Fair—and Foul

My mom recommended that I read The Devil in the White City in advance of my recent trip to Chicago. So I did. And I liked it. Crime, history, architecture, the seam-bursting vitality of a great city: What’s not to like? Since the book sold quite well, a wave of copycat works—books that use criminous [...]

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The “Importance” of Being Ugly

You can’t fight City Hall. But you can fight over City Hall. And now, it seems, a squabble is unfolding in Boston over whether to raze and replace the current seat of the city’s government—the wretched, Sixties-era slab that squats in Government Center Plaza, like an ugly concrete frog on a forbidding concrete lily pad. [...]

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Maintenance Charge

This week, in its “Innovators Issue,” the New Yorker reviews a book whose gist is that innovation isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The true power of a technology, argues David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, often emerges from the way people use it [...]

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Bus Stop, Bus Stop

Why don’t more people ride city buses? Is it because the buses don’t feature wireless Internet service? Is it because there are, as yet, no “intelligent” bus stops—“[c]urved and gleaming like a Frank Gehry structure” and “wrapped in an LED ‘skin’ that can play video”? Not so much, I think.
The main piece (“Bus 2.0”) in [...]

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