This is great.

Brit Liggett at Inhabitat reports some interesting findings from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). Namely, that people in communities with extensive public transportation networks live longer (for reasons of both health and safety) than people in automobile-dependent communities.

Hollywood Subway 1946 (via)

"Use of public transit simply means that you walk more which increases fitness levels and leads to healthier citizens. More importantly, increasing use of public transit may be the most effective traffic safety counter measure a community can employ," noted APTA president William Millar. Apparently communities with vast public transportation networks don’t just live longer because of the exercise — they’re also less likely to be the victim of a fatal auto accident. The traffic fatality rate in the Bronx, New York is four in 100,000 contrasted by the traffic fatality rate in auto ridden Miami, Kansas which is 40 in 100,000.

Not to get too Jesuit on you, but this is an interesting case for a kind of good design synergy: it's a case where one good design strategy (here, for a city) yields several seemingly unrelated benefits.

Corby Kummer has related a rather confusing realization to us this month in the Atlantic Magazine. Namely, that retail supergiant Walmart may be playing an important part in sustaining small organic farms.

Detail from Kang Can, Fast Food III (2007) [via]

If Walmart's move into organics strikes you as cynical — "a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business," you're not alone. But, Kummer suggests, it's not entirely clear that the right reaction is disapprobation. For example, he notes that:

[L]ast year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive.

Kummer, suspicious of greenwashing, called Charles Fishman, the author of The Wal-Mart Effect. Fishman was quick to note that, in Kummer's paraphrase, "whatever Walmart decides to do has large repercussions."

A virtually unknown Walmart program is responsible for their responsible buying — one that Kummer claims "could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture." At the time of their interview, not even Fishman had heard of it. "They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about," he said.

Kummer's conclusion? If it's not decidedly the case that "the world’s largest retailer is set on rebuilding local economies it had a hand in destroying," at least that "if it wants to, a ruthlessly well-run mechanism can bring fruits and vegetables back to land where they once flourished, and deliver them to the people who need them most."

Decide for yourself here.

1. Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac

The Farm Bill, a massive piece of federal legislation making its way through Congress, governs what children are fed in schools and what food assistance programs can distribute to recipients. The bill provides billions of dollars in subsidies, much of which goes to huge agribusinesses producing feed crops, such as corn and soy, which are then fed to animals. By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products—the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease. Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.

The government also purchases surplus foods like cheese, milk, pork, and beef for distribution to food assistance programs—including school lunches. The government is not required to purchase nutritious foods.

Read the whole article here.

2. Sergey Brin on Google's China Decision

I don't actually think the question of whether this was the Chinese government or not is all that important. I know that seems strange. The Chinese government has tens of millions of people in it, and if you look at the associated army and whatnot it's even larger. It's larger than most countries by far. So even if there were a Chinese government agent behind this, it might represent a fragment of policy, as it were. There are many people there, and they have different views.

If you look at when we entered China with our Chinese operation in 2006, I actually feel like things really improved in the subsequent years. And I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding it, when we had to self-censor a fair amount, but we were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less. We from the outside provided notification when the local laws prevented us from showing information, and the local competitors followed suit in that respect. So I feel like our entry made a big difference. But things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics. And there's been a lot more blocking going on since then. Also our other sites, YouTube and whatnot, have been blocked. And so the situation really took a turn for the worse.

Read Google's original statement on China here, and watch the whole interview here.