I've never been in the military, and today I'm close with only one person who saw combat in Iraq. But I was raised by a father who did two tours of duty in Vietnam as an Army captain. My dad doesn't really like to talk about his time at war, but when he does so he looks away, as if looking at me while telling me of the violence and sadness would sully me in some way. My mother—she and my dad are now divorced—says my father used to have awful nightmares from which he'd wake up screaming and drenched in sweat. When I asked my dad, who has scoffed at drugs my entire life, if he'd ever smoked marijuana while in Vietnam, he said no. "Killing people every day fucks you up enough," he said.

Whenever I think of the sadness and sacrifice of soldiers on Memorial Day, I think of my dad, and one story in particular. It's a story that begins in a Lebanese restaurant in Saudi Arabia, where my dad lives, and to me it says more about what happens to soldiers at war than any gory war movie I've seen or book I've read.

This was in 2008, and during our meal we’d been talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the former of which was raging less than 600 miles from us. Our chat got so involved that my dad took the long way back to his house so we could have time to finish the conversation. We pulled into his driveway and, still not satisfied, my father turned off the car and we sat there in the dark and the all-consuming midnight heat that wraps Saudi Arabia.

"One of the worst parts about my life," my dad said after a few moments, "is that you will never know the man I was before I went to that war. You’ll only ever know the guy that came back, and that breaks my heart more than anything else."

It seemed like more of an apology than a statement, and I stayed up all night thinking about it, in the darkness and the heat, thousands of other people’s fathers and sons killing and dying a few hundred miles away.

A true memorial to soldiers at war is acknowledging that every one of them will return a changed man or woman, a kid turned adult via a baptism in blood and screams. Whether that change is bad or good is up to each individual soldier to decide. But we as a nation need to accept that many of our fighting men and women will be haunted by the transformation for decades after they return from the battlefield. Wondering "what if..." will keep them up at night. Our yellow ribbons do nothing for their sleepless nights.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Ironchefbalara

It’s not pleasant to think about the real meaning of those signs warning beachgoers not to swim because of bacteria. Most pollution that streams into coastal waters comes from storm water runoff and sewage overflows. When rainwater flows down streets, it picks up the dirt, oil, pesticides, animal waste, and trash that’s accumulated on the streets and flushes it into the ocean. Sewage systems sometimes drain into the ocean, too. The ocean might still look inviting, but after a storm, going for a dip would be like jumping into a puddle pooling by a city street corner.

After decades of monitoring beach pollution, groups like NRDC and California’s Heal the Bay say water quality has improved. NRDC’s annual report usually comes out mid-summer; last year, it found that the number of samples did not meet federal water quality standards stayed stable from the previous year, even though the the Gulf Coast oil spill pushed up the number of beach closings and advisories. Last week, Heal the Bay's annual beach report card concluded that water quality in the past year has been between “very good” and “excellent”—93 percent of the California beaches it monitored received an A or B grade from the group. And even though seven of the 10 most polluted beaches the group identified were in Los Angeles County, researchers found that the county’s beaches had improved from the year before. Now, the Environmental Protectional Agency is working on regulations that would allow beach water to be polluted for a maximum of one out of every four days of the year.

A stormy day at the shore can ruin a beach vacation. Most viruses swimmers encounter won’t kill them, but they can cause vomiting and fevers. And the most polluted water can be home to diseases like hepatitis and cholera, the EPA warns. After a storm has washed pollutants into the water, beachgoers are advised to keep out of the water for the next three days. That means the dredging New York and New Jersey took on Thursday should have kept swimmers out of the ocean today, the first day of Memorial Day weekend and unofficial start of summer—a feat requiring immense self-control.

Groups like Heal the Bay are working to improve monitoring and strengthen federal regulations for water quality. But one of the best ways to keep beach water clean is to keep storm water from overflowing sewers and pouring towards the coast at all. That requires building green roofs and parks in cities and installing rain barrels and cisterns. Investing in green infrastructure will not only create lush, healthy spaces in cities, it will mean a safe dip in the ocean on your next trip to the beach.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

We've spent the last decade hearing similar statements from a bipartisan cast of political players. President Obama explicitly invoked Brown v. Board of Education and the Little Rock Nine in his speech to the 2009 NAACP convention. "There's a reason the story of the civil rights movement was written in our schools," Obama told the crowd. "It's because there is no stronger weapon against inequality and no better path to opportunity than an education that can unlock a child's God-given potential."

