The Rationalists, a community focused on the risks of artificial intelligence, regularly gather with tech figures and other like-minded people in a complex that covers much of a city block.
Overcoming discrimination in a mostly male preserve, she did groundbreaking work that showed experimentalist physicists where and how to look for new particles.
A medical doctor and former nun, she found an affordable way to expand palliative care in the developing world, bringing pain relief to poor, terminally ill patients.
When Maren Ahlers started cycling around the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on her housemate’s yellow bicycle during the pandemic, she was just trying to avoid the cramped public transportation. But once she started inviting the handful of other cyclists she saw around for Sunday group rides, the idea quickly caught on, says Ahlers, who is originally from Germany: “Back then it was only three, four people. But now, sometimes there’s 70 of us.”
One thing led to another: Noticing that no other women were joining the group rides, Ahlers started offering free cycling classes for women in 2022, and invited all the cyclists she knew in the city to the first cohort’s graduation. When over 80 people showed up, she joined forces with half a dozen other cycling groups to bring the global cycling event Critical Mass to their city. Now, over a hundred women have learned to ride with another hundred on the waitlist, and Ahlers has founded Egre Menged Impact to support the growing community of cyclists — which counts well over 450 members in her organization alone — through community-based projects.
The current Ethiopian government is embracing green mobility, says Ahlers, and Addis Ababa is in the process of building 100 kilometers of new bike lanes. Credit: Maren Ahlers, Bicycle Mayor of Addis Ababa
But there’s a problem with being the trailblazer in your city — there aren’t many people to turn to for advice and support. That’s why Ahlers became the Bicycle Mayor of Addis Ababa, joining a network of over 150 cycling activists in 34 countries worldwide: “Egre Menged Impact is known for doing things locally, perhaps Africa-wide, but the network also expands our reach towards Europe and the U.S.”
The Bicycle Mayor Network was launched in 2016 by Amsterdam-based NGO BYCS (pronounced “bikes”), which supports grassroots cycling initiatives around the world. The Mayors, selected for their engagement with the local cycling community, serve as the face and voice of cycling in their cities and bridge the gap between communities and local governments. “It started with this desire of connecting people, giving them this authority to be able to advocate for sustainable mobility,” says Michela Chamonal, the network’s coordinator. “A lot of people want to do something, but very often they’re isolated or they don’t have the means to do it.”
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Sustainable transportation is not only about environmental impact, says Pete Dyson, a behavioral scientist at the University of Bath in the U.K. researching transport and travel behavior: “It simply means, meet the needs of now without compromising the needs of the future. There are aspects of safety and of culture that sit alongside all these environmental concerns as well.”
Replacing more car journeys with cycling has a wide range of benefits. Courtesy of Egre Menged Impact
The barriers preventing people from cycling more in cities are as diverse as the cities themselves, ranging from lacking infrastructure and safety concerns to environmental factors like air pollution and heat, as well as local culture and individual physical ability.
While they are not elected officials, the title was chosen with care. “Very often we are made of words,” says Chamonal. “If you present yourself with a name and this name is linked to something, it doesn’t really matter that the mayor is not a real mayor. It matters that you can present yourself in a certain way.”
Before Ahlers joined, there was a discussion about whether a white foreign national should be the bicycle mayor of Addis Ababa, she says. “I’ve been living here for six years, I have residency, I speak the language, so for me personally it didn’t feel weird,” says Ahlers. “But the question was, will the people accept you? I think this was the main problem.”
In the end, there was no other candidate, as the community was still small and she was the locally recognizable face of the movement. But as the movement grows, there are plans to hand off the title to a local cycling activist once Ahler’s two-year mandate is up.
“It’s an immense privilege and power to be bestowed with a title that cycling advocates and local authorities appear to, I would say, respect and take notice of,” says Dyson, who became the Bicycle Mayor of Bath in 2023 and has found the ability to share experiences with fellow Mayors invaluable.
“I wanted to feel like I was also not just a keyboard warrior, but also someone who could respond to active issues,” says Dyson. While he keeps his objective research work separate from his activism, “those two things nourish each other. Without seeing the hyper-local, it’s hard to take a good system view and vice versa.”
