Local Politics at Work: Celebrating Cycling in St. Louis

24th Ward Alderman Scott Ogilvie

Around 30 people gathered this past Friday in the new bike shop Spoked in the rapidly changing Cherokee neighborhood. There were two half kegs of Civil Life beer on ice and free pizza from the wine shop next door. One wall is painted a bright, invigorating orange and the silvered tin ceiling looms overhead above bike rims hung up high. I met up with several friends and ran into others I knew from Gateway Greening and CityArchRiver who, like me, had come to bond over cycling, hear about new bike infrastructure and, yes, drink the free beer.

My mom was visiting too, and was by far the oldest person in the room. But she shared stories of biking in Boston almost 40 years ago and how she knew it was too cold to bike to work that day if her nose hairs froze on the way to the bike shed behind her apartment. Everyone was welcome.

Spoked was hosting a happy hour principally to celebrate the huge success of painting buffered bike lanes on Tower Grove Avenue ahead of the closure of the largest north-south thoroughfare in the city, which will divert traffic to Tower Grove and other detours—this effectively preserves my only route for cycling to work.

Scott Ogilvie , the alderman for the 24th ward and an avid cyclist, leapt up on the counter to welcome everyone and entreat us to be active advocates for biking in St. Louis. He introduced Matt Wyczalkowski, the man who led the fight to stripe Tower Grove before the Kingshighway closure. Matt told us how he had used Tower Grove to commute to Washington University for years and felt passionate about this short mile that is so crucial to bike commuters in the city.

Matt Wyczalkowski

When he learned that the planned bike lanes would be postponed until after the construction to allow more car traffic to use the route—essentially closing the street to all but the most diehard cyclists—he gathered a coalition of biking advocates and neighborhood associations. Together they held votes that convinced my alderman, Stephen Conway of the 8th ward, to expedite the bike lanes. It was done days later. Without Matt's intervention, Conway was prepared to let the planned striping lapse for two more years. At the behest of his constituents, persuaded by Matt, this important route is maintained.

I owe Matt two years worth of my biking commute: hundreds of hours worth of both pleasant and difficult exercise that starts and ends my working day.

Matt took questions and I asked him, "What's next for you?" His response was to ask me the same, and to point out how focused determination on a finite problem can lead to real results. His pet project was expediting bike lanes on a short stretch of his local street. If each of us in the room that day found our own tractable issue and pursued it by building coalitions of neighbors and friends, we could accomplish the same.

Rhonda Smythe

Rhonda Smythe, until recently the policy and advocacy manager at Trailnet, closed out the speeches by outlining her goal of including more people in the cycling community by reducing the barriers to biking. Outside of the spandex-wearing road cyclists, Rhonda wanted to get people who bike once a month to start biking four times a month. By creating low-speed, low-traffic routes through neighborhoods, she wanted to encourage families to bike for more of their short trips.

In my former neighborhood of Skinker-DeBaliviere, this takes the form of the Des Peres bicycle boulevard that improves through-access for cyclists over cars and has highly-visible markings to encourage more relaxed biking.

The owners of Spoked, Matt and Shane, also encouraged us to be advocates mainly by getting on our bikes and riding. Improving the visibility of the cycling community, they said, attracts the attention of neighbors and local leaders so they can internalize how vital it is for our city.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this event became the highlight of my week and a resounding lesson in the power of local politics that, I believe, lifted up everyone in attendance and left us all feeling energized and ready to act, alone and together, to make our home better.

Having an Impact: The Appeal of Mid-sized Cities to Millennials

“There is a vibrant bar and restaurant scene, social sports leagues through which hundreds of young people get together to play kickball and other games, even a monthly bike ride – sponsored by a group working to make [the city] less car dependent – in which participants dress up in costume and ride through the city.”

I thought I was reading about St. Louis and wanted to look up this monthly cycling event that sounded like the Naked Bike Ride but more frequent. The city in question is not Portland, either, but rather Baltimore. In a profile of “The New ‘Cool’ Cities for Millennials,” The Christian Science Monitor uses Baltimore as the example of a series of infamously rundown, increasingly vibrant and even hip urban centers that increasingly draw the urban Millennial generation. Cleveland. Detroit. Nashville. St. Louis. Mid-sized cities with cheap rent, storied histories, and surprising economic opportunities for a generation pummeled by the Great Recession but still searching for places to make their mark.

