Nick Parish

Nick Parish (NP) has been a long-standing friend of WITI since his days as the junior reporter on the NY Post’s sports desk. He’s since worked in editorial, strategy, product design and currently lives in Portland. He’s a fly fishing mentor to Noah, and he last talked about fermentation/Kombucha way back in NYC at 2008’s Interesting New York conference, a strange precursor to this very newsletter. - Colin (CJN) Nick here. I love fermentation. At its core, it’s the story of how the human species has ridden out boom and bust cycles of nature, uncovering tasty treats and useful new materials in the process. It’s a story of magic and alchemy.My love of fermenting at home started over a decade ago with kombucha in a tiny uptown apartment, glass jars from a Harlem dollar store, and a mother culture gifted from a car service driver.Now, I’m looking after a big urban garden in Portland, Oregon, with a fair chunk of shed space for experiments. Our overgrown lot features several dozen varieties of edible berries, tree fruits, perennial vegetables, and other items you’d find in the farmer’s market, in addition to a big seasonal vegetable garden and a leech-filled pond. On good days, time spent in the garden is a feast, where we wander and graze on whatever looks ripe. On (rare) bad days it’s me fretting over soil health, pest management, and the future. I’ve moved from kombucha to beer, wine, kimchi, hot peppers, hot sauce, tobacco, sourdoughs, and even lant (don’t ask). My eccentric digestive experiments are semi-tolerated by my exquisite food writer spouse. She’s constantly trying out new recipes, so I get both contemporary inspiration and raw material. But one fermentation habit has been transformative above all others and helped me understand the broader implications of our consumption, reframing it in terms of future nourishment. I ferment my trash.To be specific, I ferment our compostable kitchen waste through a process known as bokashi. Layers of our scraps ferment in a sealed five-gallon bucket, together with specially inoculated wheat bran. The inoculant is a product containing a combination of living bacteria, which has an odd enough origin story and following to merit its own WITI. As each bucket fills (I have three in rotation), it’s sealed for two weeks to ferment, then it’s ready to deploy. I dig it into one of the compacted pathways in my vegetable garden, and it decomposes in a few weeks, adding microorganisms and nutrients back into the system.Photo by Alex LauWhy is this interesting?In the last several years, our environmental and health crisis has shifted personal responsibility from a marker of identity to a safety mechanism. Whether it’s wearing a mask or planting a garden, we’re all being asked to do more, on our own. There’s a control in self-sufficiency, and that can become resilience, an important cornerstone to empathy and psychological wholeness. As these crises unfold, we’re given the opportunity to make important changes at a macro, societal level to engage this new responsibility together.Several years ago I began consulting with a big apparel company’s sustainable-innovation department, which had “waste as material” as a significant strategic pillar. Meanwhile, I was getting into the Expanse series, where off-planet Belters were endlessly resourceful and everything ultimately went into a recycler, a magic gadget trope not unlike the Fremen stillsuits in the Dune universe, or the Federation’s replicators. One was magic, one was Excel. The crew of the Rocinante’s soy kibble felt very far from pivot tables calculating macerated plastic by the ton. But the gulf between sci-fi and Earth realities-at-scale has never been closer, not from technological possibility as much as existential need. Soon we’ll be forced to pull out all the stops. Zero-waste environments (in Ljubljana, or in the “recyclers” we’ll need at home) will become a greater part of our consciousness as supply chains continue to break and reform. We’ll need to create soil substrates that are as capable as possible as we trial new varieties of adaptable plants to mitigate the effects of climate change. As you may remember from The Composting Edition, these group efforts often lack broad engagement, and many are now facing temporary setbacks.Fermentation is a delicious game with many applications that anyone remotely gastronomically inclined can play. All you need to start today are some blueberries, salt, a glass, and a plastic baggie (shouts out to The Noma Edition; I hear he’s making burgers now). No matter its simplicity, in playing along you’re adding yourself—literally, in terms of your household codependent bacteria mix—to a most essential elemental process: energy consumption. Beat the rush to the next lockdown hobby and grab a kimchi crock and a case of canning jars and the Katz and Noma books. Ferment. Preserve. Repeat. You’ll never look at your food in the same way once you’ve set it free to transform, and you’ll never be more capable to face the