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- Today's Moment of Idealistic Naivete: Wikileaks: http://wp.me/pCprU-mB 1 year ago
- Ending the War on Drugs: http://wp.me/pCprU-mw 1 year ago
- Twilight Of The Suburbs, Now Home To One-Third Of America's Poor http://huff.to/bGZP7F 1 year ago
- U.S. Subways Harness Kinetic Power To Recycle Train Energy http://huff.to/bVsXvR 1 year ago
- America's Walk Deficit http://yhoo.it/dijIvg 1 year ago
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Recent Posts
- Today’s Moment of Idealistic Naivete: Wikileaks
- Ending the War on Drugs
- The Most Walkable Cities in the World
- It’s Where We Live
- Can Cities Feed Themselves?
- French Street Artist Wins TED Humanitarian Prize
- Dimanche Sans Voiture
- Are Brussels and Los Angeles Sister Cities?
- Masdar begs the question: What exactly is meant by “a sustainable city?”
- Is Generation Y Passing on Cars?
- Can Cities Make Us Crazy?
- Stranger Studies 101: Cities as Interaction Machines
- Does New Orleans Have an Identity Crisis?
- Three Urban Interventions in Two Hours: NYC
- Cargo Bike Spotted…
Category Archives: Journalism
It’s Where We Live
Home, by Yann-Arthus Bertrand. A stunning photographic exploration of our own backyard, a surprising amount of which I felt like I was seeing for the first time. The whole movie is here…
Reversal of Fortune
For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. Smith’s core ideas—that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth—have indisputably worked. They’ve produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They’ve built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith’s ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.
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Posted in Culture, History, human scale, Journalism, Livability, Sustainability, Uncategorized
Tagged adam smith, average wage, Bill McKibben, growth no longer makes us happier, gynomite, happiness of katakuris, industrial revolution, John Maynard Keynes, more and better, mother jones, relative wealth, reversal of fortune, standard of living, Thomas Newcomen, wealth of nations
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Edward Burtynsky and the Manufactured Landscape
Canadian photographer Burtynsky has made a life’s work out of documenting landscapes altered or wholly created by human industry. The images are gorgeous, hypnotic, terrifying, and sobering, sometimes all at once. They serve as proof that we can have a profound impact on our own backyards, the implication being that if you string enough profoundly altered backyards together you have a profoundly altered planet and, in all likelihood, profoundly altered natural systems.
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Coming Home: Stories of Simpler Times
You can’t ask an acquaintance if he had a good childhood. It’s too personal — and a potential can of worms. But we’re naturally curious, looking for clues about the situations that our friends come from. This interest comes out in questions like “What do your parents do?” “Are you close with your family?” “Have you been home recently?” and even the straightforward “Where are you from?”
But what does a “good childhood” mean anyway? Most upbringings are complicated; mixed bags. Most parents try their best, and all make mistakes.
Descriptions, whether words or images, of the physical spaces of our formative years hint at the relationships within. If these walls could talk, they’d tell tales long forgotten. Continue reading
