Queering the Grid

POST-DEI DIVERSITY 101: On Crossing the Lines They Drew For You What does it mean to actually show up: not in an abstract sense, but in person, on a Sunday morning, in a neighborhood you were told to fear? This episode starts with a trip to a South Side church that turns and ends in 17th century Netherlands and, along the way, turns into something much bigger: an argument that segregation leaves e...

What if accountability wasn't a punishment but just... basic care? This episode takes on the discomfort white people feel at being corrected — by friends or strangers pointing out missteps and asks why "I'm sorry" has become so hard to say and mean it. Moving between a hockey-game fetishization story, a hair-touching confession turned cautionary tale, and the unexpected overlaps...

This episode traces an unlikely through-line: from medieval Russia to a teen girl hauling timber at fourteen centuries later, to today where I get to tell you about it, using the history as a case-in-point about why you should care about the state of the American power grid. As someone raised on stories of systemic collapse, this episode is about how inherited memory of scarcity manifests, decades...

What does it mean to spend a career translating "energy transition" into something a neighbor can actually use? This episode follows a single day — tabling at a Juneteenth event in a disinvested pocket of Kenosha, a city block holding both architectural beauty and total commercial absence — to ask bigger questions about who climate work is really for. Threading together urban planning an...

Angie explains how her lived experience allows her to be an effective bridge-builder in enacting change at a systems-level and where her program design methodology succeeds where others fail. Plus how she employed her neurodivergence to not just survive but thrive in corporate America and develop skills she now mentors others to tap into.

We live in a reality where queer people are forced to upend themselves and move to Illinois at immense personal and financial cost so as to save their lives. In Carbondale there has been enough newcomers that the city rebuilt the train station around it having a workforce hub attached where those arriving with nothing but a suitcase can get connected to resources before even stepping outside. In C...

Angie and I discuss why Illinois is the best place to be a queer in 2026 and why Carbondale is an unassuming, under-invested sort of place that is also an unexpected hotspot of Illinois queerdom thanks in no small part to Clare Killman, a progressive and beloved City Councilperson who has enacted policy aimed at specifically cementing Carbondale as a sort of place where queers fleeing other states...

Angie Ostaszewski is a preternatural translator and not because she speaks three languages. In this episode she discusses how her success is rooted in the fact that she is able to communicate her ideas to everyone from high-up people making decisions to the very people who would be impacted by the decisions those others make, all of rooted in her uncommon mindset for getting someone to care about...

Angie Ostaszewski implemented bold and bright ideas while employed at Ameren, the utility covering much of the lower two-thirds of Illinois, which earned her a Rising Star Award from the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. Since, she's went on to do even greater things nationwide as the Director of Strategy and Innovation at SEEL (Solutions for Energy Efficiency Logistics). All this might alre...

bell hooks' Belonging: A Culture of Place is a "deep cut" of hers that I read as an urban planning manifesto. She wrote it much later in life as she moved back to take care of her elderly parents in Berea, Kentucky. It is a profound and powerful text and the question of how we each "belong" to place is one I wish more people thought about. Granted I am a huge nerd and think...

What does "grid resilience" have to do with me growing up in semi-rural 1980s Russia without running water? With being an urban planner, energy efficiency consultant, and hobbyist TikTok content creator riding a packed Brown line L car during rush hour? With getting near-cancelled for daring to have an opinion in 2025, for the bold claim that systemic collapse is, in fact, not a good ide...

Welcome to How to Queer the Grid , a podcast about resilience, belonging, and redesigning the systems we live in, from the edges in. Learn about how I, an artist, urban planner, and energy efficiency consultant got to America as a child from rural Russia, with no running water, no English, and no rulebook for how to belong. In this episode I give you a window into my early years navigating profoun...