I’ve had several reasons for taking a break from prospericity.net over the last few months—three preps at school, wanting to make my novel project a success, not knowing what to say about the chaos and immorality already wrought by the new Trump administration, and, oh yes, a cancer diagnosis. Perhaps Read more…
” … New York / Where I am now; which is a logarithm / Of other cities. Our landscape / Is alive with filiations, shuttlings; / Business is carried on by look, gesture / Hearsay …” From “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery, 1974 In the early 1970s, Read more…
I’ve decided to describe my recent trip to Vancouver, British Columbia in the context of four one-sentence notes I wrote on my phone while I was there. But I also want to make the upfront statement that I loved Vancouver when I last visited there as a teenager, and I Read more…
There are a lot of beautiful things about Mexico, and a lot of hard ones. But if there is one single thing that keeps me coming back it may be the clever urban design and intense sense of public culture. I speak fluent though accented Spanish, which over the years Read more…
Prosperity has many potential definitions. But if we read the concept broadly, as a state of happiness and contentment and not merely as the economic accumulation of things and experiences, then other kinds of ideas and policy concerns might boil to the surface. I feel I need to say this Read more…
Maybe TS Eliot was right that April is the cruelest month. But here in California March was relentless. Atmospheric river after river doused hopes that the dark and cold might end. Even my third spring break sojourn to Los Angeles yielded downpour instead of sunshine, block-long puddles splashing down La Read more…
February turns out to have been a good month to muse about housing. For instance, this opinion article by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic got me going on the question of whether lack of housing might truly, as Lowrey proposes, be the root cause behind the decisions of San Francisco Read more…
In the distant time, when a now mythical subculture known as “moderate Republican” once existed amongst the folded hills and valleys of America, I landed a job as wetlands policy coordinator for the California Resources Agency. The job, really a glorified internship, played to my strengths as a recent elite Read more…
For my end of 2022 post I want to reflect on a social institution for which I’m personally grateful, and that is foundational to shared urban prosperity. That institution, as you have no doubt already gleaned from the heading above, is organized labor. One immediate reason I’m grateful for labor Read more…
Perhaps like you, the eventful year of 2020 led me to do several unusual things. One was to rebuild this blog. Another was to attend my first protest since a bright, cold Manhattan afternoon, eighteen years earlier, devoted to speaking out against George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq. Read more…