Glenn Kubish

Janette Sadik-Khan is a lawyer. She moves easily in engineering circles. She led the New York City Department of Transportation for six years. There is no necessary reason with that professional pedigree that she should also be able to speak clearly. Lawspeak plus engineeringspeak plus transportationspeak plus zoningspeak can be the deadliest of communication cocktails. Numbed by acronyms, baffled by gab, fogged by vaporous words, listeners are quickly anaesthetized while the elect work their schemes unbothered because un-understood. Sadik-Khan spoke to crowds in Edmonton and Calgary last week. She spun yarns from her storied tenure at NYC DOT. Bike lanes. Bikeshare. Summer Streets. Plazas. A new Times Square. Deck chairs. Paint. Bus rapid transit. A reinvigorated way of seeing public space for people. All the riveting stuff of her book Streetfight: Handbook For An Urban Revolution. Read it! My copy Part of Sadik-Khan's revolution is in language itself. In the bo...

As a live streaming experiment, Rumble 2012 between Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart was a failure, according to some of the loud, early online reviews from those angry they paid $4.95 for an Error 404 message. (It took me about 10 minutes to get into the stream, my issued url being a dud. At times the stream froze, which is natural around this time of the year in Edmonton, but unacceptable in this, as they say, day and age.) But looking past the obvious technical problems, the experiment in bringing together the top editorial-comedic-analytical-social guns from Fox News and Comedy Central made for an informative and entertaining evening. Neither of which adjectives could be applied to the first presidential debate. Funny, for sure. Here is Stewart invoking the shade of Clint Eastwood. It was poignant. Asked who his political hero is, O'Reilly made the case for Abraham Lincoln, the leader who wracked his own body and wrecked his own life in the service of the Union. Fo...