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has also made the reference innumerable times over the past four years. He took to the pages of The Daily Princetonian, Princeton University's campus paper, to tell students they should take a noble path of service and become teachers because education “has the unique power to transcend differences of class, race, sex and ZIP code" before repeating that common refrain: "education is the civil rights issue of our generation."

Back in 2009, President Obama and Secretary Duncan even teamed up with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Rev. Al Sharpton to declare that education reform is the "civil rights issue of the 21st century." And let's not forget four years ago in August 2008, when John McCain sat down with pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church Civil Forum for the Presidency and waxed poetic about his support for charter schools, home schooling, and vouchers. "I won’t go any further," McCain said of his plans for education, "but the point is…it is the civil rights issue of the 21st century." 

So, who is the architect of this school of thought? We might be able to lay the blame on President George W. Bush, architect of the disastrous No Child Left Behind Act. In 2002, on the Saturday before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Bush referred to education as "the great civil rights issue of our time.” The rest is history.

There’s no denying that our schools need to improve and that closing the achievement gap is a necessary goal, but we're living in a time when the prison industrial complex has resulted in more black men being incarcerated today than there were slaves in 1850, when black people still have to “whiten” their names on their resumes, and when an innocent 17-year-old black teen can be shot to death for seeming suspicious. Is the quest for racial justice for black people in America really so over that we need a new civil rights issue?

Not according to prominent education historian Diane Ravitch. In 2009, when the education-civil rights comparisons started to proliferate, Ravitch wrote in her Education Week column that such statements are "a publicity campaign, not a civil rights campaign, nor even a campaign for better education." She continued:

The civil rights movement was about dignity, justice, and equality—not just in schooling, but in every realm of life. It was about opening the doors that were shut by law and that blocked access to almost every aspect of public life. It was about securing equality of access to education, but also to jobs, health care, housing, public transit, public facilities of all kinds, and a decent life. It was about equality before the law and the right to vote.

Plus, if politicians seriously believed the connection between education and civil rights, said Ravitch, they'd "have a plan to do something about de facto segregation; they would launch a program to make sure that every child had access to good health care and started school ready to learn; they would coordinate between the schools and other government agencies to make sure that families had access to job training programs and social services and the basic necessities of life." They’d also make sure that class sizes were "reasonable," support teachers instead of bashing them, stop acting like poverty doesn’t matter, and "actually have a civil rights agenda other than raising test scores."

Despite everyone claiming that education is a civil rights issue, those changes have yet to take place in America. Yet, our politicians pull the “civil rights issue” card out of their back pockets and use the emotionally-charged language of the movement because it’s a good soundbite that makes them seem like they’re getting serious about fixing schools. Unless they're willing to truly make a commitment to real reforms that will make a difference for all children, they should stop.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

GOOD Ideas for Cities hosted an event in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, assigning each of six creative teams to one of six challenges facing the city. One of those challenges came from Portland Mayor Sam Adams, who asked how the city's public schools could be better supported by the local community. A team from Wieden + Kennedy tackled that challenge, presenting several ideas for how to get the 85 percent of Portland's population without school-age children more involved in public education. 

Now they're looking for creative Portlanders to help put the ideas into practice. On Saturday, June 2, join the Wieden + Kennedy team members, plus representatives from local schools, at a Hack for Portland Schools, where groups of developers and designers will create tools to allow Portland residents to easily donate time and resources to nearby schools and other educational organizations. 

Hack for Portland Schools
Saturday, June 2
10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE)
1227 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209

More details are available at the event website. No need to RSVP, just show up to participate.

Check out the videos from our other events and stay tuned for details about future GOOD Ideas for Cities announcements. If you'd like to talk about bringing the program to your city or school, email alissa[at]goodinc[dot]com or follow us at @IdeasforCities

Since President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage a couple of weeks ago, there's been a noticeable shift in black Americans' opinion on gay marriage. A new Washington Post-ABC survey found that 59 percent of black people now say they support same-sex marriage—an 18 point jump since Obama's announcement. Fifty-three percent of Americans now believe that same-sex marriage should be legalized; that represents a seismic shift since 2006, when just 39 percent of those polled thought it should be legalized.

