I write about #cleanenergy for my day job, everything else on evenings and weekends. Semicolon lover; will fight for the Oxford comma.
Joined April 2010
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The Real Generation X: The Flower Children on Flower Child flowerchild.substack.com/p/r…
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The summer of 1977, my mother led a group of college students from the Midwest on a study abroad program in Mexico City.
I had a choice: go with her or stay in Urbana with my father and little sister. Luckily, I chose well.
More here: flowerchild.substack.com/p/w…
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Rosana Francescato (she/her) vaxxed & wearing mask retweeted
Jun 2
No one is more annoyed by the AI revolution than people who can actually write a sentence. Basically, having any ability to write now is suspect - you will get accused of being AI at some point. It feels like you are being accused of being a witch, of holding a type of rare magic that only the machines are now allowed to have.
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Rosana Francescato (she/her) vaxxed & wearing mask retweeted
“During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” – Dan Savage
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Because I’ve been absorbed with stuff going on with my mom (IYKYK; see also flowerchild.substack.com/p/t…), I’ve gotten behind on Flower Child. To give my fried brain a break, Sparky and Fiona kindly agreed to write a guest post this week.
Check it out! flowerchild.substack.com/p/d…
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Rosana Francescato (she/her) vaxxed & wearing mask retweeted
May 29
Every single person I’ve talked to who has seen quality private polling on the California governor’s race has told me the margin between Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer is closer than the public polling shows.
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AI: It’s the best of technology, it’s the worst of technology.
No one really knows what AI will mean for our society — and for humanity — which makes a novel the perfect vehicle to explore these questions.
More in this week's Flower Child:
flowerchild.substack.com/p/w…
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Definitely an issue. How do we fix this?
I do not understand this economy where nursing homes are so expensive they bankrupt grandparents, yet aides rely on food banks. Daycare can take up a parent’s entire paycheck, yet providers still cannot earn a livable wage and end up needing a second job.
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Rosana Francescato (she/her) vaxxed & wearing mask retweeted
Brené Brown, researcher and author, on the contradiction she keeps hearing in rooms full of tech billionaires:
Her work puts her in rooms where the founders and CEOs of major tech platforms talk openly about how they think.
What @BreneBrown hears there unsettles her:
"So I hear someone say, 'Hey, you know, tech billionaire, what should my kids study? I'm worried for my kids… they should study coding, physics,' and then five minutes later, as if that answer didn't happen, someone will say, 'What do you attribute your success to?' I mean deeply when you think about it, and the same person will say, 'My deep reading of philosophy and the stoics.'"
The contradiction is what stops her: the same people crediting philosophy and the liberal arts for their own success are telling other parents their kids should focus on coding and physics.
That gap leads her to a bigger, more uncomfortable question:
"I start to extrapolate from there and wonder if there is a thinking class that's emerging where they're like, 'We're going to read philosophy and we're going to read the liberal arts and we're going to study history, and the rest of you just keep scrolling. Don't worry about the big words. We'll handle all the big words for you.'"
She points to Steve Jobs as an early signal of the same pattern:
"It's like when they asked Steve Jobs, 'Boy, your kids must love the iPad.' Steve Jobs said, 'My kids don't have an iPad.' And then his biographer who spent time with his family said he wasn't kidding. There's no technology. At dinner, they're talking about art and history."
The takeaway is simple but uncomfortable.
The people building these platforms are protecting their own kids from them, and giving them books, ideas, and real conversation instead.
So why are the rest of us being sold something different?
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Beavers are climate warriors!
May 22
London Underground station flooding has reportedly been reduced by around 90% thanks to a group of engineers: beavers.
After conservationists reintroduced a family of beavers into a nearby city park, the animals built dams and restored wetlands that now absorb and slow floodwater naturally.
Authorities had planned major man-made flood infrastructure, but the beavers effectively created their own system — while also boosting biodiversity and restoring the ecosystem around them.
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Last week, I shared the first part of a two-part essay in which I attempted to describe an experience that’s notoriously hard to describe. This week, I detail how I learned an important lesson from this experience.
flowerchild.substack.com/p/s…
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This is so validating to a non-morning-person like me.
YouTubers be like “wake up at 4am and run, that’s alpha!” No, it’s not. Look at apex predators; they’re all lazy. Bears hibernate, lions sleep all day. You know who wakes up at 4am and runs? Squirrels.
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This week, I’ve attempted to describe an experience that’s notoriously hard to describe. I hope I’ve been able to convey at least some of it.
What am I talking about? See this week's Flower Child:
flowerchild.substack.com/p/s…
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Rosana Francescato (she/her) vaxxed & wearing mask retweeted
May 10
You can’t really argue this. They believe in investing in the people and infrastructure.
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We’re number 1!
May 7
YES. YES. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS. I started a spreadsheet in 2019 tracking every category where America is number one globally and people keep asking me to stop bringing it to Thanksgiving.
