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Articles by Jonathan Hiskes
The Coach of All Things
I don’t write quickly or easily about God. Over the years I’ve written essays about childhood religious formation, about faith and parenting, about art that illuminates something of the sacred, but when it comes to naming the divine directly, the words get stuck.
When You Read a Good Book, It Reads You Back
Nicholas Thompson’s “The Running Ground” has been running laps in my head. There are lots of reasons to read books, and one of my favorites is the way a good one reflects light back into my own life. Whatever it is that delights, inspires, or mystifies in the text, in my experience, is often speaking to some longing that I haven’t fully identified.
The View from the Top of the Obama Center
On a muggy August morning, I drove into the South Side of Chicago to discover if I still believed in democracy. Yes, that’s an overwrought way of putting it. But it’s impossible to visit the new Obama Presidential Center, or even contemplate a visit, without sensing the jarring contrast between the idealism of the Obama presidency and the corruption and cynicism of the current administration.
A Reformed Journal Guide to the World Cup
What would Abraham Kuyper say about dynamic pricing and $30,000 tickets? The men’s World Cup is upon us, beginning this Thursday. If you’ve got someone in your life who will be yapping about it incessantly for the next six weeks, or if you’d simply like to be prepared, we humbly offer this guide. We’ll attempt to bring an informally Reformed perspective. I haven’t paid attention since the Qatar World Cup four years ago. What’s new this time? There are 48 teams competing, sixteen more than ever before.
Like Holding a Cup Beneath a Waterfall
Some thoughts on the Festival of Faith & Writing In the hubbub outside an auditorium, among well-caffeinated conferencegoers, a friend asked about my experience at the Festival of Faith & Writing. Like holding a cup beneath a waterfall, I said. I’d been to eight or nine sessions, any one of which could have keep me intellectually and artistically stimulated for a week. It was too much to absorb. It was overwhelming. It was wonderful.
Young Men and Women Off to War
I remember the line from Rhymefest, a Chicago hip-hop artist, that stopped me in my tracks. The young man in the song, fresh out of high school, enlists with an Army recruiter at the mall for the promise of a scholarship. A few bars later he’s finished boot camp and taking gunfire in Iraq: He ain’t really a killer, though, taking a lot of risk. This is what a poor person do for a scholarship.
Joyful, Groovy, Visionary, Fearless: A Few Words on Mavis Staples
“There are some people who just make me glad to be alive at the same time as them,” my wife, Hannah, said recently. “Mavis is one of them.” We were listening to A Sad and Beautiful World, the new album from Mavis Staples, released last fall at the age of eighty-six (eighty-six!). The music is everything the title promises — achingly sad and piercingly beautiful, a collaborative effort of songwriters and musicians held together by one of the most remarkable voices in American music.
Our Attention Is All We Have
Stewarding our most precious resource might be the vital first step to resistance. I get weirded out when prominent pundits start sounding like some of my favorite spiritual writers. That seems to be happening around the theme of attention in our distracted-digital-fragmented age. “Attentiveness is the root of all prayer,” says the poet Mary Oliver. “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is,” says Frederick Buechner.
The Righteous Path
I know these guys. I went to high school with them. Every line in the song reminded me of them. Got a grill in the backyard with a case of beers. Got a boat that ain’t seen the water in years. All of it. I know these guys. When I went away to college, they went to work framing houses and pouring cement and hauling trash and building out the ever-expanding suburban fringe. Got a couple of opinions that I hold dear. Got a whole lot of debt and a whole lot of fear. Everything comes with a cost. The new car.
What I Learned from the Mennonites
My wife Hannah and I spent ten years as part of a Mennonite worship community in Seattle. We started our family there. I learned some things along the way. Potlucks – Oh man, the potlucks. Every manner of fruit, grain, vegetable, and salmon variety from the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. Many of our churchmates came from farm country and many had lived overseas, combining Midwestern ingenuity with cosmopolitan curiosity of flavors. It was awesome, if a bit heavy on lentil salads.