The Washington Post warned of a "relatively small sample size," but numbers elsewhere are echoing the pattern: A recent Public Policy poll showed that 57 percent of Maryland voters approve of the new gay marriage law, with 55 percent of African Americans planning to vote for the law and only 36 percent now opposed. Those numbers have reversed from just a few months ago, when 56 percent of black voters saying they would vote against the new law and only 39 percent planning to uphold it.

Perhaps more important than the numbers, influential black celebrities like Will Smith and Jay-Z, along with political leaders like Jesse Jackson, Corey Booker, and Rep. John Lewis, have come out in favor of same-sex marriage. So has the NAACP. Obama's not getting much love from the black churches, but he seems to have persuaded, or at least emboldened, a large portion of the black community to support gay rights.

If Mitt Romney's malleable positions over the past year are any indication, politicians often defer to voters' steadfast beliefs instead of trying to sway them. In Obama's case, though, he's smart to get ahead of voters when it comes to civil rights. It's been very difficult for a president, and Obama in particular, to enact piecemeal legislative change with a stagnant, highly partisan Congress. Even when he scores a victory, like the Affordable Care Act, his triumph gets mired in the details. His power lies in his status as a figurehead, and in his ability to act decisively on emotional issues. If he's not preempting voters and encouraging forward-thinking change, is he really living up to the promise of his campaign—and the office of the president?

Coming out in favor of gay marriage isn't as risky a proposition as, say, declaring support for the civil rights movement was in the 1960s. Gay marriage is widely accepted as an inevitability. The issue is becoming politically safer and safer. Even some black pastors who oppose Obama's statement are encouraging their communities to re-elect him.

So if gay marriage is now relatively politically "safe," what's today's risky issue that would really benefit from the president taking a stance? America's changing demographics and, in turn, our need for immigration reform. It's no coincidence that Obama has so far avoided tackling the issue, other than speaking out against Arizona's draconian enforcement law, SB1070. But even though it's more politically complicated, Obama would put himself on the right side of history a lot faster than he did with gay rights—and he'd hopefully influence a few xenophobes along the way.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user jamesomalley.

In some parts of the United States, building Keystone XL could drive gas prices up, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council in a report confirming other economists' conclusions. This may seem counterintuitive: Proponents of the pipeline (and oil drilling in general) have argued that Keystone XL will help increase oil production in Canada, which will mean lower gas prices in the long term. 

But even without Keystone XL, Canada already ships more than a million barrels of oil to the United States every day, much of which ends up at refineries in the Midwest to be turned into gasoline. Right now, Canadian oil companies are sending so much oil to the Midwest that they end up selling to these refineries at a discount—$20 to $40 less per barrel than they could get if they had access to international markets. These discounts are passed onto drivers, who pay less for gas in the Midwest than on the coasts, where crude oil is more expensive. 

Keystone XL would create an express route for Canadian oil to the Gulf Coast, where it would be broken down, processed, and sent off to distant shores, bypassing the Midwest altogether. This is currently big business for the United States: Last year, the country exported more dollars worth of petroleum products—gas, diesel, and jet fuel—than of any other product. But Keystone would allow Canadian oil companies to fetch higher prices than American ones do. And the discounts that U.S. consumers have benefited from will disappear.

For the communities that could be affected by this shift, a hike in gas prices will hurt, especially after politicians promised that Keystone XL would cause the opposite effect. There's a problem with complaining about gas prices going up, though: the price for gas is low only because Americans are consuming so much carbon-intense oil.

Climate scientist James Hansen has called Keystone XL “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” If burnt, the oil that Canadian companies are digging up could dramatically increase the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. And even though the oil won’t come out of the ground all at once, any barrel of tar sands oil will have a greater carbon impact than a barrel of conventional oil.

Plenty of analysts from both sides of the Keystone XL fight have tried to quantify the carbon effects of using tar sands oil, and a new report from the Congressional Research Service provides an overview of the results. The researchers conclude that oil from tar sands is between 14 and 20 percent more greenhouse-gas intensive than conventional oil. In real terms, that means that building the Keystone XL pipeline would add as much greenhouse gas to the United States' carbon footprint as an extra 4 million more cars out on the road each year. 

Proponents of the pipeline argue that if the U.S. isn’t sending that carbon into the atmosphere, some other country will, as soon as Canada finds a way to ship tar sands oil across the Pacific Ocean. Absent an international agreement to draw down carbon emissions, some country will find it profitable to buy, process and burn Canada’s new product. It’s true that stopping Keystone XL won’t keep all of Canada’s tar sands oil in the ground. But it will slow the process of distributing it around the world. In the interim, the price of clean energy should drop even further, vehicles should become more fuel-efficient, and paying for barrels of dirty oil should seem less like a good deal. 

