Cities were vibrant, culturally rich places to live before the pandemic. We can only speculate about how cities will be after.
urban design
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
Los Angeles Plays Itself
In this land of constant reinvention, a longtime resident walks the streets to understand what the city was and what it’s becoming.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Science & Nature
The Death and Birth of the Los Angeles River
The authors describe the river as a “postindustrial terra incognita,” a place “of discarded things and marginalized people”. Can the city change that?
Posted inBusiness, Nonfiction, Quotes
Dorm Living for Adults
The new Common co-living company isn’t as communal is it pretends.
Posted inCurrent Events, Nonfiction, Quotes
New York City’s Final Frontier: Underground
What lays beneath New York City affects life above ground. One team is mapping the city’s below-ground infrastructure.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Back in the USSR: A Reading List
Six stories that examine the complicated heritage of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
Every Kiss Begins with Kay… And Strategic Placement in Your Suburban Shopping Mall
In “Kay, Zales, and Marketing Diamonds to the Middle-Class Man”—a recent feature for Racked—Chavie Lieber wrote about Signet Jewelers, the parent company that owns such household names as Kay Jewelers, Jared, and Zales. Signet became the largest specialty jewelry company in America by targeting the midmarket jewelry segment, knowing their customer base, and doing some serious marketing. Trust also plays […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Would You Design a Memorial for World War III?
Architect Maya Lin was a senior at Yale when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a 2000 essay for the New York Review of Books—which she began writing around the memorial’s completion in fall 1982 and then put aside for nearly two decades—she reflects on how she came to enter in the competition, and the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Murky Origins of Burma’s Capital City
The city’s origins are clouded in rumour and speculation. Some describe it as a vanity project of Than Shwe, the former military leader of the country. Many believe the “audacious” name given to the city might reflect “illusions of grandeur or … perhaps another sign of [Than Shwe’s] possible dementia”, according to one 2006 US government […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Last Freeway
The true story of L.A.’s freeways, and a judge who changed everything.