Urbanism

Call it Jewsonia: the week that Norman Podhoretz passes on, I’m sure he’d be pleased that Commentary Magazine published “The New American Jews: A manifesto for change, survival, and national flourishing” by Tal Fortgang and Ella Fortgang.

More [Jews] should also consider affordable, growing cities with small Jewish populations such as Omaha and Reno. This is an economic issue with a significant political dimension: We will continue to be taken for granted as constituents as long as we remain clustered…

It’s a kick-ass ⁠— not to mention world-saving ⁠— manifesto.

The Londonist covers the Elizabeth Line opening, May 24th, 2022.

eVTOL Innovation YouTube channel extols the Lilium as the most promising of the upcoming ways we will fly.

Pleased to see that Petach Tikva intends to effectively expand Hayarkon Park eastwards.

The plan includes 1,250 dunams (312.5 acres) for parklands, 1,066 dunam (266.5 acres) extension of the national park, 107 dunams (26.75 acres for sport, 642 dunams (135.5 acres) for agriculture, and 639 dunams (159.75 acres) for housing and employment. The plan will be sent for approval by the Central Israel Planning & Building Committee.

In this fun review of the Succession episode “Lion in the Meadow” (though surely a better title would have been “King Kong Comes to Dance”), Andrew Gruttadaro quotes the episode’s closing line “a timely fucking Evian”. Having watched that scene a few times over last night, I thought, no, there is no adjective between “timely” and “Evian”. But rewatching the scene, I’m wrong ⁠— I didn’t even hear the fucking word, that’s how much we’ve debased it.

A timely Evian; like everything else in this episode, what a great line! And this review transcribes much of the juiciness. The author also has a short Twitter thread on one of its great set-pieces, Adrien Brody’s Josh Aaronson’s layers.

Geoff Boeing at Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis, USC, on the griddiness of cities ⁠— what an awesome topic for a rigorous paper!

All 16 cities with the lowest entropies are in the US and Canada. Outside of the US/Canada, Mogadishu, Kyoto, and Melbourne have the lowest orientation entropies. Surprisingly, the city with the highest entropy, Charlotte, is also in the US. São Paulo and Rome immediately follow it as the next highest cities. Chicago, the most ordered city, has a φ of 0.90, while Charlotte, the most disordered, has a φ of 0.002.

Venice, Mogadishu, Helsinki, Jerusalem, and Casablanca have the shortest median street segment lengths (indicating fine-grained networks) while Kiev, Moscow, Pyongyang, Beijing, and Shanghai have the longest (indicating coarse-grained networks).

Londonist visits the two new Tube stations, Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms.

If you do business in LatAm, you’ve got a Miami office. Prodigal son Antonio García Martínez returns to Miami, now on a Substack-fueled writing mission.

I was raised in the Miami of the wild 80s and 90s, and more or less abandoned the city for 20 years before going back due to a family illness circa 2014. Much to my everlasting shock, all the twee fineries of overpaid SF tech life were there: pretentious craft beer poured by bearded lumbersexuals inside stylized industrial loft spaces; whimsically-named, garishly-painted food-trucks clustered in parking lots-turned-parks serving Korean/Mexican fusion tacos; pompous ‘Third Wave’ coffee places (in a city where espresso was already ubiquitous) featuring pierced baristas conjuring a pourover with all the seriousness of a priest performing the eucharistic miracle; glass-clad, high-rise condo buildings, indistinguishable from the same douche-cubes in SF’s SoMa (“GRANITE COUNTERTOPS, STAINLESS STEEL APPLIANCES”) growing like mushrooms in a dewy field throughout the formerly sleepy downtown.

With this panegyric to airport culture, Eva Wiseman riffs on a Vice story about young Britons going to the airport to get (earthly) high and hang out. As a Briton I find this awesome, even while as an Israeli I find it a bit pitiful (ie, just go to the beach!).

Cool ⁠— 10 upcoming skyscrapers. Interestingly, most of them seem to be in Toronto. I love the Zaha Hadid one, if that ever gets built.

Wow, after 5 years Yehuda Halevi St. is reopening, complete with underground light rail station. Will I still love you? Even more?

A series of great photos around London’s Tube from a book by Luke Abgaimoni in Londonist.

“There is no linguistic justice without racial justice,” as quoted in The Linguistic Society of America’s open letter to call to remove Steven Pinker.

What a fakakta ⁠— China must be licking its chops as we stand around pissing on each other’s piss.

Pictures of the glorious Soviet metro stations, a photography book by Christopher Herwig.

This Gates Foundation presentation on global inequality is clear, straightforward, well-written, nicely illustrated with animated graphs, and surely worth the time of anyone who can access it.

Cool graphic article in Bloomberg on US land use.

The Closing of the Hi-Gloss Colonel of American Letters Tom Wolfe’s Eyes. The New York Times obituary by Deirdre Carmody and William Grimes.

Even as the USA is troubled at the national level, it is often flourishing locally, argues James Fallows, who has spent five years criss-crossing the country with his wife.

“America is becoming more like itself again,” he writes. “More Americans are trying to make it so, in more places, than most Americans are aware.”

This is good, it seems to me; better than if the reverse were true.

If you’re worried about Facebook, just take a look at WeWork.

This 1-hour Smithsonian production is a history of America in the Roaring 20s, with amazing newly-colorized footage. Richly effortlessly narrated by Liev Schreiber, it remedies our black & white impression of this not-so-distant mirror. There are things I should have learned about in school but did not, particularly the Greenwood massacre.

New York Times photo essay: parking and staying overnight at the Wal-Mart car park.

He had me with his first-paragraph mention of Trattoria Da Enzo, my favorite. I’ve forwarded to visitors this panegyric to Rome by the incoming New York Times’ bureau chief. A lot of attractive restaurants mentioned and described. [via Juan Carlos Bronstein, who was unimpressed by the tone, as are many others in the comments]

Thank you, earthhandsandhouses.org. May the movement flourish…

From TED, Elon Musk is our leader.

This article features a list by Dan McNichol of suggested public works projects throughout the USA. He is author of The Roads That Built America, a history of the Interstate highway system (of which I actually have a copy).

At last ⁠— birth control for rats! A Long Read in The Guardian.

Brightonians spend more on coffee than Londoners.

On decoupling homosexuality from gayness, and more interestingly, vice versa.

Cary Grant’s 1963 op-ed in This Week magazine on dressing well.

Considering how central it is for Londoners, Why is the Tube so underrepresented in stories? The writer suggests that, like sex and prayer, and unlike on the street, any human significance down there is internal.

Surely the definitive article about internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz. Only eating white or yellow food seems a glaring sign that not everything there was quite right.

On Google Glass:
What happens in Vegas stays… at Google.

America’s housing bubble was the last gasp of suburbanism. In the information age, we need to get back to the cities.

Subways to scale. [via Subtraction]

See Lileks back skillfully into his Solzhenitsyn eulogy then relate his daughter’s birthday outing, both in the same piece.