Society

One of my favorite pieces from the philosophy-focused webcomic Existential Comics. Usually, the comics from this guy are comedy-focused with philosophy as a theme,^[Which is not to imply he doesn’t know philosophy! He absolutely does.] and only sometimes make a point. But he also just posits ideas from time to time (as philosophers are keen to do), and this was one I found particularly enlightening.

According to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey, which queried 5,699 book authors in 2023, the median book-related income for traditionally published trade authors was between $15,000 and $18,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total climbed to a measly $23,329. Fifty-six percent of the respondents relied on side jobs to survive.

Most of us, we would like to think, would help out a relative, a friend and perhaps even a stranger in need. Maybe giving directions or lending a few quid. But how many of us would donate one of our organs to someone we will never meet?

archive.is link

Was reading an article and realized the quality feels really low. The speed and pay to publish method seems suspicious at best.

Though the parades in Rio are world-famous, attracting a global audience for Carnival each year, the greatest show in the world still belongs to these communities, where the parades—a pivotal part of the season’s festivities—originated. It is also here that these samba schools work hard year-round to honor the parades’ original purpose: bringing marginalized histories that aren’t taught in Brazilian schools to the national stage.

I had read all the stories. I had even written a few myself. In just five years, Paris’s cycling modal share has doubled, from 5 percent of all trips in 2020 to 11 percent in 2025. That’s mostly thanks to a total of 870 miles of bike lanes, about half of them installed over the past decade. But now that I’m here, I feel like it’s my duty to tell you the transformation that’s occurred is even more dramatic than described. Since I’ve biked all around Paris for a total of three full days — which clearly makes me an expert — I can say this with confidence: Paris has made space for cyclists in a way that I simply have not seen in any other city.

I enrolled in MUS 253: Classical Guitar out of desperation. I’m an English professor, and since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, things have changed. I watched students, staff, colleagues, and administrators outsource their thinking to the machine, and the academy soon became a sham to me, a farce of its former self. I once taught students to spend time inside sentences, to wrestle with difficulty, to make productive use of their uncertainty by paying close attention to how language works on the page. We once sat inside paragraphs, dwelt inside language in its richness and complexity.

I was not hungry when I arrived at Taix on Thursday night, Los Angeles’s venerable, soon-to-close French restaurant and de facto museum of a long-gone era of fine dining. I’m rarely hungry when I go to Taix. Not because I don’t thoroughly enjoy their french onion soup, the mussels, or the decadent hamburger. I’m not hungry because it’s never my first stop of the night. Taix isn’t a destination. It’s a nexus point for LA.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for authorization to use military force in south-east Asia. His resolution passed unanimously in the House, and only two voices dissented in the Senate. As for the public, 77% of Americans said they trusted the government to do what is right, and more than 60% supported war.

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?

I remember my very first online search, back in 2001: “What is the meaning of life?”

‘What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke [and] you can drink Coke, too … The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is.”

My phone beeped, alerting me to a ride. I clicked to accept, and a few minutes later I pulled up beside an older lady in a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, about half an hour outside Washington, DC. She exchanged a few words in Spanish with the man who was waiting with her in the early-morning darkness and then slid into the back seat of my Subaru Outback. The fare was going to earn me less than $7.

I was raised on the scripture of the 1990s: Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. It was the Golden Rule. The dating equivalent of Slip, Slop, Slap. Whispered at sleepovers. Bolded in the margins of Dolly magazine. Never pick up on the first ring. Never say you’re free on a Saturday. Be the prize, not the contestant.

Should the buses be free? I may need to turn in my libertarian card – if I have not already done so, long ago – but the answer is yes, or very close to it. There are reasonable objections, but the case for free buses is much stronger than many people will grant. I would thus support Zohran Mamdani’s plan for free buses in New York City, although with some caveats for that city specifically, and think that many other cities should drop their fares.

Delivery workers have lost as much as $550 million in tips since Uber and DoorDash changed their apps so that the tip option appears only after customers place their orders, the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection charged in a new report.

When Toronto’s streetcars hit a rare open stretch of road, the metallic grind gives way to an airy electric hum, and for a fleeting moment, there is a feeling that one is hurtling along the knife’s edge of the future.

For more than a century, intercity buses have connected communities in ways no other mode can. They reach small towns, rural areas, and regions untouched by airlines or passenger rail. They serve people from all walks of life, but they are especially vital for millions of Americans earning under $50,000 a year, as well as students, seniors, military personnel, people with disabilities, and travelers priced out of flying or owning a car.

Like many American communities, Dublin, Ohio, grew from a small rural town in the 19th century into a sprawling suburb in the 20th. Today, it’s embracing a 21st-century development trend: walkability.

