Charm, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps. But I can’t escape the conviction that it would be an aesthetic crime not to place Guanajuato, Mexico at or near its apex of any list of the most charming cities in North America. This colonial era gem of Read more
“It’s not my Seattle anymore” My wife’s dear auntie, a lifelong Seattleite, mostly “It looks like one of those matchboxes sold already” Woman talking to her boyfriend on the street, Fremont District, June 2022 I’ve come to realize that I have a perhaps unique perspective on my natal city. I Read more
It’s been a dark month in America. With the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, I had resigned myself to again write a monthly post primarily about violence, the central topic of my post for April. And I do have a couple of thoughts and links to share about gun violence. Read more
As I close out another school year in my beloved but flat Sacramento, I find myself yearning for a big city vibe and perhaps even more to walk up and down hills. One of the many pleasures on my March trip to Los Angeles was the opportunity to walk the Read more
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot once wrote. Thankfully, this has rarely been true in my own life. But it seems wrong to begin any urban news and ideas column for this April 2022 without briefly foregrounding the cruelty and destruction imposed by the Russian military on Mariupol and Read more
The world’s attention swerved hard to Ukraine this month, and so did my news consumption. If you haven’t listened already, I especially commend Ezra Klein’s sequence of seven podcasts on the war. Klein is back from paternity leave in a big way. In particular, check out the episode on how Read more
Several events and ideas have caught my attention this gorgeous, perhaps too gorgeous, California February. Among them are the effort to redress the wrongs of urban renewal in Santa Monica, the use of the ballot to force change on homelessness in Sacramento, the intersection of education policy and building restriction Read more
I’ve been sitting for a while with Bryce Covert’s July 20 New York Times Guest Essay “8 Hours a Day, 5 Days a Week is Not Working for Us.” The piece makes an affirmative case that Americans ought to spend less time on the job. It struck a chord with Read more
The assertion that beauty must somehow play a role in shared urban prosperity seems obviously true, not to mention a healthy challenge to the notion that prosperity is only about economics. In fact any ideal-type definition of urban prosperity ought to include several essential qualities that, like beauty, are simultaneously Read more
Back in March, in the middle of another year’s push with my middle students on our statistics unit, I noticed a statistical claim that, if true, struck me as nothing short of a miraculous. According to researchers at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, changes in the Read more