Tiny pieces of plastic, a trashy confetti too small to see from the ship deck, had swirled through the water into the net. The bits of plastic were all colors and shapes, jagged and smooth, flakes and pellets, making a veritable plastic noodle soup. A hundred similar trawls across the twelve hundred miles of ocean pulled up plastic every time…the ocean, [environmentalist Mary Crowley] realized, had turned to plastic chowder.

The good, from MSNBC:

By now, it’s hardly news when a city bans plastic bags at checkout counters — but an entire state? That’s happened in Hawaii, where Honolulu County has joined the state’s three other counties to give Hawaii a first-in-the-nation title.

An ample dose of good rough and tumble capitalism, with lots of safeguards against price-fixing, lots of creative destruction as new and improved technologies supplant the old . . . yes! . . . but all that tightly coupled with seriously progressive taxation, government investment in basic research and infrastructure, a “there but for the grace of God go I” safety net, and extensive — enlightened — regulation for a complicated world. (And a vibrant press constantly on the prowl for waste and corruption to root out; stupid or excessive regulation to revamp.) That’s my utopia.

Yes, it’s still a bus shelter, but the idea is to make it both more useful and more of a social space. People may come here for a range of things other than catching the bus, so that social interaction and the life of the street intermix with waiting to produce a more vibrant, interesting, and safe environment.

When JFK was president: 50 pct #walked to #school. Now: 13 pct #walk or #bike wny.cc/IJ8FwW—
TransportationNation (@TransportNation) May 12, 2012

70% of under 25-year-olds - a total of 1.9 billion – are not online yet.  cot.ag/Kw290u—
World Bank (@WorldBank) May 17, 2012

Prior to this morning, I don’t remember the last time I listened to “Cargo,” but I imagine it was sometime in the 1980s. Yet there was I was on the bus this afternoon, listening to “It’s a Mistake” for the first time in decades and easily humming along to every single note in the guitar solo of that song. I was astonished, not by my own memory but by music. What other art form has that kind of staying power?