He’s been able to enact real change in his community, like pushing the city to resurface a dangerous stretch of road that many schoolchildren and university students use to cycle to class. But it’s not easy balancing this unpaid work with other obligations. “When appointed the title, I realized I had no team and no budget. It’s volunteering in the truest sense that you have to find our own way,” says Dyson.
Maren Ahlers is the Bicycle Mayor of Addis Ababa, part of a network of over 150 cycling activists in 34 countries worldwide. Courtesy of Egre Menged Impact
Chamonal agrees that this is one of the biggest hurdles faced by Bicycle Mayors: “But these are all extremely motivated people, so it’s astonishing sometimes how much they can do.” Convoluted bureaucracy and unresponsive local authorities can also impede their work, says Chamonal, though that is very location-specific. Both Dyson and Ahlers have been able to work closely with their city governments.
“For better or worse, I think my biggest impact is behind closed doors in advocacy and discussions with the local authority,” says Dyson, who previously worked at the U.K. Department for Transport as its first principal behavioral scientist. “I see my position as a critical friend, because our local authority has good intentions.”
Egre Menged Impact in Addis Ababa is also working closely with the government — it is currently offering cycling classes in a couple of public schools, is regularly invited to official events concerning mobility and transportations, and the city is open to its feedback about new cycling regulations, says Ahlers. “We’re trying to come from both sides, both advocacy on the government level and awareness creation in the community.”
Events like Critical Mass have been helpful in raising awareness about bike infrastructure and the growing cycling community, says Ahlers. Courtesy of Egre Menged Impact
The current Ethiopian government is embracing green mobility, says Ahlers, and Addis Ababa is in the process of building 100 kilometers of new bike lanes. Having an active cycling community in the city likely helped push this decision, says Ahlers: “If there wouldn’t be any cyclists, they would have not done it, probably.”
With a rapidly expanding infrastructure and a growing cycling community, the biggest challenge Ahlers sees ahead is behavior change — people are not yet used to the bicycle lanes, so cyclists often still use the road while pedestrians walk in the bicycle lanes, and many car drivers are against the infrastructural changes on principle. Events like Critical Mass have been helpful in raising awareness, says Ahlers: “Having mass rides with a lot of people, with music and lights and just making it a fun situation — we don’t want to approach it negatively.”
Going forward, Ahlers wants to focus on accessibility, both by training more people to ride safely and finding a way to make bicycles and bicycle parts easier to come by. “People call me daily: ‘Where can I buy a bicycle?’ And I can’t even tell them because there are no good bicycles around,” says Ahlers. “It would be awesome if we had either a cheap importer or a local manufacturer of bicycles and spare parts.”
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The big dream is to have a large community-based workshop, where people could get parts and learn how to maintain and repair their bikes, she says. Egre Menged Impact already started a small one in Ahlers’ home compound. “Most of the materials I imported from Germany — every time someone travels, they have to bring us stuff,” laughs Ahlers. “But we started it, we piloted it, and it’s so nice to see different people coming together, different occupations, different social statuses.”
“It can really sound bizarre to some people that bicycles can be such a center of life,” admits Chamonal. “But it’s astonishing to see the energy that people put into that, the motivation that they have, and how much they can do. Often people have great potential and they just need a connection to be able to do more.”
Kids are flocking to parks and Freight & Salvage to hear librarian Michael Kwende read silly books with perfect rhythm, backed up by his bookish bandmates.
Founded in 1971, the Potters’ Studio’s membership has been growing since it became a nonprofit in 2021. Now it has bought a former machine repair shop in West Berkeley.
Does anyone know how high rabbits can jump? They nibble the branches off my plants, & I want to put plants on bricks that will raise them above a rabbit’s capacity to jump.