Photo via (cc) Flickr user ARLIS Reference

French laundromats, attention! The peer-to-peer community is coming for you. A new online project called La Machine du Voisin (French for "the neighbor's machine") aims to eliminate trips to that dreaded destination, where hours are wasted waiting around under bad lighting. But the alternative proposed—while creative—is definitely not for everyone.

Much like other sharing platforms that have turned parked cars, stowed power tools, and temporarily vacant bedrooms into valuable commodities that can be rented out for cash, La Machine du Voisin transforms a home's washing machine and dryer. Like an online marketplace for laundry, machine owners put a price per wash on a washer-dryer cycle—the going rate is between 3 and 5 Euros. Those with dirty clothes who lack their own laundry machines can search for one nearby with the best rate.

The project was started by a group of students in Lille, France, a city of 230,000 that doesn't have enough laundromats, according to the project's website. Prompted by an innovation challenge by the local business school SKEMA and frustrated by the lack of places to do laundry, the resulting solution was the La Machine du Voisin.

The service seems to push the comfort zone of advocates for sharing or renting everyday items. It's one thing to borrow a neighbor's lawnmower, rent out a car, or even crash at a stranger's pad when traveling abroad. It may be an entirely different situation to show up at a stranger's place with stained shirts and soiled linens. But there's clearly an appetite: The website already has hundreds of machine owner using the service in cities around France. 

Image via (cc) Flickr user runran. Via Springwise.

The survey found that 72 percent of graduating college seniors believe being able to make a "positive societal impact" through their work is essential to their happiness. Making a difference is so important to them that 45 percent say they'd take a 15 percent pay cut to work at an organization that makes a social or environmental impact and 58 percent say they'd take a pay cut to "work for an organization whose values are like my own."

Female students are significantly more likely to prioritize social impact than their male classmates, echoing a previous study showing that female math and science majors are more likely than their male counterparts to say they go into those fields to make a difference.

Financial security is still the most important priority for new grads—91 percent said that's essential—but it's refreshing to see that students still think about how they can make the world better even though they graduate with an average of $25,000 in student loan debt.

One reason for the emphasis on improving the world probably has to do with the culture of college, which encourages students to connect their academic lessons back to real-world problems (or should, at least). Students are used to discussing important social issues with their friends and professors, and doing something about them in class or through volunteer activities. Once students develop those habits, they don't shut them off when graduation rolls around. Let's hope that the tough economic climate doesn't cause today's grads to lose their enthusiasm for making an impact through their work.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Jason Bache

Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson—time was that bank robbers had cool names and widespread celebrity. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse James, and John Dillinger were even the subjects of big, fawning Hollywood films glorifying their thievery. But times have changed.

In Mississippi this week, a man walked into a bank and handed a teller a note demanding money, according to broadcast news reporter Brittany Weiss. The man got away with a paltry $1,600 before proceeding to run errands around town to pay his bills and write checks to people to whom he owed money. He was hanging out with his mom when police finally found him. Three weeks before the Mississippi fiasco, a woman named Gwendolyn Cunningham robbed a bank in Fresno and fled in her car. Minutes later, police spotted Cunningham's car in front of downtown Fresno's Pacific Gas and Electric Building. Inside, she was trying to pay her gas bill.

The list goes on: In October 2011, a Phoenix-area man stole $2,300 to pay bills and make his alimony payments. In early 2010, an elderly man on Social Security started robbing banks in an effort to avoid foreclosure on the house he and his wife had lived in for two decades. In January 2011, a 46-year-old Ohio woman robbed a bank to pay past-due bills. And in February of this year, a  Pennsylvania woman with no teeth confessed to robbing a bank to pay for dentures. "I'm very sorry for what I did and I know God is going to punish me for it," she said at her arraignment. Yet perhaps none of this compares to the man who, in June 2011, robbed a bank of $1 just so he could be taken to prison and get medical care he couldn't afford.

None of this is to say that a life of crime is admirable or courageous, and though there is no way to accurately quantify it, there are probably still many bank robbers who steal just because they like the thrill of money for nothing. But there's quite a dichotomy between the bank robbers of early America, with their romantic escapades and exciting lifestyles, and the people following in their footsteps today: broke citizens with no jobs, no savings, no teeth, and few options.

