Hasta La Gadget!

Smart, maker of the tiny Fortwo cars, has a new model up its sleeve, and to tease its existence, the manufacturer has released a long promotional video for just the opposite: a giant Smart Car that towers amongst its road-bound brethren, offering such perks as “Eco Empathy” and the ability to drive everywhere backwards. The marketing ad kicks off with … Continue reading

Since my divorce I’ve become accustomed to doing a lot of things solo. I’ve been my own date to dinner, to movies, to gatherings with friends. At first I felt awkward ambling about the earth without a partner, but in time I realized that I enjoyed my own company.

But I wasn’t quite sure I could pull off walking into my 20th high school reunion by myself. I didn’t think I could face my former classmates and their spouses and explain that I was alone not because my husband wasn’t able to attend but because I didn’t have a husband.

I wanted to attend my 10-year reunion, but the timing was off. My son was only a few months old, and my husband was days away from departing for his first deployment to Iraq. We were trying to spend our last days together preparing both practically and emotionally, and we couldn’t spare two days for driving and two days for partying. I also wasn’t exactly in a celebratory mindset. So when classmates emailed to ask if I would be joining them, I politely declined and promised to make an appearance at the next one.

When reunion chatter started in my alumni Facebook group a few months ago, my first instinct was to think of a good excuse to decline. I couldn’t get time off from work. I couldn’t swing the cost of plane tickets for me and my kids. I had broken both arms and had casts up to my shoulders. Any excuse other than I just got divorced and I felt like a failure.

I can’t stand to fail at anything. My desire to succeed made me a good athlete. It helps me excel at my job. And it’s probably why I tried so hard to fix a marriage I knew was broken.

But I couldn’t fix my marriage. My marriage failed. And I didn’t know how I could go to this reunion and admit failure in such a huge area of my life to such a huge group of people.

I was still concocting excuses when a friend made me realize that I wasn’t a failure and had every reason to proudly go to the reunion.

“People will react to how you act,” he said. “If you go into it with the attitude that your life is worse because of the divorce, then people will react accordingly. If you go as the confident, strong woman who changed her life for the better, then you’ll be the furthest thing from a failure.”

As he reminded me of all the wonderful things I’ve created, including my children, my career and my ability to run a marathon, I knew I’d be going to that reunion. Shortly after that conversation I booked plane tickets, I started contacting old high school friends, and I bought the perfect dress.

The planning committee did a great job of organizing two days worth of opportunities to reunite. Walking into the first event was easier than I expected. Walking into the second event was exciting. By the time I walked into the third (and main) event wearing that perfect dress, I was downright giddy.

The reunion weekend made me realize I had come full circle since these people had last seen me. In their eyes, not much seemed to have changed. I was told I looked exactly the same, that I was as spunky as ever. Even staying at my parents’ house, the same house I lived in during high school, and taking a photo in the same spot where my father took my prom photo made me feel as if nothing had changed.

But everything had changed. Since graduation, I had lived in four different states and one other country. I earned two college degrees. I had two children. I had a 13-year marriage.

During those 20 years, I went through a lot, and somehow I lost that spunky girl. But since my divorce and the personal journey I’ve taken to rediscover myself, she’s back. And that’s the woman who showed up at the reunion and had the time of her life reconnecting with old friends and reminiscing about the good old days.

Of course social media helped me out too. Thanks to Facebook and my blog, most people already knew I was divorced. No one asked me if I was married. No one asked where my husband was. And while I did discuss bits and pieces of the divorce with a few people, I never once felt less than happy about where I am in life.

My marriage may have failed, but that doesn’t make me a failure. And it took a 20-year high school reunion to make me realize that.

I can’t wait to see what lesson I’ll learn from the 30th.

Co-authored by Vrinda Manglik, Sierra Club, and Andrew Satter, Center for American Progress

Solar power is the key to ending energy poverty.

No, this isn’t some out-of-touch Silicon Valley pipe dream. Innovative companies like Simpa Networks and OMC power are pioneering new energy models for rural populations that deliver everything from LED lightbulbs and Skinny Grids to off-grid Wi-Fi to pay-as-you-go solar home systems.

To better understand how they empower people, the Sierra Club and Center for American Progress (CAP) teamed up to document their efforts in a hotbed of off-grid solar activity: Uttar Pradesh, India. We brought along a pair of Google Glass to document our travel and give the world a first-hand look at our global distributed energy future.