The so-called "bicycle lane" is a 3-in stripe of paint separating cyclists from cars going at highway speeds
That trailer park across from the PCC gets so many calls for police response that I wonder why Redmond PD doesn't just build a second station there
Redmond's worst restaurant, Pizza Twist, aka Naan Stop, aka Spice&Slice, aka Dosawaala, fka Garlic Jim's, where I saw a customer brought a tape measure to complain about the 16" pizza being 12" and the worker cursed her out to her face
July 4th, someone tried to launch a firework from their forehead in the PCC parking lot and I think he died
The apartment complex where a teen mom paid a babysitter to care for her baby while she went on vacation, but the babysitter used the money to buy drugs instead of baby formula, and the baby died of dehydration
The people trying to make left turns out of their apartment complex at peak rush hour
The abandoned house which has no foundation
The gym, which has changed names like 3 times, and seems to usually be empty, although it looks really modern and clean inside
The abandoned grocery store, which used to sell products that looked suspiciously like they came from Costco just down the road
When they discovered part of the road was in danger of collapsing into Bear Creek and the emergency repair work created huge traffic jams
The water treatment facility, which might be a good location for the next Teen Center, given that currently all the teens living in those apartment complexes have not much else to do other than hanging around at the Safeway parking lot at night
The Eagles fraternity building, which I'm still not sure what that whole organization is about, and it's so mysterious to me
The great adventure of my birth family was the fifteen months we lived in New Delhi, from June of 1961, on a USAID-sponsored educational mission. So the destruction of USAID feels personal. I’m only now realizing that we were there at the very beginning of USAID, during what Jackie Kennedy later mythologized as the Camelot era. On a tour of India, at a meet-and-greet in New Delhi, she appears in this family photo.
We must have been at the embassy, she’s surrounded by Americans. You can see a few South Asian faces in the background. The young boy at the center of the photo, gazing up at the queen of Camelot, is five-year-old me.
It could have been a Life Magazine cover: “A vision in white, Jackie represents America’s commitment to be of service to the world.” As corny as that sounds, though, the commitment was real. Our nation upheld it for sixty years and then, a few months ago, fed it to the wood chipper and set in motion a Holocaust-scale massacre.
We suggest the number of lives saved per year may range between 2.3 to 5.6 million with our preferred number resting on gross estimates of 3.3 million.
The shutdown likely won’t kill 3.3 million people annually, say its “only” a million. Per year. For six years. It adds up.
Atul Gawande was leader of global public health for USAID. On a recent podcast he runs some more numbers.
On USAID “waste”:
“It’s 0.35% of the federal budget, but that doesn’t help you, right? Try this. The average American paid $14,600 in taxes in 2024. The amount that went to USAID is under $50. For that we got control of an HIV epidemic that is at minuscule levels compared to what it was before. We had control of measles and TB. And it goes beyond public health. You also have agricultural programs that helped move India from being chronically food-aid-dependent to being an agricultural exporter. Many of our top trading partners once received USAID assistance that helped them achieve economic development.”
On USAID “fraud”:
“When Russia invaded Ukraine they cut off its access to medicine, bombed the factories that made oxygen, ran cyberattacks. The global health team moved the entire country’s electronic health record system to the cloud, and got a supply chain up and running for every HIV and TB patient in the country.”
On USAID “abuse”:
“The countries where we worked had at least 1.2 million lives saved. In addition, there was a vaccine campaign for measles and for HPV. For every 70 girls in low income countries who are vaccinated against cervical cancer from HPV, one life is saved. It’s one of the most life-saving things in our portfolio. Our vaccine programs would have saved an additional 8 million lives over the next five years.”
America has never been a shining city on the hill but USAID represented our best aspirations. In the throes of the Maoist cultural revolution that tore it down there are many other horrors to confront, but for me this one hits hardest.
Apparently, dog chews made in China may be causing werewolf syndrome in dogs in the UK.
A total of 10 different Barkoo and Chrisco branded chews have been linked to werewolf syndrome by teh FSA [Food Standards Agency] and EU. They have best before dates ranging from Decembrer 2025 to June 2027.
The term werewolf syndrome has gained traction online as shorthand for a cluster of symptoms reported in dogs who appear to have consumed certain chew products. While not an official medical diagnosis, the term groups together sudden neurological symptoms such as:
Sudden, unprovoked aggression or fearfulness.
Excessive barking, crying or howling.
Hyperactivity or restlessness.
Destructive tendencies, such as chewing furniture.
Physical symptoms such as epileptic-style seizures, vomiting, diarrhoea and lethargy have also been observed in some cases.
On her first visit to Morocco’s largest city, a visitor swears off her phone, the internet and even printed guides. Her aim? To get lost, learn as she goes, and reclaim the serendipity of travel.
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