A good friend of mine in Philadelphia just recommended a new book to me by Diana Lind called, Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing. I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t in good conscience recommend it to you all or… Read More
I have been trying (albeit not very hard) to come up with the best way to describe the stinky hand sanitizer that is going around these days. Then today somebody in the office described it as bad tequila and I immediately thought, “yup, that’s exactly… Read More
I was speaking to some friends in New York City over the weekend and they said to me, “you know what Brandon, we don’t really go out at night anymore. It doesn’t feel safe. There are homeless people everywhere and they’ve started to get very… Read More
This is an interesting New York Times photo essay about “how giant ships are built.” I wasn’t aware of some of these statistics, and maybe the same goes for you: 90% of all traded goods are carried on ships 90% of global shipbuilding happens in… Read More
The New York Times is running an opinion series right now called, The America We Need. It is all about how the US might emerge from this crisis “with a fair, resilient society.” This piece by Carol Galante covers many of the topics that we… Read More
As many of you know, I am huge of Malcolm Gladwell. And one of the things that he has popularized through his writing is this idea that we all need to spend at least 10,000 hours specializing on someting in order to become truly exceptional… Read More
I am surprised, although maybe I shouldn’t be, by how quickly many seem to be allegedly turning their back on cities. According to the New York Times, cities were “losing their allure” well before this pandemic, and this might just be the tipping point. The… Read More
Just over a month ago, as North America was beginning its lockdown, the Europeans were the ones showing us how to stay sane in quarantine through balcony orchestras and viral internet videos. Now we’re looking to them for how best to reopen the economy and… Read More
Smartphone user data is hugely valuable at a time like this. Which is why governments all over the world from Israel to South Korea are using aggregated telecom data to try and track how their citizens are moving during this pandemic. Some are calling this… Read More
Building new housing — in the places that really need it — is exceedingly difficult. This recent New York Times article by Conor Dougherty is a good example of that. It tells the story of a man named Steve Falk. Steve was previously city manager… Read More