If there’s one thing we learned about their efforts, it’s this: small is big.

All those small-scale solar home systems and mini-grids these companies are building add up to a whopping $12 billion energy market potential. Even more exciting, this market is already booming. From 80,000 solar home systems installed every month in Bangladesh, to a 95-percent compound annual growth rate in Sub-Saharan Africa’s off-grid solar market, it’s easy to see why investment is rapidly growing.

But, despite all this growth, public institutions have still not stepped up to provide the investment these companies require to truly scale their efforts. Perhaps the lone exception to this rule is President Obama’s exciting new “Beyond the Grid” initiative, but even that is not enough. That’s why entrepreneurs are demanding $500 million to catalyze faster growth from leading development institutions like the World Bank.

But lost amidst growth rates and investments is the human story yearning to be told.

From Mathura to Atroli, solar power has helped transform the lives of countless Indians. In Mathura, we met farmers who have saved untold amounts of money by switching from expensive kerosene lamps to inexpensive solar power. We met rural shopkeepers who are now able to stay open later in the evenings, which means more money in their pockets. And we met rural seamstresses who now use cleaner, cheaper solar lighting when they weave India’s famous saris.

But perhaps the most poignant moment was when we heard from Vishal Shukla, a local villager who now lives and works in Delhi for a non-profit organization, about the effect solar energy has had on his daughter’s lives. When he was growing up, Vishal didn’t have reliable light to study by in the evenings, and he struggled with his education. Fast forward to 2014, and Vishal’s daughters now enjoy cheaper, cleaner solar LED lighting that helps them study at night. Thanks to solar lamps, his daughters now have a brighter future, both literally and figuratively.

This is a testament to the immediate and transformative effect even small amounts of clean energy can have on people’s lives. By leapfrogging the dirty, ineffective centralized energy grid that has failed these rural populations for decades, companies are building an entirely new system, one which puts power directly in the hands of the people.

To see more of the effect solar is having on the lives of people like Vishal follow #PutSolarOnIt on Twitter as the Sierra Club and CAP release behind-the-scenes footage of our trip all this week. Then on Thursday, join us for the world premiere of our documentary, “Harnessing the Sun to Keep Lights on in India,” and see why solar truly is the key to ending energy poverty.

The Doctor is back.

From script leaks circling the Internet to a rough cut of the newest season’s first episode making its online debut a month before the show is set to air, “Doctor Who” fans hoping to avoid spoilers for Season 8 of the BBC series haven’t had it easy. But finally, some footage has surfaced that is actually network-approved.

The British series unveiled its first full-length trailer for the next installment of the time-traveling drama during Sunday’s World Cup final, and it looks like the new Doctor is going dark. In the minute-long clip, Peter Capaldi, who’s the twelfth actor to step into the Time Lord’s shoes, informs Clara (Jenna Coleman) that the duo are headed “into darkness” before the audience is teased with everything from sinister-looking robots to a giant prehistoric lizard roaming around London. The end of the teaser sees the Doctor asking his companion if she thinks he’s a “good man.” Answer: we don’t know.

Season 8 of “Doctor Who” premieres Aug. 23 on BBC One.

The typical language-learning ad promises you will “Learn French in 10 Days!” I understand such impatience. When my airplane finally pulls up to the gate, I want to get off just as fast as the next guy.

But if you truly want to learn your next language, a better plan is to be a little patient — in fact, a lot patient — and adopt long-term goals. Think of it as the long and rewarding road that leads to your second language.

Our expectations about learning languages are, quite frankly, odd, and ads like “Learn French (or Spanish, or Galician) in 10 Days” pander to them. While these ads might help sell language-learning programs, they reinforce false expectations. The result? Many people give up and miss out on the grand adventure of language learning.

Weird frustrations
In interviews for my research on multilingualism in America, I ask people about their language-learning experience. The result is usually a frown, followed by something like, “I took Spanish for six years and can hardly speak a word!”

I’ll bet you’ve heard — or felt — similar things. Yet we never hear anyone say, “I played trombone for six years in school and can hardly play a note.”

But why not?

