Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
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Mucho interesting
Yesterday I attended a luncheon put on by Seattle's excellent Plymouth Housing Group, an innovative non-profit working to end homelessness in the city. Malcolm Gladwell -- staff writer at The New Yorker, author of Tipping Point and Blink, blogger, and public intellectual extraordinaire -- was the keynote speaker. (He was invited in large part thanks to his influential piece in the New Yorker arguing that problems like homelessness are "easier to solve than to manage.")Opinions about Gladwell are mixed and deep-rooted. For my part, I think he's great. He basically lives the life I dream about: someone who takes obscure academic research and buried historical anecdotes and popularizes them for a broad audience. (And it could have been me in his shoes, dammit, if only I lived in NYC and were, uh, smarter. And more imaginative. And a better writer. Damn you Gladwell!)
Anyway, his talk was on social change. Stripped of the anecdotes, the basic thesis of the talk was that social change has three somewhat unexpected features:
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Big sustainability announcement
Remember the big sustainability announcement from DuPont I told you was coming?
Well, they made it. Joel Makower has the rundown.
Someday I'll have time to comment on things like this again. And by "someday" I mean November.
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Tune in
Be sure to tune into Bill Moyers' Is God Green? special tomorrow, on your local PBS station.
Here's the trailer:
Also, check out this piece in the L.A. Times today on the same subject.
Update [2006-10-11 0:32:52 by David Roberts]: Here's another piece on the subject, from NYT.