The stealing rebel types we all came to love after reading the Robin Hood story are gone. Today the robbers are just trying to pay their gas bills. There will be no movies for them.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user colin.brown

Two-thirds of swing-state voters say improving education should be a top priority, but politicians don’t always give the issue the attention it deserves. Now a new nonpartisan College Board campaign called "Don’t Forget Ed" is aiming to use public support to pressure presidential candidates to pay more attention to public education.

The effort has the potential to generate plenty of support: A College Board survey finds that the only national issues more important to voters than education are jobs and the economy. Voters believe improving the quality of and access to schooling—particularly at the college level—is necessary to maintaining America’s global competitiveness. The issue is particularly important to women: 70 percent of women in swing states say that "education is extremely important" in this year's presidential and Congressional elections.

In the video announcing the campaign, advocates interview students, teachers, community members, and former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein about how America's education system should improve and why politicians should get involved. But much of the narrative of the video is about the failures of the current education system. It shows scary stats about the United States ranking 25th in math and 21st in science on international tests—though it fails to note that the nation has always performed near the middle or bottom on those tests or that our results are improving over time.

While we can all agree that politicians should quit their partisan squabbling over student loan interest rates and stop slashing state education budgets, it's unclear whether any president should be heavily involved in education policy. Let's not forget that the last so-called "education president" was George W. Bush, author of the nearly universally reviled No Child Left Behind Act—which ushered in an era of high-stakes testing and harsh punishments for failure to improve—all without providing schools the resources they needed to innovate. Prominent critics of President Obama's Race to the Top education reform say it's more of the same, launching a "Dump Duncan" campaign calling for the firing of the Secretary of Education. 

Most politicians already say they're committed to improving schools, but College Board president Gaston Caperton says actually improving education "takes money and it takes change, and both of them are hard for politicians to talk about." Perhaps a flood of Don't Forget Ed-inspired tweets, Facebook posts, and blog entries will finally spur candidates to engage in some real talk on education—and follow through if they're elected in November.

Much of today's scientific research is funded by the government—in other words, by you, the taxpayer. Science can be too expensive for most private companies, and the rewards are uncertain. But here's the frustrating irony: The results of this publicly funded work are often inaccessible to the public. They're published in academic journals that are available only to those who can pay substantial subscription fees.

In 2004, the FBI estimated that more than a quarter of a million bikes are stolen in the United States each year. Chances are that if you ride a bike—and you really should if you can—it will be taken from you at some point in your life. While having your bike stolen can suck, all hope is not lost. One of the simplest and cheapest ways to try to track it down is through Craigslist. We talked to Christian Brown, a freelance film and television designer in Los Angeles who in April found his heisted bike on Craigslist, to find out how he did it.

GOOD: How does this story begin?

Christian Brown: My bike was locked up underneath my apartment. I'd been locking my bike up to this big support column underneath my unit, which was big enough that the lock fit around it really snugly. I used to watch those videos of dudes proving how easy it is to steal bikes, and I knew the one thing basically every lock is susceptible to is using a car jack inside the loop of the lock to force it wide open, and I figured, “Hey! Big column! Nobody can jack it open, and the lock's a Kryptonite, so I'm sure it's totally impregnable.” (Stupid.) Plus, the bike itself wasn't really anything special—a 21-speed Cannondale that I'd bought new a year earlier. It was basically the cheapest new bike I could find, so I couldn't really imagine someone going to a lot of effort to steal it.

Anyway, I came home from work one Tuesday and noticed that the big blue recycling bin was out front, in a parking space, sort of visually blocking the column my bike was locked to. I immediately thought, "Well, fuck me, someone stole my bike today.” And I was right. All that was left was the lock, cut open really cleanly, so I guess even fancy-ass Kryptonite locks can get cut by someone dedicated enough. As near as I can tell, they moved the recycling bin to make it easier to hide how long they were taking to cut it open.

This was actually my first bike since I was a kid. I hadn't even been on one in like 15 years when I bought it. That's why I bought it new; I didn't know shit about shit and wanted to make sure it was reliable. I hadn’t had a bike stolen before, but my serious bike-riding friends said it was inevitable

GOOD: What made you decide to start looking on Craigslist for your bike?