What Truly Matters Has Not Changed: On Writing and AI
More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI The arrival of generative AI on top of algorithmic social media can feel like a pandemic on top of a pandemic for overwhelmed parents, educators, writers, knowledge workers, or anyone trying to work thoughtfully with language. As someone who wears all those hats, I’m constantly struck by how thoughtlessly we’ve charged into an AI-saturated world.
There's No Such Thing as Secular
Online publications come and go all the time, fleeting flickers in the stream of culture. Still, it’s unfortunate to see a good one go away. So here’s a tribute to Think Christian, which recently shuttered its doors due to budget cuts after some 14 years of nuanced exploration of grace surfacing in pop culture. Think Christian was a project of Reframe Ministries, the media ministry arm of the Christian Reformed Church, but it never felt like a house PR organ.
A Vulgar, Tender Ethic of Friendship
Years ago, in college, I spent a Saturday night at a house party somewhere in the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania. I was visiting a friend and didn’t know anyone else there, though most of them, like me, were Christian college students. There was a lot of beer, a lot of early-aughts indie rock, and a lot of jawing about the hypocrisy of the church and the lameness of the earnest worship leaders in the campus chapel.
Watching Old Movies
In the face of a smash-and-grab presidency, with unelected powers destroying humanitarian aid, medical research, and educational institutions, what value is a quiet little art-appreciation project? I don’t know. But, along with leaning into community, calling my representatives, and supporting local organizations working for housing justice and school equity, it’s one of my survival strategies.
The Quietly Radical Politics of "Derry Girls"
The Netflix show Derry Girls has been on my mind a lot during this stomach-churning election season. I’ll try to explain why. Set in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the mid-1990s, the show follows four teenage girls (and a cousin, James) against the backdrop of The Troubles, the violent conflict that kept the region in a tense military state since the late 1960s. If you’re not in the mood for a story about partisan political violence, stay with me.
Masculinity (Taylor’s Version)
A while back I was watching the Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert film with my eight-year-old son. We were both enjoying the incredible display of talent in songwriting, choreography, staging, costume and lighting design, and more, all centered around one brilliant performer holding a crowd rapt for three-and-a-half hours. Early on, Taylor donned a sequined power-suit jacket and launched into “The Man,” a wry, bass-heavy riff on the unfair gender standards we all live and breathe.
Farewell (and Good Riddance) to a Bygone Era of Twitter
I’ve essentially quit Twitter/X, and my life is better for it. I joined the platform in 2008 as a young journalist hoping to gather sources, crowdsource ideas, promote my work, and listen to some of the sharpest minds in my field think out loud. It helped with all of those things, a bit. But as I moved out of full-time journalism, my time on the site turned from commenting and conversing to passive consumption. Doomscrolling, as it came to be known.
Organizing for Better Cities: An Interview with Peter Lagerwey
Peter Lagerwey became the City of Seattle’s bike transportation planner in 1984, at a time when few cities had such positions. He quickly discovered that others expected his office to champion a few trophy trail projects and to leave the rest of the city’s car-centric transportation network unchanged.
Survival Mode - The Other Journal
During the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the end of long days juggling work and caring for two homebound kids, when our boys were finally asleep, the kitchen cleaned, and the work problems left for another day, I’d flop on the couch with a laptop and a video game that I’d recently rediscovered from my childhood. Frac is a three-dimensional version of Tetris created by two Swedish developers in 1990.
Grist profiled in Finnish paper -- read all about it
Published Jun 02, 2009 These editors have begun to slightly hack.Photo: Tom Clements/Vihrea Lanka Grist recently found itself the focus of a feature story in a Finnish newspaper under the headline “Tässä ei ole mitään hauskaa.” We were briefly flattered, as all those umlauts struck us as quite sophisticated, and we’re pretty much suckers for any outside attention. Until we ran the story through Google Translate, which interpreted the headline thusly: “This is not funny.” Ouch.
