in this issue: grad school rEvEaL, a new article published, what it’s like to send off my squishy heart in the proverbial mail, + discussion questions!

at this ripe age, i know the decisions that change the course of people’s lives are usually made by Three Dudes In A Room.

when i started working as a city planner in Portland, i was Dude 3.5, a newborn intern taking my first steps into a real city. one day, we got rid of the rule that said every single home must come with a car parking spot. we built on the work of activists, who’d noted for years how that rule made homes more expensive and further entrenched us into the car dependency that is smothering the earth. but it was me, Dude 3.5, who whispered into the ears of the real Dudes that it would, in fact, be okay—and right!—to remove this burden.

we Dudes had tomatoes thrown at us for a project to overhaul the zoning for the entirety of Portland, in hopes of more homes at a more-attainable price than the McMansion-ish status quo. when we hosted an open house in Portland’s lush southwestern neighborhoods, the residents staged a coup, snatching the mic out of my boss’ hands and demanding a “town hall” where they could “ask” their “questions.” it was the pilot episode of Parks and Recreation everyday for three years.

and justly so—we Dudes held a lot of power. as an intern Dude and then a full-fledged Dude across my decade as a planner and professional policy nerd, i tried to wield that power well.

the Dudes often met in the smoke-filled back Room of the public-sector office. sometimes, the Room was just a flat collection of one-inch face-squares on a screen. sometimes i needed to influence my own Dudes, and other times i tried to defend against Dudes from more sinister corners, like the companies appropriating our public streets and sidewalks for their technocapitalist schemes.

on occasion, there’s just one Dude In The Room telling all the other Dudes what to do. this happens when power is concentrated at the top and all decision-making must funnel through one person. this Dude becomes crucial to the passage of any do-good agenda and usually obstructs it, either through passive disregard or active suppression.

“Dude” is a gender-neutral term, but the Dudes skew white, male, and Boomer, as most holders of power do. it’s the spirit of the Dude that matters, but we need more, different, and better Dudes In The Room.

sometimes that happens. hope glimmers when we select a new type of Dude, a new set of Dudes. yes, i mean Zohran; yes, i mean the democratic-socialist flanks of city councils cropping up across the country; yes, i mean the wins in my birth state of Virginia, home of many histories.

the rule of Three Dudes In A Room may function most harrowingly at the scale of the collective—the city, the state, the nation, so-called international agreements.

it is perhaps most dearly felt, though, at the individual scale.

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