Brown: It was actually a similar thing that happened to a coworker—but with a laptop stolen off the back of a parked motorcycle. He immediately hopped on Craigslist, which I wouldn't have done, and he found the laptop. Alas, it was sold before he could figure out what to do. So after my bike disappeared, I started just poking around on Craigslist. Basically searching for "21-speed" and "Cannondale," figuring those were the two things I'd advertise if I were trying to sell a bike I stole.

GOOD: How long did it take you to find your stolen bike on the site?

Brown: It was stolen on Tuesday, and on Sunday I was walking back from the corner store and saw it on my phone on Craigslist. (I pretty much tried to only search for it on my phone, while walking around, so I wouldn't just refresh Craigslist on my computer over and over.) I wasn't sure it was mine at first; there were a few photos of it, and most were close-ups of the chain and tires and whatnot showing it was in good shape. Oddly, three of the four photos showed it with a kickstand, which my bike definitely didn't have. But the fourth was taken in a different location, and it was extremely recognizable as mine. It was the same color, and the posting mentioned it was the same model (a Quick Six). Also I'd added three things to it after I bought it: a rear rack, a water bottle holder, and a little under-the-seat Velcro bag. The rack and water bottle were on it, and while the bag was missing, so was the rear reflector I'd had to remove to install it. It’s hard to imagine the odds of the same color, model and add-ons all showing up within a week of my bike being stolen.

GOOD: How did it feel to see your bike on Craigslist?

Brown: I basically flipped my shit. My then-fiancée (now wife!) was out at a surprise bridal shower, so I was alone with the cats in my apartment frantically Googling "found stolen bike craigslist help." Most of the results were useless, as they were about figuring out if the bike you bought on Craigslist was stolen. I was excited, but also, after my coworker's experience with their laptop, extremely worried that it would get sold before I could get it.

GOOD: Did you consider just going to get it yourself, or did you immediately call the cops?

Brown: I one hundred thousand percent considered going on my own to steal the bike from the Craigslist seller. I had fantasies about shouting over my shoulder "I KNOW YOU STOLE THIS, YOU MOTHERF**KER!” as I sped off. But I called the cops because I figured in L.A. they probably have a lot of experience with stolen bikes. They didn't say it happened often, but they made it sound like having found it on Craigslist was a good sign and that their “bike detectives” (!!!) would be excited. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, so I had to wait a day to meet with them.

GOOD: How did you and the cops catch the people who had your bike?

Brown: The cops didn't actually let me get within sight of the bike seller. They sounded really worried that I'd do something "unwise,” which wasn’t that unreasonable of them given the revenge dreams I was having. I’d already started texting the guy selling my bike to set up a time and place to meet (my backup plan if the cops didn't want to get involved was to just buy it back, because my fiancée had made it abundantly clear that if I died a week before our wedding in a failed bike-counter-theft operation, she would turn my Facebook memorial page into a really embarrassing monument to how stupid I was), so I'd already had a time picked out when I met with the detective on Monday. At that point, I'd gotten the serial number from the store that sold me the bike, so the cops were really excited—I guess an easy bust is appealing. The police had me take a phone call from the bike detective when he was in position and then text the bike seller and ask him to bring the bike outside our arranged meeting place so I could see it. That’s when, according to the detective, they would "nab him."  I didn't hear from anyone for like two hours, and then the police called and said they had my bike, the serial number checked out, and I should come get it.

GOOD: Was the guy charged? Technically the seller could have gotten the bike from a third party in an innocent exchange, right?

Brown: The guy was not charged, since he said he had bought the bike at a swap meet. He described the guys that sold it to him as being there every weekend and selling a suspicious number of cheap bikes. He said he bought my bike for a hundred bucks, took it home, cleaned and tuned it, and was trying to resell on Craigslist for $250. He was a bike flipper, I guess. The cops made it sound like this was legal, but they were hoping on busting the guys who sold it to him. From what I can tell, the guys at the swap meet were part of an actual bike-theft ring, stealing bikes professionally and selling them at swap meets.

GOOD: How is the case going now that you've gotten your bike back?

Brown: Last I heard, the cops are pursuing the bike theft ring. If it goes far enough they might need me in a court case, but they also said a lot of times bike thieves just confess. We’ll see!

GOOD: What's the lesson to take away from all this?

Brown: The real lesson here is that I shouldn't lock my bike up outside my apartment for any real length of time. And I shouldn’t assume that nice bike locks are a substitute for just keeping a bike inside, behind closed doors.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user sylvar

Get out of your car and ride your bike in the 2 Mile Challenge. CLIF Bar will donate $1 for every trip you log to bike nonprofits, up to $100,000.