And although New York, San Francisco, and other metropolises draw the lion’s share of young, educated adults, these other, often overlooked cities are beginning to see rapid increases in these populations. Even as St. Louis has continued a six-decade population death spiral, the number of 25-to-34-year-olds with a college degree near the urban core has more than doubled, rising 138% from 2000 to 2010, the largest such surge in the country. Although this relative increase obscures absolute changes, St. Louis attracted more than half the demographic increase Seattle did over this same period (4,227 versus 8,209). St. Louis and other struggling cities have far to go, but they are going, and changing faster than many would have anticipated just a few years ago.

In St. Louis, Downtown, Midtown and other central corridor neighborhoods were the only ones to gain residents from 2000 to 2010, when the city overall saw an 8% drop in population, perhaps a bellwether of a turning tide in the exodus from the city center. These neighborhoods include startup incubators like T-REX and Cortex, revitalized loft apartments, and convenient public transit.

And St. Louis is the fastest-growing city for new technology jobs. ArchGrants, founded in 2011, provides non-equity funding to tech startups—as long as they remain in or move to St. Louis. LaunchCode, which rapidly trains new programmers and places them at area businesses, was recently lauded by President Obama for its successes and is expanding nationally. Tech may not be sufficient to power the city’s economy, but St. Louis’ low cost of living and access to capital make it a top place for starting other businesses as well. 

Although demographers cannot untangle the economic causes from the cultural behind the Millennial move toward cities, The Christian Science Monitor and other sources have identified a self-reported interest in dense, walkable, community-oriented neighborhoods over suburban sprawl among the young. The people profiled in the CSM piece—employees at tech startups and nonprofits—claimed Baltimore as a city where they could have an impact, where a vibrant urban lifestyle coincided with a small enough community to feel absorbed, not “carried along”.

St. Louis offers the same opportunities to contribute to a quirky, very much in progress revitalization of the city. Upstart politicians can win by a mere 90 votes against an entrenched incumbent; individuals can ensure that local representatives listen to their constituents about critical bike infrastructure projects; shuttered corner businesses can be reopened to create a new community space; a brand new brewery can be self-funded.

As a full-time graduate student, I can still find a way to contribute to outreach to the community gardening scene in St. Louis where other cities, San Francisco for example, might have those kinds of niches saturated by individuals who can commit more fully to single projects. In many areas of this city, there is both a need and room for interested individuals and small groups to get their hands dirty in making their communities better—the results are obvious, the actions of individuals visible.

Demographers quibble over whether the Millennial move toward cities is stable, or whether family life, schools, and age will push us back out to the suburbs in the next decade or two. Time will tell. But it may be that the economic forces that favor urban centers only reinforce an intentional return to lively, dense cities. And that St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland or Detroit offer the more civic-minded—and more financially constrained—of our generation an opportunity to help forge the cities we will inhabit for decades to come. 

The Limits of the DOJ Ferguson Report in a Fractured Region

The Department of Justice released the findings of its investigation into civil rights abuses in Ferguson this week. The report is unsparing in its indictment of intentional racial bias within the police department and city government, and the unequal application of the law on black residents without cause. Analysis by people familiar with the DOJ’s involvement with other police forces suggests that the DOJ will forcefully compel their suggested changes, or dissolve the police department entirely.

As striking as this report is—and as clear as it is to dispel the myth that race is not a factor—its effects are inherently limited. Ferguson is home to only 21,000 people, one of 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, which has a total population greater than one million. The independent City of St. Louis houses another 320,000 residents, more than half of whom are non-white. The DOJ may reform the Ferguson police department into an exemplary force, or dissolve it altogether and allow the St. Louis County police to patrol the town. Neither will sufficiently address the widespread problems facing the St. Louis region or the country as a whole.

St. Louis is fragmented, divided intentionally over decades into white and black, rich and poor. Many other cities are similarly fractured. Forceful reform of a single police department, representing barely one percent of the region’s population, is nearly meaningless. The divisions that have contributed to St. Louis’ problems must be addressed alongside raking the Ferguson police department over the coals. Unnecessary police forces should be dissolved, and many of their cities absorbed into larger municipalities. The City of St. Louis and the County should be reunited in order to work together, not compete. 

