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Category Archives: Mexico City

This week’s city reading: Detroit stays flawed, Mexico City kills parking minimums, corporations flee the suburbs

The new Detroit’s fatal flaw (Heather Ann Thompson, Washington Post) “Way back in July of 1967, just before that infamous evening when Detroit went up in flames, city boosters had been feeling pretty optimistic about the Motor City’s future. Detroit, then the nation’s fifth-largest city, was a metropolis that epitomized all that postwar America had to offer. Home to […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E20: Traitor to Genre with Gabriela Jauregui

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa with Gabriela Jauregui, writer, poet, and co-founder of the publishing collective sur+. They discuss her childhood in Coyoacán and at what point during it she realized she lived in a place with a rich literary history; her coming up reading and speaking Spanish, English, and French; the […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E19: Nothing Works, Everything Moves with Juan Carlos Cano and Paloma Vera

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa with Juan Carlos Cano and Paloma Vera, founders of the architecture and urbanism practice CANO | VERA. They discuss how everything in Mexico City’s built environment exists “behind,” being interesting in irregular ways; all the untrue superlatives you hear growing up about how Mexico City is […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E18: First-Rate “Second World” Eating with Nicholas Gilman

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with artist-turned-food writer Nicholas Gilman, author of the book and blog Good Food in Mexico City: Fondas, Food Stalls, and Fine Dining. They discuss the culinary importance of places like Mercado Medellín; how Mexico City’s art, not its food, first brought him here (make a beeline though […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E17: Youth Is Overrated with Brenda Lozano

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with novelist and essayist Brenda Lozano, author of the Todo Nada and contributor to Letras Libres. They discuss the space Spain’s troubles have opened for Latin American literature; the passion for Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde she learned from one particular teacher; how she began seriously reading in English, […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E16: Autobiology with Kurt Hollander

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa with Kurt Hollander, photographer, filmmaker, magazine editor, and author of Several Ways to Die in Mexico City: An Autobiography. They discuss his microbiologically informed view of life; the presence of death in Mexico, especially since people there now die developed-world deaths and, to an extent, developing-world […]

Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast: Gabriela Jauregui

On the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast, I have a conversation in Mexico City with Gabriela Jauregui, a writer who crosses not just the boundaries of genre but language (Spanish, French, and English) and city as well. She has a poetry collection out called Controlled Decay, and co-founded the publishing collective sur+. You […]

Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E15: The Mexican Reality with Diego Rabasa

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma with Diego Rabasa, co-founder of Sexto Piso press. They discuss why this might make for the most exciting moment in Mexican, or even Spanish-language, literature; Mexico’s past era of invincible intellectual giants, from whose shadow writers now emerge; these writers’ response to their country’s “total social […]

Diario de la Ciudad de México 2013

  Last time I visited Mexico City, I recorded a single interview for The Marketplace of Ideas and spent the rest of the time exploring and hanging out (mostly with Japanese people). This year I had a whole slate of Notebook on Cities and Culture conversations to record, not much time in which to do […]

Suketu Mehta: Maximum City

Packing for Mexico City, I briefly considered taking the perverse (as usual) reading route and packing no books about Mexico City at all. Maybe I’d just take the first few on the couch pile: Lonely Planet Japan, In the Dutch Mountains, Maximum City. In the event, I chickened out and stuffed at least five D.F.-centric […]