Last night I watched my hometown baseball team, the Oakland Athletics, get shut out by their most hated rival in front of a crowd of barely 11,000 people while simultaneously reading news reports about Oakland's basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, moving across the Bay to San Francisco. I'm not sure I've ever felt so personally betrayed by sports.

I'm not even a Warriors fan—an uncle's season ticket package made me root for the Portland Trail Blazers years before I moved to the Bay Area in middle school. But I am and will always be an Oakland fan, and anybody who's ever loved a city should be able to appreciate how taking away a sports team strips away part of its soul.

At a news conference yesterday, Warriors owners Joe Lacob and Peter Gruber announced plans to relocate the team from its Oakland arena to a brand-new, privately funded $500 million facility at a San Francisco pier currently used for parking. The site will include restaurant and retail space and will be closer to the region's wealth, much of which is in San Francisco and neighboring Marin County, and almost none of which is in Oakland, the perpetual underdog.

Logic suggests that moving the Warriors a measly 15 miles away shouldn't matter to those who already support the team, especially when they always purported to represent the entire Bay Area. But the fact that Lacob considered it so important to leave Oakland, the Warriors' home for four decades, reveals both a deep disrespect for the community that supported the team and a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a team owner.

The usual reasons owners move teams to new cities—low attendance or a decrepit arena—don't hold water in the Warriors' case. The team's coliseum is perfectly adequate, and despite losing all the time, they have the 10th-highest attendance in the league. They didn't need to move, Lacob wanted to move.

It was obvious from his first press conference as owner that he wanted to be in the bigger, shinier city—he took questions in a hotel ballroom in downtown San Francisco, not in the Oracle Coliseum or anywhere else in the team's actual hometown. And he was surprisingly candid yesterday when asked about the conventional wisdom that the team would attract better players and thus win more games in San Francisco than in Oakland. "That's debatable, whether this will make the team better," he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Moving the Warriors is about image, not results. Oakland is associated with crime and poverty and bad schools and police brutality; San Francisco with great restaurants and expensive real estate and yuppies and hipsters. If you were a billionaire investor and sports team owner, you'd make the same choice.

The owners' decision is logical but not defensible. Sports teams owe a unique debt to their communities. Lacob and Gruber shouldn't have been allowed to buy the team if they intended to betray the hometown fans as soon as they had the chance. Oakland fans didn't buy tickets to Warriors game simply because it was so much fun to watch them get blown out every night. They made the conscious decision to invest in their hometown. Many of them assumed that buying tickets would help improve the city they love. And in exchange, they got sold out by a greedy owner.

San Francisco has plenty of crime and bad schools too, and Oakland its share of great restaurants and hipsters. A city's image is largely a sales job, and billionaire team owners should be key salesmen. The hundreds of acres of restaurants and shops that Lacob is planning to surround the Warriors' new home could easily have occupied the hundreds of open acres near Oracle Arena, and they would have made money—anyone who's ever tried to eat something before a game or hang out afterward would pay quite the premium for some options.

By the time the Warriors tip off in their new home in 2017, the A's likely will have already fled the East Bay. The Raiders may not be far behind; Los Angeles is openly trying to woo them away. It's easy to imagine Oakland going from three sports teams to zero in the next few years, hurting a city I love in ways much more tangible than image. I still believe in Oakland. I just wish the occasional billionaire did, too.

Illustration by Art Zendarski, courtesy of the Golden State Warriors

In New York City recently, when the government announced the details of its bike share plan, the city collectively whined. An annual membership, which will cost $95, was too expensive. The fees for trips that ran over 45 minutes were too expensive. The whole idea was too expensive. 

True, New York’s bike share is more expensive than other systems like it. But it's be cheaper than owning a bike, which costs just over $300 in annual upkeep, according to the Transportation Research Board. And it’s nothing compared to the $7,000 or so that a car sucks up each year. Because cars are so pricey, Americans who are choosing to bike instead of driving are saving huge amounts of money—$4.6 billion, according to the calculations [PDF] of bike-friendly groups. 

The Sierra Club, the League of American Bicyclists and the National of Council of La Raza took a look at the costs of each ride in a car and the cost of each ride on a bike. While a ride in a car costs about six times the amount a ride on a bike does, the actual dollar amounts attached to each individual decision are tiny: about sixty cents per mile for a car ride and about ten cents per mile for a bike ride. 

