Characteristics and traits in individuals can and do manifest themselves more generally across societies but the outcomes they predict can be very different due to scale. I’ve witnessed the Dunning-Kruger effect in myself and in my career over the years, only coming to understand my behavior and the behavior of colleagues in the context of
My stepdaughter has been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack obsessively over the last few weeks, in and of itself not so objectionable, but there’s a song tucked in there with an appallingly anachronistic, though seemingly obligatory, celebration of “The Greatest City in the World”! My first response was “…this is set in 1780 or so…why
There’s no doubt in my mind that my Mormon upbringing nurtured a sense of apocalypticism. I remember being in a “Super Saturday” lesson sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s in Bloomfield, Connecticut where the discussion turned to whether Jesus would return precisely in the year 2000 to usher in the sabbath-like Millennium, or
(LuLu skating on a weekday at MGM…weekends are packed so nobody skates there, it’s too crowded) The end of the year brings out not only the Year in Review essays but also the Predictions 2019 pieces. I’m not someone who is afraid of being wrong so my reluctance to make an attempt at guessing what’s
In the same spirit as my last post I’d like to change the focus from local individuals to local corporations. There are two in particular I’ll be focusing on, but the treatment the city gets is more or less the same from all of its corporate citizens. When the tornado ripped through my neighborhood in
The headline of Richard Florida’s most recent essay on City Lab could just as easily read: “People Who Can Live Anywhere Like Living Near Cool Stuff” or “Rich People Like to Have Stuff to Spend Their Money On Nearby” or even “Poor People Can’t Afford to Live in the Same Places Rich People Want to
I spent a few hours watching and re-watching a debate between Modernists and Traditionalists in the realm of architecture. I found it both enlightening and frustrating. The arguments that the three supporters of Modernism gave were compelling and well-reasoned with the only caveat being, well, this: Architecture doesn’t only exist in the world of theories
As I’ve exposed myself more consistently to conservative and right wing media I’ve been amused by just how much there is an open distaste for cities. It doesn’t just take the guise of articles detailing how violent and unlivable urban nodes like Baltimore and Chicago have become, but also in immediate responses to any apparent
Carol Coletta was, quite literally, one of the first urbanist voices I ever heard. I was an early adopter of the Internet, using it for research for a weekend radio program I hosted and produced; a friend hooked me up to do research using an old Mac and a modem (“Whatever that is”) and the
Criticism of the way in which local media covers various topics in Springfield in particular, and regarding urban places more broadly has diminished here because, for the most part, I’ve had my say and gotten it out of my system. Death Race 2016 was an enormous part of that; actually documenting as it happened just