AI in their garages, fields hold real-world reserve for heart-rate work that happens in groups.

As importantly, they do work when nobody steps on them or notices.

Fields use pesticides to a lesser or more intense degree. They stand behind wrought-iron fences or they don’t. If they involve certain systems of plantings and culverts, they absorb stormwater more than they do if they involve artificial turf. If they provide shady places to sit and clean water to drink, they protect people from killer heat. And if a well-trained, well-paid corps of landscapers and managers oversee them, they attract the eye and eventually the whole head away from endless scroll.

So you might ask yourself, as a taxpayer and oxygen-breather: what more could you be plowing into your local field? Do you know their costs and services? Do you think you could use them more, more often, or more alertly?

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On the way to the protest I sketched out last week (you can see the essay here), I ran past the private high school I attended in the 1980s. To get precise, I ran past the southern end, four blocks toward Manhattan from the main driveway, where teams play their home games. As a public school parent, I stumbled on a riddle.

Public school footprints rarely include playing fields, and many teams compete on a crazy-quilt of permits across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. So do these teams, like the ones my kids played for, have no home games? Or are all their games home games because they’re playing in city parks that everyone - including them - owns?

While riddles like this keep writers busy, our current society could use a frame that sets some competitive boundaries. You can’t score if you’re standing outside the end zone. In the same schema, you can’t touch the ball with your hands, dispatch soldiers to kill people without Congressional approval, write code to atomize human patience. It’s fair to love the consenting adult you love, whatever genders you all use: it’s not fair to provide capital to for-profit prison companies who leave pregnant women to die and expect consumers to love you for it.

So long as you agree that rules apply, you might also respect some of the rules of nature. Water needs to go somewhere, heat rises, stuff like that. Fields create lacunae where those rules get a chance to reassert themselves - especially empty fields.

That open space, for those who look at it or move through it, yields the chance to think about the ganglion of choices and consequences in any town. The mix of open space and defined lines cues questions and negotiation. Consider: I read a critic I respect last week, ticking off reasons to use AI in daily life. One was to find out the name of the soccer league at her local field and find out how to register her son.

I wonder why she didn’t think it was in bounds to walk up to someone at the soccer league and ask, and why I couldn’t find a way to email this question to her. (I might just not have looked hard enough.) From where I’m crouching waiting for a fly ball, the available sponge for rain and canopy for sun and defined space for humans to do things together all argue for less AI and more time on the field.

On Saturday, acting on a tip from a trusted tree lover, I took a bike from my home at the bottom of Manhattan to a protest near the top of the Bronx. The trip meant 15 miles in the rain, but all the same. It seemed vital to cut across a certain street.

The protest happened outside a Citizens Bank branch in the solidly upscale Riverdale neighborhood. Citizens Bank has its shareholder meeting this week in Providence, and protests occurred at branches around the country. Lots of Americans like me want it to stop lending to private prison companies who help ICE agents snatch and then torture people without due process.

I rode toward Riverdale on Seaman Avenue, cutting uphill north of the park you see in the photo above. That was my path because a former manager of the city’s parks had urged me to visit Inwood Hill Park when the trees were “in leaf” to think about the work that urban greenery does - and to tell you about it so you can reassess its value.

And even in the spittly rain, the route showed off the oak trees in Inwood Hill Park, a holdout from Manhattan’s forest landscape before the Dutch and British elbowed their way uptown. Some purple awnings read “Welcome to car-free Earth Day!” and some cops and Transportation Department folks stood around minding sawhorses.

Given my destination, I started thinking about freedom to think what you think and dream what you dream as the most precious thing. And I started groping for steps you can take to protect freedom. It was too wet and I was too late to take decent pictures, but I pedaled to a metaphor.

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My friend had told me that the issues in an urban forest come down to maintenance: pruning weeds, removing invasive species that pirate water, and planting native species in the soil (or, as nature types say, “understory”). That’s species, not individual. When you know how to read a natural system, just as when you know how to read human and human-derived argument, you come into orbit with the idea that members of our species really can learn to share our nutrients under certain conditions.

On a sunnier day a few years ago, in another knob-shaped park at the southern end of Manhattan, I took this picture of land where European sailors had muscled their way onto the island. It also endures as a park because people learned to read its system and rally support to help life there.

Now, the trees and maybe the understory and certainly the backstory here in Battery Park make a different roster from what’s at the island’s opposite pole in Inwood. A person can make a key stride toward freedom by recognizing the different ways life and relationships present in different places, and the different ways they mingle.

A person’s less free when accepting someone else’s blanket fiat about how things are or should be (“I alone can fix it,” let’s say, or “a computer on every desktop”). You can often stress-test mottoes by asking whether you’d agree with them if you found their ingredients on a trail or in a book.

