The Way We Live Now

Daniel Knowles, a journalist at the Economist, joins Karen Christensen to talk about his book, Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It. The publisher calls it “A high-octane polemic against cars,” but that’s not all. While Knowles has plenty to say about what’s wrong with cars, he is also eloquent about the benefits, and beauty, of life with fewer cars around. Note that “fewer.” Not no cars, but fewer of them, and more trains and bikes and walkable streets.

Knowles is not advocating change by directive, but argues that the market could and should do the job for us. That is, if we can recognize that we have been subsidizing automobiles and strangling other forms of mobility.

The conversation also gets into the pros and cons of EVs and the political importance of the auto industry, and highlights positive developments as well as some of the problems with transit planning.

Karen Christensen talks about her discovery that third places have been left out of academic writing on social capital and social life. Meanwhile, the terms “third place” and “third space” are surging in general conversation and in planning and architectural circles, especially since the pandemic. She proposes that these humble but vital pieces of the mosaic of public life have to observed and studied in real life, and aren’t amenable to being turned into data sets for AI processing. These books are discussed in the show:

1995 Rheingold, Howard, The virtual community: finding connection in a computerized world

2001 Putnam, Robert, Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community

2015 Turkle, Sherry, Reclaiming conversation: the power of talk in a digital age

2018 Klinenberg, Eric, Palaces for the people: how social infrastructure can help fight inequality, polarization, and the decline of civic life

2021 Murthy, Vivek, Together: loneliness, health and what happens when we find connection

2024 Moreno, Carlos, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet

This interview about third places was recorded last September for the WRLDCTY conference in Bilboa, Spain. While I found it a bit disconcerting to do an interview with a busy beach behind us, and even more disconcerting to have Canadian geese wandering around, the conversation hit on quite a number of important points. I was happy to find that I’d explained how reading Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place in 1990 changed my life. It was a book that changed a lot of people’s lives, I suspect, and perhaps mine as much as anyone’s since I’ve ended up inheriting the work from Ray. I often find myself wishing I could talk to him about the new material, but so far I’ve never found myself agonizing over whether he would agree with me—in fact, I have a sense that he is urging me on.

The Substack platform now uses AI to generate video clips—after all where would a writer be without video clips to post to Facebook and YouTube? Here’s the bit about how third places changed my life (just a minute and a half).

The interviewer, Steven Pedigo, is director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas Austin, and happens to have a home in Great Barrington. How fortunate I was to have such a knowledgeable interlocutor. He asked great questions, and encouraged me to include practical advice to people wanting to create or restore a third place. That section of the book is now substantial. I’m gathering a lot of material that won’t fit into the book but will become lectures or perhaps even a course. I’m keen to field test ideas, and will be looking for case studies as I travel in 2026. Europe first, and then Mexico.

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A walk and talk with architect John Massengale in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, one of the towns and cities discussed in Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, which he wrote with Victor Dover. The revised and expanded edition is published by Wiley. Buy it here.

Whether you are a reader or a writer, and especially if you are a biographer or someone writing a memoir or family history, you’ll find much to consider in this conversation with Carl Rollyson, who has stories about many subjects: Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Eve Arden, Joan Crawford, Ronald Coleman, Susan Sontag, and Sylvia Plath. How’s that for variety? And I throw in a tidbit about Valerie Eliot, notable both for the song “Memory” and for her myth making.

Show Notes

Carl Rollyson is the author of many biographies, as well as books about biography, and he only recently stopped adding to his popular podcast series, A Life in Biography. Details about his many biographies and books about the art of biography at Carl Rollyson’s website.

Join the conversation with Keith Grint, a well-known UK leadership scholar. His new book, A Cartography of Resistance., ranges from the Roman Empire to the US occupation of Iraq, but our conversation focuses on Keith’s chapters about the resistance to the Nazis. We talk about why universities and intellectuals are among the first targets, how knitting was used in the resistance to the Nazis, and the vital role of communications, messaging, and organization. A notable example Keith talks about is Sefton Delmer, a genius of propaganda who worked on behalf of the Allies in World War II. We also consider the ways in which resistance movements can arise from a claim, often imaginary, of stolen glory—as with the Ku Klux Klan, the invasion of Ukraine, and the J6 assault on the US Capitol. Keith’s work wraps up with a survey of rhetorical devices used in resistance movements.