The Moral Failure of Crowdfunding Health Care
The rise of crowdfunding on sites like GoFundMe reflects — and potentially worsens — inequities already at play in US health care, according to new research. By Jonathan Hiskes GoFundMe homepage image If you’re going to raise money for your medical bills on a website like GoFundMe or GiveForward, it’s best to have the right kind of disease. Be sure to have a curable condition — terminal cases are unappealing to potential funders.
The Rage of Peter De Vries: Reckoning with a Brokenhearted Humorist
IT WAS AN ORDINARY autumn night in suburban Chicago when I received the most disturbing book I have ever read. I was seventeen, slouching in my bedroom making a half-hearted attempt at homework, my sweaty cross-country clothes festering on the floor. My father appeared at the doorway and handed me a yellowed paperback that looked at least a few decades old. “You might like this,” he said. It was The Blood of the Lamb by Peter De Vries.
Stopping Infectious Disease Requires ‘Staff, Space, Stuff, and Systems,’ Paul Farmer Argues (With Video)
The Partners in Health founder draws on history, anthropology, and clinical field work in a series of conversations with UW scholars about global-health inequities. By Jonathan Hiskes Paul Farmer delivers a lecture through the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington on February 7, 2018.
Woodward: ‘Journalism is not stenography’
By Jonathan Hiskes Woodward said journalists, including himself, failed in investigating the administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction. (Photo by Jeremy Hogan) Bob Woodward offered a surprisingly simple bit of journalism advice Monday night in the IU Auditorium. “Work at night,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist told the young reporters in the crowd of nearly 2,000.
If the site is right, researchers could bring tidal energy to Puget Sound
Climate & Energy By Jonathan Hiskes on Aug 11, 2009 Get your daily dose of good news from Grist Subscribe to The Beacon The problem with wind power—one of them, anyway—lies in the phrase “fickle as the wind.” Ocean tides, by comparison, are a paragon of reliability. They come and go twice a day, like clockwork. Seasonally, they’re strongest at the solstices in June and December and weakest at the equinoxes in March and September.
America’s greenest mayor, laid off and looking on
Greg Nickels. It was a dark, dreary, drizzly November morning in Seattle when I visited Greg Nickels, the city’s lame-duck mayor and an influential national voice on the need for climate action over the last decade. Outside the LEED Gold-certified City Hall, a gray murk hung in the air, nearly obscuring Elliott Bay five blocks away. I went to ask Nickels about the role cities can play in addressing climate change. And I went hoping to learn why he would be out of a job in a few weeks.
Peter Spier’s picture books praise the world
When I read to my two sons, I find myself marveling at the way they respond to good books. Their reaction is physical as much as mental. After a day of running and leaping, they climb into my lap at bedtime and almost instantly grow calm. Jittery limbs stop moving for the first time all day. Their breathing slows and deepens, and so does mine. We sink into a worn reading chair and travel into the world of a story.
Ethnography of a Surveillance State – Simpson Center UW – Medium
In the last three months, University of Washington anthropology student Darren Byler has spoken about his research to AI developers at Google, business leaders at the Washington State China Relations Council, and journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Beijing. Each group has sought his help in understanding the situation of the Uyghur people in China’s far-northwest Xinjiang province.
Stopping Infectious Disease Requires ‘Staff, Space, Stuff, and Systems,’ Paul Farmer Argues (With Video)
The most shocking fact about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2013-2016 was not the bloody hemorrhages the disease can cause, Paul Farmer said in a February 7 lecture at the University of Washington. Nor was it the “crossover event” in which the disease enters the human species, a frequent fixation of the Western media. The most damning fact was the case-fatality rate: Nearly seventy-percent of those infected with the disease died from it.
