If I see someone making my neighbourhood a worse place to live, I walk straight up to them and have a little word. What is happening to me?Some people buy sports cars when they have a midlife crisis. Others cut off all their hair. Me? I seem to have developed a debilitating obsession with urban sanitation. Over the past couple of years, I have become unhealthily preoccupied with the fact that an alarming number of grown adults seem incapable of disposing of their rubbish properly. There are people in my Philadelphia neighbourhood who will bag up their dog’s excrement and then just leave the little poop bag on the pavement for the rest of us to admire. And don’t get me started on the people who dump untied bags of recycling on the street days before it’s supposed to be collected, resulting in it inevitably blowing around the neighbourhood. (If you’re wondering why the rubbish is loose, it’s because the US, the land of innovation, has been slow to embrace the wheelie bin.)Do I sound l...
Arwa Mahdawi, formerly terrified of confrontation, developed an obsession with urban sanitation in her 40s, confronting people in her Philadelphia neighborhood about littering and improper waste disposal.