challenges ahead. (NP)Video of the Day:If you’re anything like me you saw this YouTube video of a guy solving a Sudoku pass through four or five of your feeds in the last few weeks. You may or may not have ignored it, thinking, “how good could a YouTube video of a guy solving a Sudoku be?” Well, I’m here to tell you it’s amazing. Contributor Edith Zimmerman replied that “it feels like watching a real action movie” after pushing the video for the second time in WITI Slack. Make it happen. (NRB)Quick Links:To use the delicious carrot or the stick, when it comes to consumption and climate change? Jonathan Safran Foer opts for the latter and declares the tipping point for eating meat’s cultural defensibility. (NP)Gucci’s creative director breaks the seasonal collection cycle: “We went way too far...our reckless actions have burned the house we live in. We conceived of ourselves as separated from nature, we felt cunning and almighty.” (NP)A bit of macro understanding from Scientific American about where all NYC’s garbage goes, and how it’s transforming a landscape for the third time. (NP)Learn about initiatives empowering localism toward food security in places like Los Angeles (NP)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Nick (NP)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Fermentation Edition

Nick Parish (NP) has been a long-standing friend of WITI since his days as a junior reporter on the NY Post’s sports desk. He’s since worked in editorial, strategy, product design and currently lives in Portland. He’s a fly fishing mentor to Noah, and most recently wrote about fermentation. - Colin (CJN) Nick here. I’ve kept a journal on and off since the summer of 1990 when I was 10. Thirty years later, it’s become a lifesaver. It’s full of anxieties I won’t go into, as you’re probably quite familiar with your own and likely bearing greater. I’ve paddled in clear waters all my days, though sometimes they were cold, and the current strong. But I've been able to manage heightened anxieties and focus on what I can control in part due to the greatest journaling vehicle since sliced paper: the Hobonichi Techo life book.Believe me, I’ve tried them all. My writing ritual came alive with marble composition notebooks, legal pads, Moleskines, 750words.com. When my responsibilities grew and important details advanced from flurries into a blizzard, I looked to more complex planners, like the Page-A-Day and FranklinCovey systems, with rules about which nooks and crannies got which important information. None stuck.What’s different this time? The Hobonichi Techo (loosely translated from the Japanese as “almost everyday planner”) achieves near-perfection in design by balancing a considered sense of purpose for every detail and the freedom for individual style and creativity.The Hobonichi Techo is the creation of Shigesato Itoi, an incredibly prolific writer previously best known for his role as auteur of the Mother / EarthBound series of video games. In the late ’90s, after he found notoriety writing and directing games, he began writing a blog, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun (The Itoi Pretty-Much-Daily News). In 2001, after he asked his audience whether they’d be interested in a Hobo-themed planner, the Techo was born.Why is this interesting?It’s a special month for Hobo addicts like me. The 2021 planners go on sale on September 1. Since the beginning of August, Itoi and his Hobo overlords have been counting down the days and teasing changes for the 20th-anniversary editions. This time, it’s more than the ritual of unwrapping our 2021 book sometime in November. In a year with little to look forward to, a simple calendar’s inevitability has taken on special significance. The Techo comes in several shapes and sizes and has a variety of cover options that protect the book and bring it to life with colors and characters. It features the exquisite Tomoe River paper, which accommodates many different inks and inspires its own obsessives. All the creative, crafty elements of scrapbooking—washi tape, stickers, fancy pens, and the like—are at home here. As you might expect, Reddit and Instagram are great places to see what people are doing with their books. For me, the focal point of my planner (a Cousin A5) is the daily page, where each evening I spend about 20 or 30 minutes jotting down an observation from the day, usually describing a scene, an interaction I want to remember, something I’m feeling, or a key decision. I list five things I’m grateful for and anything I’ve finished (like books or movies), and I make a rough translation of the quote at the bottom using Google Translate. Since the pandemic began, I’ve been entering the daily count of new COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths in my state and county, and the number of days since my parents started quarantining. Toward the front of the book, a weeks-view page breaks each week down into day- and hour-long chunks. I still use a digital calendar system, but