We lead the PLANET in medical debt. Not the developed world. The PLANET. There are countries where "medical bankruptcy" doesn't translate because the CONCEPT doesn't exist in their language. We invented it. We EXPORTED it as a field of academic study. German researchers fly here to observe it happening in real time. They take NOTES. We are a living laboratory and the experiment is "what if you made people choose between insulin and rent." We chose. Exposed. This is the thing we're best at.
We lead in incarceration. More humans in cages than China. China has 1.4 billion people and an authoritarian government and we STILL have more prisoners. We beat AUTHORITARIANS at their own game using FREEDOM. We did it with both parties cooperating across NINE administrations. Name ONE other bipartisan project that lasted fifty years. You can't. This is our moon landing. We just don't film it.
We lead in insulin pricing. $300 for a vial that costs $30 in Canada. Canada is VISIBLE FROM DETROIT. You can see Canada from a Walgreens parking lot where someone is deciding between half-doses. The same molecule. The same manufacturer. The border adds $270 of LEADERSHIP. That's what leading looks like. It looks like a 900% markup on not dying.
We lead in mass shootings. Not per capita. Not adjusted. RAW TOTAL. We have so many that researchers had to invent subcategories. School. Workplace. Concert. Grocery store. We have a TAXONOMY. Other countries have incidents. We have a CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM with peer-reviewed SORTING CRITERIA. That's infrastructure. That's RIGOR.
We lead in healthcare spending AND in maternal mortality among rich nations. Simultaneously. We spend $4.3 trillion a year and mothers die at rates that would concern a developing nation. We spent MORE money to get WORSE outcomes so consistently that it can't be incompetence. Incompetence wouldn't be this RELIABLE. This takes PLANNING. This is an ACHIEVEMENT of systems working exactly as designed across multiple industries cooperating to extract value from the specific biological event of someone trying not to die.
We lead in per-capita spending on our military while our veterans sleep in tents. We allocated $886 billion to defense and our soldiers come home to a VA waitlist so long that some of them die on it. We spent the money. We just didn't spend it on THEM. The money went somewhere. It led the way. Just not toward the people who fought.
I printed this tweet on a 24x36 poster. It's in my living room. My wife moved out last month but she didn't take the poster so I think she agrees.
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These days you really have to worry about what you say! 🤣
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Rosana Francescato (she/her) vaxxed & wearing mask retweeted
BREAKING: This ad, when tested, moves voters 4.1 points to Democrats to win the House
That’s HUGE MOVEMENT!
Voters are angry that Trump’s judges are coming for abortion rights. Again.
You know what to do. SHARE. THIS. EVERYWHERE.
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After a crazy roller coaster of a week, we spent the weekend packing up Mom’s apartment to move her to a smaller unit in a memory care facility. That meant downsizing, which meant the orange mushroom lamp had to go. What did that mean for me?
flowerchild.substack.com/p/t…
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Rosana Francescato (she/her) vaxxed & wearing mask retweeted
May 3
The replies to this person's tweet lack a nuanced understanding of aesthetics. Let me tell you why I don't think this room works.
First, the gold decorations make the room look like an ersatz Versailles. Go to Getty Images and type in "Oval Office." Then zoom in on the gold decor. You'll notice that the lines are very blunted and muddied; they lack the sharp lines and fine detailing that you'd expect on something made by an artisan. Hence why some people have suggested these decorations are from Home Depot (true or not, that's the impression).
You can see the difference between the first and second photos. The first, of course, is of the Oval Office; the second is the reception room from the Hotel de Cabris in France, which was made during the 18th century under the direction of Louis XVI. Even at this distance, the second image looks much better because it was designed and executed by artisans working within a coherent visual language. You can really see the crisp lines and detailing.
Second, the White House was designed by James Hoban, an Irish architect who migrated to the US for economic opportunities (what a great American story!). He originally designed it in the Neoclassical style, drawing on Palladian and Georgian influences.
Neoclassicalism was a reaction against the Rococo movement, which reactionaries saw as overly ornate and frivolous. A bit of gold used sparingly and strategically can look fine in a Neoclassical building, but the amount Trump used has so radically encrusted the room that it's now in Rococo territory, making it look like a mismatch of aesthetics. You can see an example of gilded Rococo architecture in the third slide. Although it's not my thing, the effect is totally different because it's coherent.
IMO, architecture sets the terms for you can decorate a space. Modernist furniture looks best in modernist buildings, just as Craftsman furniture looks best in Craftsman homes (see fourth slide). You don't have to do period recreations — sometimes mixing two aesthetics, or old and new, can make a space feel more natural — but having a sense of aesthetic history (art, architecture, furniture, fashion) can help you create better aesthetics.
The Oval Office offends on at least three levels: the ersatz nature of the decor, the way it grates against Hoban’s Neoclassical vision, and the way it misunderstands the classical-republican symbolism that the White House was meant to project in the first place. As others have noted, this is the kind of decor you'd expect from dictators who rob their own country.
May 2
Words literally cannot express how utterly insane and tasteless this aesthetic really is.
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