Building a Green Tea Party
A leading thinker on the left recently wrote that elite authorities have failed us and require grassroots input to become accountable. A leading thinker on the right recently wrote that centralized authorities have failed us and should be balanced by stronger local economic, political, and social networks. Now Woody Tasch of the Slow Money Alliance wants to get people with these sentiments working together.
Massey denies time off for workers to attend funerals of mine victims
The coal and oil industries are really trying to outdo each other these days.
Crowdfunding for medical bills a Band-Aid, not a cure-all, UW Bothell study finds
Crowdfunding campaigns to pay for medical costs have become a booming industry in recent years, with sites like GoFundMe raising billions of dollars for Americans struggling to pay medical bills. But the large majority of those campaigns do not reach their financial goal, according to new research from the University of Washington Bothell.
Why We Don’t Have Wings
“Why are some scenes so powerful that they keep coming back to us?” he said. “It’s not just because they’re a metaphor. It’s often because they express something that we are feeling yet lack the words or images to express.” What is it about flight that stirs such powerful feeling? The stories that move us most powerfully, Thurtle considered, don’t create new emotions. They evoke feelings already latent within us.
The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest
what a great romp through the history of the northwest. i really enjoy this book with its anecdotes and descriptions.Astoria, at the mouth of the columbia, was british during the war of 1812, the confederates roamed off shore during the civil war and the japanese fired upon it during wwII.
Worldchanging’s bright green contribution
Rumors have been floating around for a while, but on Monday the unfortunate fact became public: the sustainability news and advocacy site Worldchanging is shutting down. The 501c3 non-profit will dissolve by the end of the year, though the hope is to preserve its seven-year online archive. A note on the site says the organization had grown almost completely dependent on revenue from the speaking fees of co-founder and editor Alex Steffen: Why is this happening?
The best 9 steps toward oil independence
The Mobility Choice Coalition — a collection of environmentalists, fiscal conservatives, and national security specialists — ranks the most effective ways to reduce transportation-oil dependence in a new report, Taking the Wheel: Achieving a Competitive Transportation Sector Through Mobility Choice.
Find out where your city is most walkable with Walk Score's new heat maps
Today, Walk Score rolled out new heat maps for the 2,500 largest American cities, providing a quick way to get a sense of where cities are most walkable. That could be useful if, say, you’re visiting an unfamiliar city on holiday travel and want to burn off some extra stuffing. Or if you’re thinking about moving. Many of the maps, like St. Louis’s, are marked by isolated pockets of bright green walkability surrounded by seas of red auto-dependence.
Indiana coal plant will stop sending soot toward Chicago — in a few years
Photo: A Chicago SojournAn especially filthy coal-fired power plant in northwest Indiana will belch its last cloud of soot, carbon, mercury, and other pollutants sometime between 2014 and 2017, Gitte Laasby of the Post-Tribune reports. The State Line power plant in Hammond, Ind., will shut down rather than install new scrubbers when new EPA sulfur dioxide protections come online, its owner, Dominion Resources announced Friday. Two points of interest: 1.
6 ways to solve the ‘renter’s dilemma’ for home energy
Thermal imaging helps energy inspectors locate heat leaks.Photo: reeishome.comWatching a skillful home-energy inspector explore a leaky house last week left me with a distinct sensation: envy. As the inspector went through the process, showing the homeowner how insulation, foam sealing, and other improvements would save money on heating bills, I realized I want some of that sweet weatherstripping action for my house. But my wife and I have a simple and common dilemma: we rent.
Understanding the smart meter backlash
Smart meters let you track real-time energy use.Photo: PG&E Energy David’s been writing lately about the intersection of technology and human habits and culture, arguing that energy is a behavioral challenge as much as a technological one. There’s a prime of example of how these things collide — and why climate hawks should pay attention — in the backlash against smart meters in California.
Bicycling to Mecca
I’m fascinated by stories of pilgrimages, religious or otherwise. So this caught my eye, from Al Jazeera: The idea began as a hypothetical situation — what would happen if a few friends attempted to bicycle from their home in South Africa to the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia in time for the annual Hajj pilgrimage?