the Techo is where details from appointments and meetings are logged, along with weekly to-dos and work notes. A monthly spread at the front of the planner tracks big things, like birthdays and special days, and provides a place for me to code my daily mood and track important habits. There’s a space at the very front that lets you track progress toward long-term goals, which for me is a light worklog for a new manuscript. Journaling, especially if you include things you’re grateful for, is the cheapest possible therapy. It’s been shown to provide positive mental health benefits, alleviating anxiety, and tamping down intrusive thoughts while improving short-term memory. Focusing on gratitude has been shown to decrease materialism in young people, among the myriad benefits of gratitude in general. Nowadays, it also helps me throttle and process information and understand life in context. When you’ve got a big book of days, nothing on a single page is ever as big or as small as it seems at the time. (NP)Service of the Day: Robin Sloan hipped us to Mubi. It is a combination of a streaming service, a curator, and a distributor. There’s a new film every day, and things drop off and disappear. The hand picked nature of the catalog, the emphasis on interesting foreign films, and ephemeral nature (better watch or it will be gone!), makes for a compelling proposition. The Chinese film “Office” has been a favorite among the members of the WITI contributors Slack. Quick Links:You can pick up your Hobonichi Techo starting September 1 here, but until then, revel in the anticipation of another year. (NP)Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction? (NP)A good place to decompress a bit: dreaming of the Aman in Kyoto (CJN)WITI contributor Ana is on the Courier Weekly. Go tune in. (CJN)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Nick (NP)PS - Noah here. Variance, my new company, is just getting going with our Alpha. If you work in sales, services, marketing, or engineering and want to try out/give feedback on a tool to help your team work more effectively with their apps, please request an invite on the site. Thanks.—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? The Hobonichi Techo Edition

Nick Parish (NP) has been a friend of WITI since his days as a junior reporter on the NY Post’s sports desk. He has since worked in editorial, strategy, product, and org design, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He’s a fly-fishing mentor to Noah, and is focused on raising awareness around conservation and sustainability issues central to the sport. - Colin (CJN) Nick here. Dams have always divided. Some see them as technological marvels, helping communities flourish by putting water to work. Some see them as a marker on the vainglorious trail to ecological collapse, monuments to the belief that behind tons of concrete and steel, our civilization can conquer nature.Along with the railroad, barbed wire, and the reservation system, across the American West dams have measured the cost of progress to nature and culture. Traditionally, the answer to “What good is a dam?” has fallen into one of two camps: authority or outsider, empire-builder or no-hoper. John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid portrays one such struggle, between the Sierra Club and Bureau of Reclamation. It’s a contest between cutoff jeans fringing free love-tanned thighs and Stetsons topping polyester action slacks. The empire’s hell-bent on “flooding the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get a better look at the ceiling,” the hippies on saving it. In fiction, Chief Brompton of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestexperiences the fracturing of his culture at the mechanistic levers of the Combine. A dam subsumes his identity and voice along with the traditional economies around Celilo Falls—the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America—as they are inundated by the Columbia. But this divisive portrayal may not be shaping the future of water—water meaning agriculture, economies, and life—in the west. Recent developments have moved former foes beyond political ideology and outmoded stereotypes.Why is this interesting?Far from the dam-busting fantasies of Green Beret-cum-eco-saboteur George Hayduke in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, twin forces are pulling America’s dams down: simple economic sense and resilient fish.America’s dam infrastructure is terrible, and we’re downstream of it. Major breaches and failures at sites like the Oroville dam in California and Edenville dam in Michigan have displaced thousands. The American Society of Civil Engineers give the country’s dam system a “D” in its 2021 report, revealing the average dam is 57 years old, with more than 2,300 “high-hazard-potential” dams around the country. Given their overall shabbiness and potential for costly failure, it’s becoming cheaper to take a derelict dam out, rather than leave it intact and roll the