Who Am I?

More specifically, who the hell am I to tell anyone else how to get things less wrong?

Well, hi! I'm Andie. I'm an elder millennial white woman in the United States, trained as a lawyer, policy and politics analyst, environmental scientist, and generalist researcher and distiller of information. My day job is as a policy advisor and advocate at a national nonprofit working to build community-led solutions to advance economic and environmental justice through renewable energy. This blog is emphatically not associated with that job or organization. Prior to that, I worked in the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service (CRS), American Law Division, where I honed and tested much of my research process. It was under some pretty high stakes conditions, because Congress actually did lawmaking back then on occasion. No current association with that either. I've also worked in the law firm and business worlds.

I'll be the first to tell you I'm not a subject matter expert on much of what I'll write about here. What I am, fittingly for this project, is a process expert. Specifically, the iterative process of encountering a new-to-me topic area where there are a lot of subject matter experts, usually in vigorous debates with one another; getting oriented to that topic area's general outline, status, history, direction, top debates, major guideposts, context, and so on; compiling, sifting, and integrating large amounts of credibly verified information, especially from peer-reviewed articles and their citation webs; identifying patterns; and reporting out to people even newer to the topic area, providing useable topline concepts that they can be confident are accurate while still respecting the depth and complexity of the topic.

I'll have some posts on that relational process itself. They'll include streamlined versions and tips that can help anyone get things less wrong in everyday circumstances, even in today's horrendous information environment. Mainly, though, I want to use this blog to share the often mind-blowingly cool results of that process when it's grounded in empirically confirmed understanding of reality. This project began as a book draft a few years ago, but I decided the process-relational theme and the enormous range of subsidiary topics where that theme shows up (literally everything everywhere all the time!) deserved a less linear format, with more opportunities for feedback and for responsiveness to current events. Questions, comments, and critiques are welcome.

I currently live in Northeast DC with my spouse and two shelter cats, Vincent (a Japanese Bobtail) and Mia (a Manx). My favorite city is Chicago, my favorite movies are Mad Max: Fury Road and The Apartment (LoraxLawyette on Letterboxd), and I'm pretty good at crochet and regrettably terrible at gardening.