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My New Substack! “Architecture and the City”
Vibrant cities are places of making and selling, of transaction and speculation, of consumption and creativity. They are cauldrons of wealth creation—though too often of despair. Cities are also invaluable as places for people to find their identities and their tribe, and remake and realize themselves. Architecture exists to tease out the innate expressiveness and Read more
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Where Have I Been?
Like everyone I’ve been shifting gears as the fickle winds of technology, which now regards blogs as passé, take me. I’ve been focusing more on journalism and book writing (more about my current work in progress here), and was for a time forced out of the blogging habit by work with the City of New Read more
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Cities’ rise from the dead shows why extortion is bad
Among the many distressing aspects of the presidential impeachment now underway is the perception that extorting a foreign leader to investigate the President’s rivals is unsavory but not important enough to merit impeachment. The President’s defenders are pushing this specious line unrelentingly presumably because they think a lot of people will accept it. This totally Read more
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It Should Not Be Bad for Cities to be Rich
If you missed it, it’s worth catching up on the brilliant Emily Badger’s Upshot column in the New York Times that appealingly focuses on cities scared of becoming Manhattanized, or San Franciscoed, or Seattleified. These cities create a great deal of wealth and tens of thousands of jobs that pay six figures. But they Read more
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Can Amazon Be . . . Gasp . . . Good for New York?
“Stop Amazon!” is increasingly the mantra of activists in New York, referring to the new $5 billion campus the company is slated to develop in Long Island City, Queens. With righteous rage, city council members at a hearing demanded the company stop cooperating with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement on facial-recognition software and end their union-resisting Read more
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Questions for Brett Kavanaugh
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will no doubt be subjected to detailed questioning this week about his substantial record as a jurist. Kavanaugh has been groomed through the equivalent of a far-right judicial finishing school, and has reliably reflected those very conservative views of the law. Indeed, the farthest he seems to have strayed from Read more
James S. Russell 