Back in 2026, I reached my protest after misreading my memory’s map and running up a flight of public stairs and across a ramp to a strip mall. At the protest, a star of “The Bear” who grew up in the Bronx stopped by, asked our group what we were up to, thanked us and recorded an Instagram Reel testifying to Americans’ rebuttal of ICE’s disappear people and Trump’s unauthorized war. (Her name is Liza Colon-Zayas and she’s also an accomplished playwright: follow her on Instagram if that’s your thing.)

Passing drivers honked in support: passing young men took flyers: we sang more or less in tune and introduced ourselves to strangers. A guy got to withdraw some ATM cash without hassle. A member of NYPD Community Affairs, in bright-blue uniform shirt and bright-blond ponytail, came out of the branch and chatted with an organizer who sported a peppery beard and a dangling earring. She asked the procedural question: why does it have to be raining? Seemed like open-mindedness in leaf.

A camera operator from PIX, a local station, filmed Liza Colon-Zayas filming. I learned the next day that the station didn’t air the segment because “an unfortunate incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” made it less newsworthy.

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So the parallel between gun violence and organized state violence rewards a slowed-down inspection. It has me thinking about how people attain freedom.

Start with first principles. Whoever shows up anywhere besides a battlefield of declared war intending to kill somebody is, let’s agree, wrong.1 I’m glad everyone who was at the dinner is safe, and I wish violence on nobody. My guess about the man at the WHCD is that he is unwell. Our country fails to keep guns in responsible hands and fails to care for people in mental health crisis. And our president spins these and other failures into gold for his lair and his otherwise unemployed adult children.

Donald deals in disbelief: so do Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and others working to replace human negotiation. These people clutch control of more peoples’ attention and money when more people do less interrogating of why something works the way it does. They often wrap that clutch in language about freedom.

But. When people freeze in shock or mobilize in raw rage, two things are true. They will likely soon shrink into exhaustion, and they likely hunger for answers that look simple. And in that exhaustion, you can convince them to ask Claude/Chat/Despot X for “The Answer” rather than enter into the original web on which all life rides.

Compare that to what happens when people learn to read the roots and rocks in a forest system or an urban system. That experience parallels what happens when you give people license to read deeply and broadly. They start seeing how and why certain reactions arise, what those reactions cause, how that chain loosens or traps human confidence. You might even say the two modes that nourish a person’s aptitude for freedom most are reading texts and exploring nature.

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The gasps and gore of a gunman did drown out coverage of the Citizens Bank protest, and while reporters were retelling and streamers were on a streak all kinds of other systems went on. People got sick or went into trauma or died in the prisons that Citizens Bank helped make into profit centers. People started experiencing cell divisions that will turn into cancers that will kill them because the current government cut off funding for science. People around the world came closer to starving because the current government erased aid. There’s a lot of churn.

All the while, as Bill McKibben and John McPhee and Wendell Berry and others have taught us, forest floors and shorelines and meadows did their thing. It’s not so that nature works the way Walt Disney professed in Bambi, all glucose and sunshine until nasty male humans stomp into the picture. It is so that seeing one emanation in nature leads to ask how it got that way, which leads to more and more questions.

Heading through Inwood Hill Park reminded me, as most experiences do, that muffled or commandeered communication among humans has led to an excess of carbon in the air and a consequent warping of natural systems. The climate has always been changing, but now one human endeavor is making it more severe and dangerous for everyone. And climate change has everything to do with what brought me and Liza Colon-Zayas and dozens of New Yorkers to that corner in Riverdale.

It’s a warped climate that brews up heat, which makes people more reactive and hostile. It ruins crops and makes food more expensive, which sends people searching for simple ways to live more securely. In that search, they can risk their lives or they can mortgage their independent thinking to someone who tells them that their woes are the fault of immigrants. In their discomfort, they can forget that for-profit prison companies stand accused of letting pregnant women and children sicken and die.

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So from the tip I received to take my grappling to Inwood Hill Park while trees are in leaf, I offer this broader tip. Think about the climate when rebutting the dictator, when seeing through the swindle, when practicing your skills. Always think about the climate, and know that you might find it a gut-punch.

If it seems too mammoth to be real, go somewhere public, and note the time of day and the weather. Work and exchange and history keep going on around you. Living things are making their deals with the rest of life - passively or actively, more or less. If other species can sort their affairs without name-calling or widespread lying, our species can certainly one-up them. We invented reading, after all.

Later in the weekend, I did some chores and absorbed the news from the Washington Hilton. I probably would have detected some shock or grief if anyone had been hurt. Given our nation’s gun laws and levels of social trust, though, the story seemed as surprising as ponds forming on streets in heavy rain.

Now, if you inspect street ponds you start to see many other places the water can go to work. I’ll aim to talk about that in the next essay, so long as we remain all systems go.