Topic

cities

A collection of 50 issues

Letters from Paris: On cities as museums.

It’s springtime in Paris and I have something to confess (although the fact that I feel the need to dub it a confession makes me sad). I’ve been in Paris for almost 10 days and have only been to one museum (no, it wasn’t the Louvre). And,

Letters from Paris: Things Parisians Like.

The thing I love about Parisians is they just don’t give a damn. And that, contrary to popular belief, they aren’t rude. In fact, they’re wonderfully polite. I think people don’t understand that there are a number of things that are said and that have to

Letters from Paris: Flâneur as Voleur.

PARIS — Aggravated robberies are up more than 40 percent in the Paris public transport system, and the government places blame for the rise on the attractiveness of smartphones. See: Smartphones Lure Sticky Fingers in Paris The interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, calls it the “iPhone effect,” and the police talk of

An apiary, a city, and beautiful cinematography.

Made by Hand / No 3 The Beekeeper. Via Made by Hand on Vimeo. First I wanted chickens. Now I want bees. I don’t have either yet, but…maybe this summer. Will and I have been learning about wonderful things in our research on sustainable agriculture. Things about biodynamic farming,

My city, myself.

From Mapping Home: Learning a new city, remembering the old. By Aleksandar Hemon I returned to places I had known my whole life in order to capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its

On cities and multiple mental models.

Looking down Dame Street toward Trinity College. Dublin, Ireland. Photo by Callie Neylan, February 2012. What I love about cities is everything. What I love about traveling to other cities is how it expands and challenges ones mental models. As Charlie Munger expounds, having multiple mental models is a necessity

On urban semiotics and self image.

In This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide To Semiotics, author Sean Hall outlines key semiotic concepts (in which are cloaked Peirce’s sign, object, and interpretant): Sender (who) Intention (with what aim) Message (says what) Transmission (by which means) Noise (with what interference) Receiver (to whom)

A Second Sunday. A first month.

I didn’t know of Jim Haynes until I read about him this week in Leo Hollis’s Cities Are Good For You: The Genius of the Metropolis. He’s an American in Paris who, for almost 40 years, has held an “endless dinner party” in his apartment at 38

On how good design makes food taste better.

I never knew I was a foodie gourmande until I didn’t have access to good food. Misery loves company, and some of my first conversations with my friend Paolo, who moved to D.C. from the West Coast about a year or so after I did, were about how