Show Notes

Keith Grint is Professor Emeritus at Warwick University and founding co-editor with David Collinson of the journal Leadership. He also co-founded the International Studying Leadership Conference. His most recent books include: Leadership, Management & Command: Rethinking D-Day (2008); Leadership: A Very Short Introduction (2010); and Mutiny and Leadership (2021).

A Cartography of Resistance: Leadership, Management, and Command by Keith Grint (Oxford University Press). Table of Contents.

Historical insights: Universities in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union thought giving in to government demands would save their independence by Iveta Silova in The Conversation.

Sefton Delmer: The Man Who Used Nazi Propaganda to Help the Allies Win (TIME)

Today we have a curious literary tale, a twist on the usual account of a woman who typed for her husband. Sylvia Plath, ambitious as she was, wanted her husband Ted Hughes to succeed. She typed his poems, and submitted them for a literary prize that launched his career, as you’ll hear from Carl Rollyson. Carl has written a book called The Making of Sylvia Plath, and he talks in this podcast about the making of Ted Hughes, British Poet Laureate.

Show Notes

Carl Rollyson has written a number of books about Sylvia Plath, as well as many other biographies and books about the art of biography. Here’s a full list.

Is a third party the answer? Karen Christensen tells the story of her involvement with the UK Green Party and shares a recording on the 8-minute talk she gave about the UK Greens at the 1990 organizing conference that led to the establishment of a US Green Party, which has been running candidates for president in spite of international criticism by more established and successful Green parties. This show was inspired by Karen's plan to attend Principles First in Washington DC, a gathering of conservatives and others who intend to change the trajectory of US politics.

Show Notes

Principles First Summit 2025: American Principles and Priorities / Speakers

US elections: European Greens call for Jill Stein to step down

David Icke - Wikipedia

Dee Berry 1926 – 2022 - www.gp.org

San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi’s Woes Began Before Immigration Uproar – NBC Bay Area

Michael Feinstein, former mayor of Santa Monica

Conspiracy, murder, or suicide in the German Green Party: Who killed Petra Kelly? (Mother Jones)

I should note that Caroline Lucas was a long-serving Green Party leader and then MP, very professional, and in Canada there is the admirable Elizabeth May. And Jonathon Porritt, a former Green Party leader, is an influential media figure in the UK and still very much an activist. (He wrote the foreword to a couple of my environmental books, too - thank you, Jonathon!)

More of the Green Parties story in the Sage Reference Encyclopedia of Leadership: download the PDF here.

Anthropologist Susan Blum talks with Karen Christensen about how she came to question today’s educational practices and discusses her newest book Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning. Her study of Chinese social values led her to explore what we mean by cleverness and originality. She then began to question the nature of education itself, and its role in students’ lives, which took her to critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy and the anthropology of learning. The conversation also goes into alternative education, global variation, the role of parents, and the use of online tools and smart phones in the classroom.

David Jesudason, a London-based journalist who writes about beer and author of Desi Pubs - A Guide to British-Indian Pubs, Food & Culture, explains how he realized that certain aspects of British life, particularly when it comes to people of color and the working class, have been massively underreported. He began to write about Desi pubs, the British-Indian pubs that became third places for those unwelcome in “white” British pubs. Jesudason talks about his book how Desi pubs have thrived in different parts of Britain, compares them with Jamaican pubs, and discusses issues of exclusion and acceptance.

Links

Desi Pubs - A guide to British-Indian Pubs, Food & Culture

“The Triumphant Story of Britain’s Desi Pubs”

“Eclectic Avenues — How London’s First Black Pub Landlords Changed the City’s Drinking Culture”