Friday, February 28, 2025
Japan was experiencing a tourism boom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when that period’s restrictions were lifted, the gaijin floodgates opened wider than ever. Though this seems to have been a rather mixed blessing for the Japanese, it’s surely benefited Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which had the good fortune to be published […]
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Stendhal was born and buried in France, but his tombstone describes him as a Milanese. Italo Calvino, whose life began and ended in Italy, long maintained that he wanted “New Yorker” engraved on his tombstone. Stendhal may only have lived in Milan for seven years, but that was considerably more time than Calvino’s longest stretch […]
If you want to learn a language, move to New York. It doesn’t really matter what language you want to learn: with its nearly 40-percent foreign-born population, it’s now “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” home to over 700 of them. So writes linguist and New Yorker Ross Perlin in […]
Orhan Pamuk has spent almost all of his 72 years in Istanbul. That may not be especially rare for a Turk, but it’s somewhat more surprising for one who happens to be an internationally acclaimed novelist, not to mention a Nobel laureate. When he was growing up, as he tells it in Istanbul: Memories and […]
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
If you’ve never visited Austin, Texas, it’s probably too late to do so now. That, in any case, is the impression I’ve received over the past fifteen years, during which time my interest in the city has greatly diminished. Word has long circulated that Austin is “over,” but until now, there hasn’t been a book […]
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Thursday, September 19, 2024
Every so often on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, discourse erupts about the relative merits of Europe versus the United States. The arguments always seem to come down to the value of individual earning potential versus overall quality of life. “Amerifats” always to point to the large salaries earned in their country by […]
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Stewart Brand isn’t the first public intellectual one associates with cities. In fact, he’s probably closer on the grand map of cultural phenomena to the rejection of cities, specifically the post-hippie ethos-impulse to go back to the land, albeit equipped with the highest possible technology. This owes, as anyone who’s heard Brand’s name understands, to […]
Tom Scocca has known difficult times of late. Earlier this year, he published an essay in New York magazine detailing his struggle with a fierce and mysterious — and, as of the piece’s writing, still unexplained — autoimmune disorder. This health crisis struck amid “some normal midlife stuff, some normal parent stuff, some abnormal and […]
In 2017, Elon Musk called consulting public-transit planner Jarrett Walker an idiot. This happened on the the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, before Musk himself took its helm. It began with a criticism of public transit Musk lodged while promoting the notional Hyperloop: “Why do you want to get on something with a lot […]
Thursday, February 22, 2024
About a year after its publication, Tim Cocks’ Lagos: Supernatural City received a positive review in the Los Angeles Review of Books with the unfortunate headline “When a White Man Writes a Good Book About Africa.” I call it unfortunate not because of its untruth — for indeed, Tim Cocks, a white man, has written […]