dice.As dams themselves are crumbling, the decades-old rationale for maintaining the status quo erodes too, and we have a real chance to restore rural economies together with critically endangered Pacific salmon populations. The largest dam-removal project in U.S. history is underway on the Klamath River in California. Meanwhile, Idaho congressman Mike Simpson, a Republican, has proposed a $34 billion legislative package to remove four dams on the Lower Snake River, a potentially transformational breakthrough. Drive and desire to implement these initiatives before time (and infrastructure money mojo) runs out is uniting both ranchers and environmentalists to find solutions.Through it all, nature pervades. After dams are removed and habitat restored, salmon begin slowly and steadily returning. I hope one day to see the Columbia—a larger drainage than all the other West-running rivers in the continental U.S. combined—in an undammed state, with Celilo Falls roaring, salmon runs again counted in the double-digit millions, and our environment managed in accord with, rather than against, nature. Science and innovation can help make right the damage coming from earlier places of ignorance, as honor and tradition reunite in these sacred places. (NP)Charity of the Day:This might resonate with you more than it had pre-pandemic. Maybe you’re one of the 17 million Americans who connected or re-connected with aquatic recreation in the last year. No matter if you’re long-time or first-time, I work with an organization executing ecosystem-scale river regeneration and re-wilding, and I want to invite you to get involved too.The Freshwater Trust is pioneering the next generation of quantified conservation and restored watersheds, mixing modern technology and native ecology. Sophisticated modeling products determine where and how a suite of remedies can bring tangible, measurable outcomes to help restore watersheds and leave them more resilient in the process.Our annual gala, Immerse, is coming up in virtual format on May 13. And thanks to the Great Pandini, it’s just $20 to attend. You can hear more about the big opportunities we have to pioneer watershed restoration from anywhere in the world. Buy a ticket, come see the show, and next time you’re in Oregon, we can go find some fish together. Maybe we’ll see them where they hadn’t been in a while. (NP)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Nick (NP)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Dam Edition

Nick Parish (NP) has been a long-standing friend of WITI since his days as a junior reporter on the NY Post’s sports desk. He’s since worked in editorial, strategy, product design and currently lives in Portland. He’s a fly fishing mentor to Noah and recently wrote about fermentation. This originally ran last August, but we love it. - Colin (CJN) Nick here. I’ve kept a journal on and off since the summer of 1990 when I was 10. Thirty years later, it’s become a lifesaver. It’s full of anxieties I won’t go into, as you’re probably quite familiar with your own and likely bearing greater. I’ve paddled in clear waters all my days, though sometimes they were cold, and the current strong. But I've been able to manage heightened anxieties and focus on what I can control in part due to the greatest journaling vehicle since sliced paper: the Hobonichi Techo life book.Believe me, I’ve tried them all. My writing ritual came alive with marble composition notebooks, legal pads, Moleskines, 750words.com. When my responsibilities grew and important details advanced from flurries into a blizzard, I looked to more complex planners, like the Page-A-Day and FranklinCovey systems, with rules about which nooks and crannies got which important information. None stuck.What’s different this time? The Hobonichi Techo (loosely translated from the Japanese as “almost everyday planner”) achieves near-perfection in design by balancing a considered sense of purpose for every detail and the freedom for individual style and creativity.The Hobonichi Techo is the creation of Shigesato Itoi, an incredibly prolific writer previously best known for his role as auteur of the Mother / EarthBound series of video games. In the late ’90s, after he found notoriety writing and directing games, he began writing a blog, Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun (The Itoi Pretty-Much-Daily News). In 2001, after he asked his audience whether they’d be interested in a Hobo-themed planner, the Techo was born.Why is this interesting?It’s a special month for Hobo addicts like me. The 2021 planners go on sale on September 1. Since the beginning of August, Itoi and his Hobo overlords have been counting down the days and teasing changes for the 20th-anniversary editions. This time, it’s more than the ritual of unwrapping our 2021 book sometime in November. In a year with little to look forward to, a simple calendar’s inevitability has taken on special significance. The Techo comes in several shapes and sizes and has a variety of cover