But even in this bike-skeptical country, people are taking more than four billion bike rides each year. Since those trips average a little more than two miles, a bike rider only saves a dollar or so for each individual trip. But over time, those savings add up—like brewing coffee at home instead of buying a venti latte from Starbucks every day.

Right now, avid bikers are the ones who are saving the most. But as the groups’ report points out, if all drivers took just one round-trip per week by bike the savings on gas alone would be enormous—more than $7 billion. That’s money we could be spending on vegetables from a farmer’s market, a visit to the doctor, or tickets to the zoo. 

And families could use those extra dollars. The New America Foundation has shown how burdensome car ownership has become even for middle class families. And for low-income families, car-related costs can eat up half of the money they take in. Many don’t have a choice about car ownership: This country’s infrastructure has been built up around the dream of the hot-rod automobile. While building bike infrastructure is relatively cheap and most Americans support at least maintaining funding for walking and biking, the government has shown its dedication to car culture. Those decisions are costing would-be bikers money every time they get in the car. 

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Benson Kua

Get out of your car and ride your bike in the 2 Mile Challenge. CLIF Bar will donate $1 for every trip you log to bike nonprofits, up to $100,000.

The bright days of summertime seem to bring out the sunny side in all of us. Longer days and warmer nights drive flocks of people to take part in the season’s best festivals, hikes, performances, and picnics. How are you planning to make the most of the season while giving back to your community?

GOOD Maker is awarding a $5,000 grant as part of a Doing Good This Summer challenge. Whether you’re a teacher with some time on your hands, a nonprofit that runs summer-enrichment programs, or a college student who wants to create your own service internship, we want to fund your initiative. You could hold a series of workshops at a summer camp, build a community garden, plan an eco-friendly music festival—it’s up to you!

Submissions for the Doing Good This Summer challenge are open until June 8 at 3 p.m. EST. Voting will be open from June 8 to 29 at 3 p.m. EST. The top-voted submission will win $5,000 to bring the idea to life. Submit your ideas here.

Want to learn more about GOOD Maker? Drop us a line at maker[at]goodinc[dot]com, sign up for our email list, or check out the current challenges.

As you might imagine, all that mental turmoil has resulted in erratic behavior in the military's ranks. Hundreds of American veterans and enlisted people still commit suicide every year, and for a couple years more soldiers were killing themselves than were dying on the battlefield. Crime is regular enough amongst the veteran community that special "veterans courts" have begun popping up around the United States.

War demands that people kill men, women, and children, and watch their friends get killed in return—probably the most mentally taxing experience the world has ever known. Of course our soldiers come back in agony, and of course that agony sometimes leads to suicide. But to at least one American general, all this complaining about soldiers killing themselves is "selfish."

"I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act," wrote Major General Dana Pittard, who commands Fort Bliss, one of the nation's largest military bases, in an official blog post. "I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess." Pittard added that any soldier thinking of committing suicide should "be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us."

The National Journal reports that the blog post was deleted from the Fort Bliss website soon after it was posted, but the damage has been done. Pittard has not apologized, nor has the Pentagon condemned his comments as being distasteful and out-of-touch. And now the world knows that one of America's leading military officials believes soldiers who commit suicide are simply not "being adults."

If nothing else, Pittard's comments should serve as a reminder of what our soldiers are up against. First they asked to fight, kill, and witness unknown horror. Then when they're damaged by that horror, they often face backlash that tells them they're weak if they can't handle the pressure. Some of this guilt is self-imposed, of course—men and women acclimated to the "military way" sometimes are unwilling to allow themselves to be seen as vulnerable. But a lot of that burden is caused by comments like Pittard's. The chain of command is a powerful thing, and when the person at the top of that chain is telling you you're a coward if you're thinking of suicide, the lesson gets internalized and can corrode a person from the inside out.

For centuries, we've lived in a world that says soldiers who break under the stresses of war are simply not strong enough, that they're being "babies" if they can't help themselves out of depression. That mentality has led to traumatized veterans who unsuccessfully try to take on their misery by themselves, only to eventually end up homeless, drug-addled, or dead by their own hands. I'm ready for a world in which a soldier's strength isn't measured by how few resources they need to help them get over their pain, but by how quick they are to reach out for those resources. In a world in which men like Pittard are the leaders, sometimes asking for help is the bravest thing anyone can do.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Secretary of Defense