Only a region so strengthened will be poised to lead the nation in meaningful reforms. Only if we heal these longstanding divisions can we turn a conversation into action. Bust open Ferguson, break it down and build it up into a city and a police force that serves its residents proudly and well. But to stop at Ferguson would fail St. Louis to an extent we cannot afford. 

Reaching Across the Gap with Curiosity

"I think there is nothing so exciting as listening to someone think on the radio." — Jad Abumrad

On Wednesday, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab fame presented at Washington University’s first Ampersand Week, a series of events celebrating the ‘and’ of Arts and Sciences, or the value of liberal arts education over exclusive specialization. A perfect choice for such a purpose, Radiolab draws on the composing background of Jad and the inventive science journalism of Robert to explore scientific topics with a humanistic lens. The event took place in Graham Chapel, the pews filled with students, faculty, staff, and the public for the free event.

I was not sure what this presentation would entail. Would they present a live version of Radiolab? Or just introduce a series of archived podcast segments? The experience was somewhere between those two. Relying on existing tape, Jad and Robert discussed the production of Radiolab, the task of distilling technical knowledge from experts for a lay audience, and the musicality and intimacy of radio over other mediums.

Jad opened by acknowledging his mother, sitting in the front row, an obesity researcher here at Washington University, a professor in my program no less. I had no idea. On the large screen behind them, Jad put up a picture of his mother’s protein, what she studies every day, which helps bring fats into the cell. In fact, Jad grew up in a scientific home, with a medical doctor father and scientist mother, an environment that clearly influences his work to bridge the sciences and the arts.

The first segment began by peeling back the curtain on how a formal interview with a scientist becomes radio drama. Robert spoke with Cynthia Kenyon, a C. elegans researcher at UCSF, about two genes that control aging in the tiny worms. One is a hormone receptor, which, when activated, represses the activity of a transcription factor. When the transcription factor is allowed to function, it controls the expression of many separate genes that work together to increase the lifespan of the worms several fold. Jad played the unedited interview, demonstrating how even a media-savvy researcher stumbled to translate the molecular action of genes into something a non-scientist could grasp, and even care about. It was awkward and difficult to keep track of.

 

But as Jad pointed out, Cynthia’s explanation naturally gravitated to exciting, narrative verbs. Spring. Inhibit. Leap into action. The nouns suffered from alphabet soup—scientists rely heavily on acronyms and jargon for naming genes—and specialized phrases. Receptor. Transcription factor. DAF-2. Radiolab’s job, then, was what Jad called “noun replacement therapy.” Keep the substance, but swap technical language with vernacular.

The translated version: The Grim Reaper Gene (hormone receptor) cue evil laugh battles it out with the Fountain of Youth Gene (transcription factor) cue toddler giggles for control of the aging process. Beat up on the Grim Reaper (mutate it) painful groans and the baby is free to keep cells, and the animal, youthful, blowing spit bubbles as it does.

To some scientists, this kind of translation may seem simplistic. (Cynthia produced the gene nicknames, it was not a liberty taken by Radiolab.) Robert even phrased it as having to ask, “How stupid do you want to be?” Always there is a trade-off between accuracy and understandability. Always. “You’re somehow trying to find a way to stay in the middle,” Robert said. Choosing that point, and then finding that point, is the challenge a show like Radiolab contends with for every topic. But to avoid any kind of simplifying is to wall off scientific research to the ivory tower, something far more damaging than “noun replacement therapy.”

This translation is not foreign to most of us, maybe just lost. Jad recalled trying to bridge the gap with his mom to explain her work when he was a kid, dinner plates standing in for cells and the salt shaker for her protein, the iterative process of trying to get closer to the truth one curious question after another. Our interest in understanding something new, something difficult, is dampened by a culture that discourages looking stupid, but it can be encouraged as well. Jad and Robert try to use the power of stupid questions asked with genuine curiosity to recapture that sense of wonder. “Yes, but why?”

Robert said that if they approach a scientist with sincere curiosity, about 60 percent will spend the time to tell them what they need to know. I wish that number were higher, but I am surprised it is that high. I think they may have a self-selecting group of scientists more inclined to work with the media than most. But I could not say for sure.

