“In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.” — Lewis Hyde Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift is a must-read. It’s a study of gift giving, its relationship to art, and the communities that form around these acts. “It is the one book I recommend without…

Environmental projects are interesting candidates for NFTs. We should view our environmental resources as non-fungible assets. Each tree, member of a species, plot of land is unique. The same goes for carbon credits, which vary considerably in quality and provenance. We struggle to properly appraise, value, and govern environmental resources…

These projects all rely on crypto protocols to solve real world problems in clever ways. Brave Brave is a web browser for your phone or computer that stops online surveillance/tracking. In doing so, it speeds up browsing and uses less battery. The Problem Most websites and ads include software that tries…

Working with custom color palettes and digital elevation models to render beautiful topographic prints in Python — I’ve always enjoyed playing with maps. As a kid, I would pore over the ski mountain maps of James Niehues, memorizing the trail names and verticals. His maps inspired me to hand-draw my own (fictional) ski resort maps. For my senior project in high school, I programmed a ski resort…

A visualization of the altitude of 121,156 coffee farms visited by Enveritas over the last 3 years, representing 21 countries. There are three things that were fun about making this dataviz. It’s a joyplot (😂📊). According to this blog, a “joyplot” refers to the classic 1979 Joy Division “Unknown Pleasures”…

This report was written in August 2017. The goal of the trip was to learn how China’s coffee sector works and gather updated estimates on its size and scale. While the pace at which China has emerged as a major washed Arabica producer is unprecedented, I predict some speed bumps ahead. — China currently has the fastest-growing coffee industry in the world. In 2007, China produced around 13,000 tons. Today, the official total is 139,000 tons (2.3 million bags). Its year-over-year growth rate has exceeded 20% since 2007, which is reminiscent of Vietnam’s rapid rise during the 1990s. However, unlike Vietnam, over…

The following is a lightly-edited audio transcript of an interview between Ketan Patel, Regional Director for Enveritas, and the project management team from the National Vision Development Fund (NVDF), a Yemeni NGO and research organization. Enveritas and NVDF recently completed more than 430 interviews with coffee farmers in Yemen. Listen…

How do you wet mill your coffee? Few topics of conversation among producers and buyers seem to conjure more myth, mystery and tightly-held opinion. Wet milling technology has been around for more than a century. The process itself involves a number of steps that ultimately transform cherry into parchment. …

Ridership is up, service quality is down. The MTA, which runs the NYC subway system, is quick to offer statistics on the former, but takes a more taciturn style when asked to provide transparency on the latter. …