options that protect the book and bring it to life with colors and characters. It features the exquisite Tomoe River paper, which accommodates many different inks and inspires its own obsessives. All the creative, crafty elements of scrapbooking—washi tape, stickers, fancy pens, and the like—are at home here. As you might expect, Reddit and Instagram are great places to see what people are doing with their books. For me, the focal point of my planner (a Cousin A5) is the daily page, where each evening I spend about 20 or 30 minutes jotting down an observation from the day, usually describing a scene, an interaction I want to remember, something I’m feeling, or a key decision. I list five things I’m grateful for and anything I’ve finished (like books or movies), and I make a rough translation of the quote at the bottom using Google Translate. Since the pandemic began, I’ve been entering the daily count of new COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths in my state and county, and the number of days since my parents started quarantining. Toward the front of the book, a weeks-view page breaks each week down into day- and hour-long chunks. I still use a digital calendar system, but the Techo is where details from appointments and meetings are logged, along with weekly to-dos and work notes. A monthly spread at the front of the planner tracks big things, like birthdays and special days, and provides a place for me to code my daily mood and track important habits. There’s a space at the very front that lets you track progress toward long-term goals, which for me is a light worklog for a new manuscript. Journaling, especially if you include things you’re grateful for, is the cheapest possible therapy. It’s been shown to provide positive mental health benefits, alleviating anxiety, and tamping down intrusive thoughts while improving short-term memory. Focusing on gratitude has been shown to decrease materialism in young people, among the myriad benefits of gratitude in general. Nowadays, it also helps me throttle and process information and understand life in context. When you’ve got a big book of days, nothing on a single page is ever as big or as small as it seems at the time. (NP)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Nick (NP)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Diary Edition

Nick Parish (NP) has been a long-standing friend of WITI since his days as the junior reporter on the NY Post’s sports desk. He’s since worked in editorial, strategy, product design and currently lives in Portland. He’s a fly fishing mentor to Noah, and he last talked about fermentation/Kombucha way back in NYC at 2008’s Interesting New York conference, a strange precursor to this very newsletter. - Colin (CJN) Nick here. I love fermentation. At its core, it’s the story of how the human species has ridden out boom and bust cycles of nature, uncovering tasty treats and useful new materials in the process. It’s a story of magic and alchemy.My love of fermenting at home started over a decade ago with kombucha in a tiny uptown apartment, glass jars from a Harlem dollar store, and a mother culture gifted from a car service driver.Now, I’m looking after a big urban garden in Portland, Oregon, with a fair chunk of shed space for experiments. Our overgrown lot features several dozen varieties of edible berries, tree fruits, perennial vegetables, and other items you’d find in the farmer’s market, in addition to a big seasonal vegetable garden and a leech-filled pond. On good days, time spent in the garden is a feast, where we wander and graze on whatever looks ripe. On (rare) bad days it’s me fretting over soil health, pest management, and the future. I’ve moved from kombucha to beer, wine, kimchi, hot peppers, hot sauce, tobacco, sourdoughs, and even lant (don’t ask). My eccentric digestive experiments are semi-tolerated by my exquisite food writer spouse. She’s constantly trying out new recipes, so I get both contemporary inspiration and raw material. But one fermentation habit has been transformative above all others and helped me understand the broader implications of our consumption, reframing it in terms of future nourishment. I ferment my trash.To be specific, I ferment our compostable kitchen waste through a process known as bokashi. Layers of our scraps ferment in a sealed five-gallon bucket, together with specially inoculated wheat bran. The inoculant is a product containing a combination of living bacteria, which has an odd enough origin story and following to merit its own WITI. As each bucket fills (I have three in rotation), it’s sealed for two weeks to ferment, then it’s ready to deploy. I dig it into one of the compacted pathways in my vegetable garden, and it decomposes in a few weeks, adding microorganisms and nutrients back into the system.Photo by Alex LauWhy is this interesting?In the last several years, our environmental and health crisis has shifted personal responsibility from a marker of identity to a safety