Beyond translation, the hour-long presentation delved into the frenetic production of the show, with layers of music and noise and swirling audio energy, a style that aims for a composer’s musicality and an authentic struggle for new knowledge. As a technically naïve but huge fan of radio, I appreciated seeing the depth of production at the software level that goes into making one of my favorite shows. Although hard to miss in a show like Radiolab, I know that most audio production is successful when it goes unnoticed, but it is good to be reminded of the work that goes into these programs.

The floor open to questions, I waited in line at the mic to ask: How can scientists help reach back out to the journalists, or the public, who have reached toward us to help bridge these gaps? I did not get an answer to my question, but I did get a good answer to a good question.

Robert instead answered the why. Why should scientists care about communicating their work? He couched it in militaristic, epic terms—scientific inquiry is the product of intellectual freedom, a resource that is constantly endangered. To tell a story of the science we do is an enchantment, one that can draw people in and convince them that the freedom required for this kind of work is worth demanding and worth preserving. No less than the ability to perform honest work is at stake in the communication of our research.

Jad again put on screen the structure of his mother’s protein, her life’s work, to help illustrate his partner’s answer on the value of free inquiry. He then answered a question closer to my own. “The story of science is in most cases the story of ceaseless failure, which is really the story of everyone who walks the earth,” he said. Tell that human story of vulnerability, confusion, failure, and occasional bright points of insight and success, and anyone can be reached.

Beer in the Garden

As humans first started to settle down from nomadic hunter-gatherers into early agricultural societies, they took what must have been an exceedingly keen understanding of the diverse plants in their environment and applied that knowledge to the cultivation of crops. Instead of relying on the bounty provided by nature, these people began to select the most appealing and nutritious plants to work deliberately. In so doing, they actively produced brand new crops and developed an even deeper relationship with the plant world.

And here, at the very dawn of civilization, early agriculturalists took their growing understanding of plants, and perhaps a bit of serendipity, and developed something to rival agriculture itself—beer. Agriculture and brewing developed side-by-side because both required a deepening understanding of the plant world. Today, the increasingly popular hobbies of home gardening and homebrewing can bring us back to this early world thousands of years ago where an appreciation for and knowledge of the plant world translated into intoxicating, frothy, delicious brews.

This past Wednesday I was invited to give a presentation on the intersection between gardening and homebrewing at the wonderful, new(ish) Urban Chestnut bierhall in The Grove. I was invited by Gateway Greening, which runs a monthly seminar series called, appropriately, Pints ‘N’ Plants. Around fifty people came to learn and talk about the understanding of barley and hops that is required to make great beer, and the many plants we can grow right here in St. Louis to brew with.

Bread baking and brewing happened under the same 

roof in ancient Egypt. Photo by Keith Schengili-Roberts

Barley of course provides the essence of beer, the sugars that yeast ferment into alcohol and carbon dioxide. But barley kernels straight from the field are full of starch, a form of sugar inaccessible to yeast. To unlock this sugar, maltsters control the germination of barley seeds, the developmental program that converts starch into sugar for the young seedlings. Instead of letting the seed continue to produce a whole new barley plant, maltsters instead dry and roast the sweet malted barley to halt the process and caramelize the sugars.

Fermented malted barley is all that is needed to make an intoxicating beverage, but it will result in a cloyingly sweet, unpalatable beer. Hops, the aromatic female flowers from the hop plant, perform the job of balancing the saccharine barley with bitter hoppiness while flavoring the beer as well. Hops took over from a diverse array of local herbs, fruits, and other plants around a thousand years ago to become the exclusive flavoring of most beer.

These earlier brews—called gruits—also relied on a strong sense of the qualities of local flora to produce drinkable beer that would not poison the drinkers. Hops likely superseded these hundreds or thousands of other plants because of their ability to protect beer from bacterial infections so well, but they also make a damn fine beer. The dozens of different varieties of hops lend distinct flavors and aromas from dry and earthy to bright and citrusy, helping to recover the diversity in flavorings lost with the gruits.