9 things I learned by shadowing a home-energy inspector
Weatherizing homes to cut heat waste makes all kinds of good sense — it lowers utility bills, makes homes more comfortable, creates building-industry jobs, saves energy, is both a floor wax and a dessert topping, etc. Grist has sung the praises of building efficiency so often we’ve taken to recycling our old jokes (and they’re not even good ones). We’re usually looking at the big-picture questions of climate, economy, and jobs.
Ruin porn, exurban sprawl edition
A while back, Sarah noted the proliferation of Detroit “ruin porn” — images and films that depict abandoned houses, crumbling factories, and desperately unemployed masses without showing that intelligent life does, in fact, remain in the city. There’s something of a parallel trend for sprawl: illustrations of the overbuilt, over-mortgaged empty subdivisions littering exurban America.
Christie finds the Right’s kingmakers demand orthodoxy on climate change
Photo: Chuck WalkerIn most of the democratic world, it’s possible to be a conservative leader who doesn’t completely dismiss climate science. In fact, it’s common. The dismissive position of the American Right’s elite is unique. This was embarrassingly clear at the recent International Security Forum, where European military leaders urged Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to take seriously the threat of famine, war, and instability driven by global warming.
Webcast: What is livability anyway?
Photo: because.philips.com“Livability” is the buzzword favored by those seeking a standard of success for communities that’s broader than “green,” or “prosperous.” It’s a more holistic term that includes environmental, health, economic, educational, and social successes. How’s that for a vague and boring definition? I’m not the only one who struggles for a way to describe livability that isn’t lame.
The post-election outlook for regional cap-and-trade
When the national climate bill crashed this summer in a flaming streak of senatorial ineptitude, climate hawks could take a little comfort in the progress that continued on the state level. Ten northeastern states have been running an active cap-and-trade program for power plants that has produced modest greenhouse-gas cuts and raised $729 million for clean-energy programs. Two clusters of states in the West and Midwest have been inching toward their own regional cap-and-trade plans.
Fix public housing by reconnecting it to the street grid
Rather than freaking out over poll returns Tuesday evening, I figured I’d go learn something (and then freak out later). So I joined a walking tour of Yesler Terrace, a Seattle public housing project that’s slated for an interesting redevelopment. It’s a useful counter-example to UniverCity, the pretty urbanism-in-suburbia neighborhood outside of Vancouver that’s pretty much unaffordable for anyone who can’t make $1,200 rent.
'20 is Plenty' campaign takes crazy stance against running over children
Hoboken, N.J., launched a “Twenty is Plenty” campaign to ask drivers to voluntarily slow down to 20 mph where the limit is 25. (New York is also trying this out in certain places.) It’s a safety thing. Crashes between autos and pedestrians have a 40 percent risk of fatality if the driver is doing 30 mph. But that risk drops to just 5 percent at 20 mph, according to the city’s transportation and parking director, Ian Sacs. It’s also a green thing, indirectly.
Biodiversity is an urban concern
The threatened Red-crowned River Turtle of southeast AsiaPhoto: Peter Paul van Dijk, Conservation InternationalBiodiversity doesn’t get as much attention as it should now that climate change has become preeminent among environmental quandaries. But it’s important! Species extinction isn’t some boutique issue that’s distinct from the needs of humans.
Bellingham’s biking nurse
Jody Hoppis, excellent personPhoto: Mobile MedicineEvery so often you get climate hawks and public-health advocates saying to each other, “Hey, walking and cycling help both of our causes. We should work together.” Here’s one way to do that: Jody Hoppis fastens her helmet, pulls on her gloves but rides no ordinary bike. Hers is a high-tech model that even comes with a small motor to push her through those long journeys. She can use the extra push, because when Hoppis arrives, the nurse is in.
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