Happy new year! My blog vacation is ending with a vengeance, I promise you. (It was partly caused by a host snafu, joined with a forced but complicated switch from Berkeley to MySQL databasing on the backend of this site. Non-technical readers: I promise no more posts about Berkeley or MySQL for the rest of winter.)
If you’re (a) an environmentalist, (b) a car enthusiast, or (c) a policy wonk, you’ll be interested in Supercar: The tanking of an American dream, a series that just ran in the Chicago Tribune. It’s by my ol’ bud Sam Roe, who I sat next to at my old job. It’s all about how a project to build an 80-mpg family car got scuttled by government and industry intrigue. (Warning: like all Sam Roe stories, this one’s an epic. Read it in chunks, or be prepared to set aside a decent percentage of your day.)