As any would-be usurper of the Busch crown will tell you, beer only requires barley, hops, yeast, and water. However, the craft beer and homebrewing renaissance has helped rediscover the variety of beer flavorings that harken back to an earlier time when all manner of local plants found their way into the brew kettle. Here, gardeners and homebrewers can join together in search of homegrown, quality ale.

Any number of bizarre plants can find their way into homebrewed beer. I covered just a handful to consider and get started in my talk, some I have experience with and some I do not. By far the easiest to grow is cilantro, the herb flavoring a lot of Mexican dishes. Instead of the leaves, however, brewers seek the bright, citrusy seeds called coriander. They have a completely different taste and are used in a very popular style of beer called Belgian witbier. This is the style of Blue Moon and is a very refreshing beer brewed with wheat, bitter orange peel, and coriander. In fact, the witbier is light on hops and calls back to the gruits that were flavored with an array of herbs and spices. Cilantro is so easy to grow it will even reseed itself from year to year, reliably producing pods of brown, crunchy seeds in the summer. Only about five tablespoons are required with an equal weight of orange peel to flavor the beer, an amount easy to acquire from just a plant or two.

I also covered how to grow and brew with pumpkin, chili peppers(!), and potted citrus plants. Perhaps the best plant to get in the ground this spring, however, is hops! A perennial, fast-growing vine, hops do well in community spaces where they can spread out and grow stronger year-over-year, or in the backyard of an enthusiastic gardener-brewer who has enough space for a sturdy trellis. Each spring, homebrew supply stores sell chunks of hop rhizomes, a root-like structure that overwinters to produce vines the next season. This vegetative means of propagation ensures that gardeners get only the female plants and clones of their favorite variety. After growing up to thirty feet high and maturing at the end of summer, the hops are ready to be tossed in the brew kettle for truly homegrown brewing.

My former community garden, Block 1035. Hops growing

on the common space trellis in the background.

To combine gardening and brewing, with an eye for creativity and variety, is truly to travel back in time to eras when most beer was brewed at home alongside the baking of bread, and when a knowledge of local plants was required for making delicious brews. For a time it seemed we had lost both of these skillsets. But now with the ongoing popularity of home and community gardening and the rapid rise in homebrewing, we all have the opportunity to capture again that intrinsic link between the growing of plants and the brewing of beer. Prost!

[I relied heavily on The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart and The Complete Joy of Homebrewing 3rd ed. by Charlie Papazian]

Update: Valentine's Day Isn't Completely Terrible

It's freezing outside and St. Louis is full of people so disappointed in their relationship status that they're all drinking at noon and fighting over plastic beads.

But let's not forget the upside to Valentine's Day. We're halfway to the vernal equinox. We've climbed just a little out of the unending darkness of the winter solstice. It's getting a little lighter out.

I conducted a scientific poll—a poll of scientists, not a representative sampling of the population—and it’s true! Seven out of seven plant biologists agree: it’s getting noticeably lighter outside, just in time for this big letdown of a holiday.

So if the chocolate is especially bitter today, just pause to reflect on the changing seasons. Nothing ever lasts forever, be it the cold dark or Mardi gras revelry or the failure to meet high expectations. The Earth keeps spinning around the sun and things grow brighter every day. 

Audio File #3: Getting Entangled in Invisibilia

Cover for "Entanglement" by Daniel Horowitz

“Two things separated in space can be the same thing.” –Geoff Brumfiel, Entanglement

After the hit podcast Serial landed and enraptured a widening audience of audio fanatics, I think that a lot of people have been searching for new shows to fill the gap left behind by the conclusion of Serial season one. To this group—and to existing podcast aficionados—I present Invisibilia.

Invisibilia is the spiritual successor of Radiolab, and its production love-child along with This American Life. The two hosts, Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, are founding producers of This American Life and Radiolab, respectively, and NPR science reporters besides. Latin for “all the invisible things,” Invisibilia promises a weekly exploration of the invisible forces that shape human behavior. So far, four shows in, this means Spiegel and Miller are creating a surprisingly spiritual discussion rooted in cutting edge neuroscience about the psychology and brain biology behind how humans feel and act.

The first three episodes covered the power and intrigue of our very own thoughts; how to control your fear (and what happens when you feel none); and the profound, very real, effects of people’s expectations of the blind. Each is truly, almost alarmingly, excellent. Today, I want to cover the latest episode: Entanglement.