I did happen to play trumpet for years in school, and like all people who played an instrument for enough years, I learned what’s actually involved in becoming a professional musician. It takes lots and lots of practice. The well-reported 10,000 hours’ worth that Malcolm Gladwell described in Outliers is about right. Most professional musicians, even those who have been performing for decades, still typically practice several hours a day just to keep up their chops and to learn new things.

Using language well — with something like fluency — is something like being a professional musician.

Think about how much you practice English — nearly all your waking hours, every day of your life. Doing that, you log in about 5,000 hours each year. And because of this daily practice, you’re always reinforcing your hearing and speaking and reading and writing, honing your understanding of nuances and subtleties as well as learning new words — for example, selfie.

So why do we assume, with only a few hundred hours of French class — and those years ago — we’ll be able to jet over to Paris and engage in lively banter with our garcons? Do we expect to leap onto the stage in New Orleans and play a trombone solo with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band?

Hasta mañana
Such unrealistic expectations kill off the motivation that’s required to succeed in the long haul that language learning is. Don’t fall victim to them.

Instead, I suggest you commit to learning your next language for the rest of your life. Commit to loving it as you love your first language. Think of it as adopting a child: a lifetime commitment, with no less love than you have for a biological child.

When you adopt a lifetime perspective, it takes the pressure off. When you have those days, as you most likely will, when you’re terribly frustrated, when it seems you’ll never get it, when it seems just too much, you’ll know there’s tomorrow.

And when you shout with joy at having understood something and having others understand you, know that you’ll have more days like that as pleasure becomes its own reward. The language instructor Paul Pimsleur wrote, “That languages take time to learn becomes a plus instead of a drawback when one considers how much a long-range commitment gives focus and continuity to a period of one’s life.”

From language learning to language living
Often I hear monolingual Americans say, “I just don’t have a talent for languages.” While it’s true that people vary in their abilities, I wonder if the people who lament their lack of linguistic talent are being fair to themselves — whether they know how much time it really takes.

I’ll ask them, “How well do you speak English?” And with a surprised look they’ll say, “Pretty well, I guess.” And I’ll say, “Then you have the ability to speak a second language, too; it’s mostly a matter of time.”

If you’re one of those who felt traumatized by language classes, know this: Even the best classroom experiences — and there can be great ones — can only take you so far. To really learn, you need to live in your adopted language in the real world. As my Spanish instructor told me, “You don’t teach a language, you learn one.” She means that a successful language learner pulls in the language through desire, rather than waiting for it to be pushed into her head by others. (This is probably true of most real learning, when you think about it.)

Luckily, it’s never been easier to pull in languages outside the classroom. You can set your technology — smartphone, car, computer, ATM, airport check-in terminals — to your adopted language. While this was done to enable speakers of different languages to navigate technologies, it’s an absolute boon for language learners.

You can watch movies, TV, YouTube and TED videos in hundreds of languages.

And then there are books.

Brad Schmier, a neuroscientist living in New York City, lives part of his life in Spanish — not because he needs to, but because he wants to. He recently read two popular books on biology — books he wanted to read anyway for his profession — in Spanish: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

“I enjoyed reading these very interesting and important books for my field, and worked on my Spanish at the same time,” he told me in an interview. “I love doing that!”

How do you say sex in Macedonian?
And don’t think that Microsoft real-time translation and Google Glass will make learning languages obsolete. Learning and using a second language are just too much fun. They’re rewarding in a deeply human way.

While we can be lazy, we humans do the harder thing — by choice — all the time. We like to cook, when we could just buy frozen dinners. We like to garden, when we could simply buy all our vegetables. We like to walk when we could drive. We lift weights and jog and study and learn — because using our bodies and our minds just feels so good.

Perfect machine translation will no more replace language learning than artificial insemination will replace sex.

What better language technology will do is make language learning more efficient and fun. It already has. We can put the Google Translate App on our phones, and toggle between languages on our phones as we text, getting the help of predictive spelling as we go. We can delight in free or inexpensive language resources online. (Check out Duolingo, which has gamified language learning in a most magnificent way.)

Language-learning technology makes it more enticing than ever to live part of the rest of your life inside your adopted language, enriching your life greatly.

I hope it takes you forever
I used to walk by a travel agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a sign that said, “Please Go Away!”

In the same spirit, I say to you, “Learn French in 10 Years!” And I hope it takes you far, far longer.