mechanism. Whether it’s wearing a mask or planting a garden, we’re all being asked to do more, on our own. There’s a control in self-sufficiency, and that can become resilience, an important cornerstone to empathy and psychological wholeness. As these crises unfold, we’re given the opportunity to make important changes at a macro, societal level to engage this new responsibility together.Several years ago I began consulting with a big apparel company’s sustainable-innovation department, which had “waste as material” as a significant strategic pillar. Meanwhile, I was getting into the Expanse series, where off-planet Belters were endlessly resourceful and everything ultimately went into a recycler, a magic gadget trope not unlike the Fremen stillsuits in the Dune universe, or the Federation’s replicators. One was magic, one was Excel. The crew of the Rocinante’s soy kibble felt very far from pivot tables calculating macerated plastic by the ton. But the gulf between sci-fi and Earth realities-at-scale has never been closer, not from technological possibility as much as existential need. Soon we’ll be forced to pull out all the stops. Zero-waste environments (in Ljubljana, or in the “recyclers” we’ll need at home) will become a greater part of our consciousness as supply chains continue to break and reform. We’ll need to create soil substrates that are as capable as possible as we trial new varieties of adaptable plants to mitigate the effects of climate change. As you may remember from The Composting Edition, these group efforts often lack broad engagement, and many are now facing temporary setbacks.Fermentation is a delicious game with many applications that anyone remotely gastronomically inclined can play. All you need to start today are some blueberries, salt, a glass, and a plastic baggie (shouts out to The Noma Edition; I hear he’s making burgers now). No matter its simplicity, in playing along you’re adding yourself—literally, in terms of your household codependent bacteria mix—to a most essential elemental process: energy consumption. Beat the rush to the next lockdown hobby and grab a kimchi crock and a case of canning jars and the Katz and Noma books. Ferment. Preserve. Repeat. You’ll never look at your food in the same way once you’ve set it free to transform, and you’ll never be more capable to face the challenges ahead. (NP)[Sponsored links: Atlas Bars are GMO-free and keto-friendly with 15 grams of protein and just a gram of sugar. We’ve tried Atlas and they are very good. Use this link (code WITI20) for WITI readers to get 20 percent off. Get started with the sample pack.]--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Asia's growing global role. You probably don’t need us to tell you that Asia plays a key role in culture and the global economy. But if, say, Squid Game's worldwide success took you by surprise, you might get something out of the latest edition of McKinsey for Kids, which heads to Asia and digs into how the stuff you love—be it your favorite hoodie or binge-worthy TV—gets to you. Explore the interactive for a fun look at big ships, the Silk Road, Bollywood, and more of Asia’s past, present, and future.--Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Nick (NP)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Fermentation Edition

Nick Parish (NP) has been a long-standing friend of WITI since his days as a junior reporter on the New York Post’s sports desk. He’s since worked in editorial, strategy, product design and currently lives in Portland. He’s a fly fishing mentor to Noah and has previously written about fermentation, dams, and media sharing in Cuba for WITI.Nick here. Most weekday mornings, it's a challenge to get my kindergartner motivated. Except on Wednesdays. Because on Wednesdays, we ride the bike bus. Why is this interesting? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Imagine a massive pack of schoolchildren filling the street, all dinging bells and whirring chains and clicking gears, a zooming swarm of fairy wings and handlebar streamers and dinosaur helmets, a giant rumbling snowball of youthful energy gathering force, plunging toward school, plunging toward their futures. That’s the bike bus, led by Alameda Elementary’s phys-ed teacher Coach Balto, coming to a school commute near you. We join the bus a few blocks from home. Two dozen other kids and a couple of adults helping lead the way are usually waiting at our stop. At 8:15 on the dot, it’s time to roll. Coach Balto shares the safety rules and cues a banger on his boombox (Katy Perry’s ‘Roar”, or the Stranger Things theme), and off we go.We cross a busy street, with adults corking traffic to let the bus pass, and join another group, another stop on the bus. A third group joins us a few minutes later, and Balto initiates the final move to school. By now we’re probably numbering over a hundred. Neighbors wave and cheer from their stoops, morning coffees in hand, enjoying the show. My daughter usually finds her teacher, also riding. She offers encouragement as we all descend the steepest hill, hard on the brakes, like many squeaky little mice scurrying forward.Then, we’ve arrived. Coach Balto gives out high-fives as we turn the corner to the schoolyard, starting the day with a smile. Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortlandWhy is this interesting?There’s a feeling to the bike bus that’s stronger than a normal group ride. Watch videos and you can see it on everyone’s faces. (Yes, even the parents. It’s right behind the look of concern.) Everything clicks.I saw it when my daughter was first learning to ride at our local pump track. After a few unbroken laps, she stopped and said, “Daddy, when I’m out there, it feels like I’m in a dream.” That’s the stuff.I don't really care too much for the gear, or the competition, or the quantification that seems to mark cyclists. I just like to ride bikes. They bring freedom and possibility. To go places only my bike can take me. To pay attention to and care for my bike and my friends’ bikes. To make sure they run well by following simple mechanical-maintenance values. I'm optimistic kids on the bike bus will bend toward this source of light as they grow. And as we build cities that are better geared to two wheels than four, they will take the exploration and responsibility of riding bikes with them for the rest of their lives. Sam Balto @CoachBaltoAt this point I have nothing to say. The #BikeBus is it!! 150 kids which is 27% of students at Alameda Elementary participated today. I am speechless. 5:46 PM ∙ Sep 7, 20225,207Likes782RetweetsWhy is this really interesting? Because a lot of decentralized efforts by interested folks are starting to spread as fast as people can watch videos like this, feel the joy, and start organizing. In fall of last year, Barcelona’s bike bus, the bicibús, started gaining traction globally. “What a great idea,” I thought, and filed it away in my “Great Ideas” folder. (Actually, in a DEVONthink database.)Then, last Earth Day, Coach Balto’s initial efforts surfaced. This cool thing that started all the way across the world was coming to a school near us. Our school! My Great Ideas folder vibrated. It felt like figuring out that with a few copies of Maximum Rocknroll and some phone numbers, your band could go on tour. Track down a generator, a friend who works at Kinko’s who’s willing to look the other way for an hour, a phone number for an infoline, and a drinks table, and you could throw a rave. It felt like pure DIY. To help that joy take root, someone—literally, three volunteers—just needed to do some math on the timing and make a Google Slide of the route. Voila! Our community had a bike bus.Our cities have a lot of problems, especially Portland. Our recent attempt at a “Vision Zero” campaign should have been called “Vision Add a Zero”: Traffic deaths here are as high as they’ve been in three decades. We see lots of gnarly driver behavior at organized rides, and even some frowns at the bike bus from frustrated drivers.But initiatives like the bike bus keep popping up nevertheless: the depave movement, community solar and community choice aggregation, community broadband. These are lower-case “c” community initiatives, of and by places. They’re not driven by institutions as much as by individuals who know how to surf the tangents of institutions, work in the gray areas around them, and above all else harness popular momentum.The bike bus might not change the world. But all these things added together stand a chance. And I'm happy to be living in a world where  you can still make things happen with a couple of people that care, just enough to show up on time and try an idea out. (NP)Quick Links: Cars Are Vanishing From Paris“Wider efforts to create a 15-minute city—where every resident’s needs, for leisure and work, can be reached by bike or foot in a quarter of an hour—will put the brakes on car use even further.”  (NP)Dutch Rewilding Project Turns Back the Clock 500 Years“Helmer’s proudest moment was seeing thousands of students enjoying the new beach-like river banks. ‘I know how good it is for biodiversity, but for 99% of people that is not at the forefront of their minds. In the end it is all about people. If they like it, there is no turning back.’” (NP)When the Big One Hits Portland, Cargo Bikers Will Save You “A disaster, I used to believe, calls for a hero. A Navy SEAL, an EMT, or a firefighter with a neck as thick as a tree trunk. Maybe that hero could even be me, a bike-addicted mom of two. It’s taken me this long to say: I can’t do it alone. I can’t save anyone singlehanded, not even my own kids. And you probably can’t either—not with the right flag and an 8x8 truck and a 12-gauge shotgun, not with a multitool or pocket stove or 10 emergency water filters. But we can, with each other.”  (NP)—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Nick (NP)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.Why is this interesting? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.