Lulu and Alix begin by visiting a physics lab at the University of Maryland to witness the creation of quantum entanglement, the physical phenomenon of linking two objects together at a deep level. Once entangled, if one particle is altered—even at a great physical distance from its partner—the other responds accordingly. It’s messy, and brushes up against our notions of causality and the fundamental limit of the speed of light, but it is very real. And quantum entanglement is the lead in to the equally bizarre and fascinating world of entanglement among people, how we are intimately tied to the people around us in conscious and unconscious ways.

The first story of entanglement takes Alix and Lulu to a woman, Amanda, and her family. Amanda experiences a very rare form of extreme empathy, called mirror-touch synesthesia. Synesthesia is the general term for relatively rare but well-documented cases when people experience a mixing of traditionally separate senses, like seeing colors in numbers or tasting sounds. Basically, synesthesia boils down to crossed wires in the brain, which ultimately integrates all of our senses into conscious experience. In some people, that integration is messier.

For Amanda, the very experience of seeing someone experience something triggers the subjective sense of that act within herself. When she was young, she realized that seeing someone get hugged felt like a hug, at a very real, physical level. A woman scratching her arm felt like a scratch. People chewing food felt like they were stuffing food in her own mouth. Pain also transferred across space. Experiencing all of this, and an intense level of emotional empathy as well, left Amanda drained every day, and even unsure of her own identity as she took on the feelings and mannerisms of those around her.

The neurological explanation of Amanda’s difficult condition relies on mirror neurons. Observed directly only in monkeys so far, mirror neurons fire both when observing an action and when doing it. They are a cellular explanation for empathy. Presumably, mirror neurons, or something much like them, cause Amanda’s sensory cortex to light up just when watching a stranger feel or do something. I will leave the engrossing and melancholic exploration of the effects of this overcharged empathy on Amanda and her family to the hosts. Suffice to say, it is not easy being so intimately wrapped up in the world.

The second story features psychology researchers Elaine Hatfield and Dick Rapson of the University of Hawaii and their studies on ‘emotional contagion,’ the phenomenon of mimicking the physical and emotional states of those around you. Unconsciously, we match the posture or speaking patterns of people we interact with. Lulu goes on to explain that even imperceptible patterns, like blinking or breathing, will become synchronized.

Emotional mimicry is at play here as well. Linked to microexpressions—unconscious, rapid-fire flashes of emotion—this kind of emotional empathy influences the mood of everyone you interact with. Filled with audio of old Candid Camera episodes and the meshwork of Elaine and Dick marveling at the subject of their studies, the story comes alive with emotion and a sense of wonder. The researchers explain the consequences of this sponge-like absorption of our environment’s emotional energy, which include a limit on our individuality. We cannot truly be isolated, emotionally contained individuals if we react so viscerally to the emotions around us. Like smokers who try to quit but still hang around smokers, all of us are influenced in obvious and subtle ways by the people we surround ourselves with.

Or as Lulu explains: “It's like without quite being aware of it, we are all one organism, a heaving, swirling organism contracting the feelings and thoughts of the people around us.”

There is a bonus story at the end about the greatest entanglement—the one with our mothers—that I won’t spoil. In their exploration of Amanda’s extreme empathy, and our commonplace experience of it, Lulu and Alix manage to weave an emotional hour of awe, sadness, and laughter. Their story-telling pedigrees, and science journalism chops, combine to create the best science show I know of since Radiolab.

The show can stretch credulity. This is clearly not an accident. Alix and Lulu want to stretch your mind to the border of science fiction, and then push you back just over the edge toward reality. They deliberately construct ridiculous claims—about the blind seeing or the material reality of thoughts—and then carefully lead you to that exact conclusion through their narrative. They may test the boundaries of accuracy with hyperbole, but the sense of curiosity and wonder they instill seems worth it.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the refreshing power of having two quick, smart women discuss science with a clear sense of awe, respect, and desire to learn and share. Although Lulu and Alix are journalists, not scientists, I expect the show could really impact our culture where women are still underrepresented in science and face a lack of role models for scientific curiosity. Not scientists, no, but Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel have the scientific curiosity down, and we all benefit in Inivisibilia.