I was standing at the edge of the Saint Lawrence in Montreal waiting for L’International des Feux Loto (fireworks) to begin and as a friend began to explain to me what the various landmarks were I realized how eerily similar it all seemed. There was a city to be sure, and a river with a
There’s an infantile instinct which I’ve never been able to shake. I can remember very distinctly, and therefore probably erroneously, its earliest manifestation. I remember watching the most popular boy in the 5th grade at Washington Street School riding his bike with Lynn (Linda?) D’Agostino on the handlebars up Tiffany Street. Lynn (Lisa?) said hello
Education popped back onto my radar this week, propelled by two separate online sources. An article at CityLab failed, crashed, burned, and then disintegrated as it took claims made in a report by an equity in education think tank and, in essence, unknowingly made the case that every claim which the report made was refuted
The attorneys who sold me their building ran nine window unit air conditioners to keep the offices cool during the summer. I know because they left me all of them. After 4 years of running between 3 and 6 of those units my wife and I made the decision to try something different. We had
Some quick shot updates and observations to start this week’s contribution. Kids are doing wheelies in areas with heavy concentrations of pedestrians in places other than Springfield as it turns out. Commercial Street in Provincetown is the finest example of a shared space corridor that I have seen anywhere. For cars and delivery trucks it
A few years ago my wife and I had spent a little time in Albany during the Rational Urbanism Summer Stalking Tour; we went to a movie in Bellows Falls (KMO), drove through Jim Kunstler’s home town, and spent a few nights at a B&B in Troy (Duncan Crary). I was unimpressed. Like Hartford it
The key question in poetic analysis is why is this poem a poem? That is to say, what is it about the expression of this idea as a poem that makes more more effective than if it had been expressed as an essay, a short story, or a novel. It’s a conceit, of course, but
I was buying radishes at the farmers’ market yesterday when this pretentious ass, you know the type, the kind who buys his veggies at a farmers’ market, tells me I’m cutting in front of the people standing beside me. Now, it turns out that there were two different lines depending on method of payment and
I don’t know if vindication is something I’m looking for most of the time when I put down my views here at RationalUrbanism since so much of what I express here is subjective. I don’t want my hometown to thrive because it’s demonstrably true that some fact or other makes it the rational outcome of
At the risk of giving you more insight than you might want into the inner workings of RationalUrbanism, I tried to multi-task by earning some step-dad bonus points as I slyly took some photographs intended to support an opinion at which I had already arrived. One problem: the experience didn’t match my expectation and so,