Tag: American cities
Public Pools Are a Blessing
In this summer of heat domes and record-breaking global temperatures, finding a place to cool off is more important than ever. You can go to a movie or a museum—if you want to buy a ticket. You can head to an air-conditioned bar—if you don’t have kids who also need to escape the heat. Or you can just stay at home and blast your own air conditioner—a rather lonely prospect, if you ask me.
But there’s a better way to
Why There Are So Few Places to Hang Out
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Coffee shops, churches, libraries, and concert venues are all shared spaces where mingling can take place. Yet the hustle and bustle of modern social life can pose challenges to relationship-building—even in spaces designed for exactly that.
In this episode of How to Talk to People, we analyze how American efficiency culture holds us back from connecting in public, whether social spaces create a culture of interaction,
Tyre Nichols’s Death: Can Memphis Change Its Police Culture?
On Sunday morning, the Reverend Earle Fisher was trying to keep his sermon toned down. He’s the pastor at Abyssinian Baptist, but he was guest-preaching at the more buttoned-down Trinity Christian Methodist Episcopal. The thing is that low-energy Earle Fisher still outpaces most ministers at their most fervid, and this was no typical Sunday.
Fisher, one of Memphis’s most prominent criminal-justice activists, was preaching just two days after the release of video footage of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols
Why It’s So Hard to Get a Restaurant Reservation Right Now
In Mexico City, there is an airy, sun-filled restaurant called Contramar that offers a whole grilled snapper, flayed and then smeared with red chilis on one side, and green herbs on the other. The fish arrives on a minimalist wooden plate, surrounded by a series of small accouterments—sliced limes; tortillas; silky-smooth black beans; a shallow bowl of creamy, verdant sauce that looks like it was probably made with avocado.
I have to speculate on ingredients here because although I’ve seen
War on Drugs Logic and Overdose Deaths
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Observers disagree about law enforcement’s case against Donald Trump, the former president whose Florida mansion was recently searched by federal officials in pursuit of classified documents. None of us knows whether Trump will face charges––or the
End Times in Aspen: How to Kill a Newspaper
Here in Aspen, the air is thin, the snow is perfect, and money is everywhere. This is a singular American town in many respects. Among them is this: Aspen had, until very recently, two legitimate daily newspapers, The Aspen Times and the Aspen Daily News. At a moment when local newspapers face manifold threats to their existence and more and more American cities become news deserts, Aspen was the opposite: a news geyser. The town’s corps of
How Zoning Broke the American City
Until recently, zoning was a sleepy backwater in the policy world. The mere thought of a weeknight hearing or a 700-page ordinance was once enough to make even the most eager wonk’s eyes glaze over. If a layperson knew anything about zoning, chances are she didn’t have an opinion about it. The rules dictating where and how Americans lived and worked attracted curiously little attention.
A decade of urban upheaval has changed all of that. Amid ongoing crises of housing
What Historic Preservation Is Doing to American Cities
When news broke earlier this year that the modest but attractive house on Long Island known as Geller I was going to be demolished, the outcry was immediate. The home’s significance in architectural history was beyond question. Its designer, Marcel Breuer, was among the most acclaimed of the mid-20th-century modernists and one of the few whose name is familiar to those with only a passing interest in architecture. These facts ultimately meant little. Geller I—the first of two buildings that
Community Input Caused the Housing Crisis
Development projects in the United States are subject to a process I like to call “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Some refer to this as participatory democracy.
Across the country, angry residents and neighborhood associations have the power to delay, reshape, and even halt entirely the construction of vital infrastructure. To put a fine point on it: Deference to community input is a big part of why the U.S. is suffering from a nearly 3.8-million-home shortage and has