I think I found a rough barometer to measure how upbeat or relaxed a major city is.

People in mobility advocacy and traffic safety have known this issue for a very long time, and it’s never been popular to say publicly. Nobody wants to bad mouth the fire department. Nobody, myself included, questions the hard work of firefighters, from the volunteers, to the emergency service responders (EMT), to the marshals and chiefs, who save lives every day through rescue and preventative measures.

A number of [habitability] ordinances or bills have recently passed in states and cities across the U.S., including in Colorado, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. In Nevada, a habitability law was vetoed by the governor. Habitability can be a slippery concept. There’s a general common sense idea of what makes a dwelling habitable—comfort, safety, utilities—and then there’s the legally enforceable ‘implied warranty of habitability,’ which is the legal term for a landlord’s obligation to make a rental unit livable. The latter varies between municipalities and in some places doesn’t rise to what most would consider a reasonable minimum standard. (The state of Mississippi, for example, doesn’t require landlords to provide heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer, though they must maintain existing heating and cooling units. Arkansas doesn’t have any implied warranty of habitability at all.) In most municipalities, the implied warranty of habitability requires that units have working heat in the winter, running water, doors and windows that lock, working utilities, and no pests or environmental hazards.

The state’s Regional Transportation Authority, which oversees the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra commuter railroad and Pace suburban bus service, projected a $230 million 2026 budget deficit in October. The RTA proposed fare hikes for Metra and CTA to cover the fiscal deficit.

There is a shortage of over 106,000 homes across Colorado, according to a recent study by the Colorado State Demography Office. Nearly 90% of the lowest-income households in the state spend over one-third of their pretax income on rent or mortgage payments. That means they pay more on housing, as a percentage of their income, than is considered affordable.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles City Council Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee approved a motion that could lay the foundation for ending harmful parking requirements for new development.

First time I’ve seen the pedestrian crossing button pointing downward

A city traffic engineer credits the success to lower speed limits and smarter design.

In the spring of 2020, as the gravity and extent of the pandemic’s disruptions sank in, the chorus began. “New York City is dead forever,” one prominent commentator wrote. “San Francisco is the next Detroit — the handwriting is on the wall,” another declared. Urban office towers stood empty, downtown streets were deserted and doomsday forecasts abounded. With the rise of work-from-home, the cynics insisted, we were witnessing the beginning of the end of America’s dense, vibrant, economically essential cities.

Inspired by road safety innovations widely used in the Netherlands, several US cities are installing street crossings that can better protect pedestrians and bicyclists.

As we all know, Mamdani has proposed making New York City’s bus system free. Writer Matt Bruenig makes the case for Mamdani’s free bus idea on the basis that school bus systems and libraries are already free and he asked for a more of an enlightened debate on the utility of bus fares rather than a hyper-charged culture war. Well, I’m here to do that!

Trees provide cooling shade that can save lives. They absorb carbon pollution from the air and reduce stormwater runoff and the risk of flooding. Yet many builders perceive them as an obstacle to quickly and efficiently putting up housing.

BCU Labs is excited to unveil our Bike Stress Map. This is a tool that helps viewers to better understand how people riding bikes or other personal mobility devices likely experience stress caused by automobile traffic while traveling through the city.

In order to promote social mobility, we need to support physical mobility by investing in public transportation.

On May 2, 2025, I visited the BYD1 dealership in the Mexico City borough of Iztacalco. This just a few days before the end of my three-month remote-work and reporting journey around Mesoamerica, after starting in Mexico City in January 2025. While writing up this experience in late May 2025, as the U.S. executive branch and Congress endeavor to devastate the nation’s scientific and industrial base with senseless attacks on research funding and clean energy tax credits, this experience has become a bittersweet yet powerful source of hope and optimism for me.

Fewer cars. Faster travel. Less honking. And some questions we still can’t answer.

Good news for rail fans: Recently, Illinois legislators discussed a groundbreaking bill to launch statewide train service.

California has a major slate of housing law that’ll significantly push housing production this session and dramatically transform the state. There are three major proposed bills that have caught my eye. The first is Senate Bill 79, authored by state senator Scott Wiener (D - San Francisco), which is his fourth attempt at a transit-upzoning bill. SB 79 would re-zone areas around “high quality” transit stops, primarily rail stations, to allow for 6 - 7 story apartments within a quarter-mile of a major transit stations and 4 - 6 stories within a half-mile. The bill also removes a legal constraint on public transit agencies by allowing them to develop high-density housing and commercial properties on their public property with few restrictions. This is how East Asian countries approach mass transportation and it would provide alternative revenue for public transit by not leaving them dependent on fares and taxes for operations exclusively.

Modeled on towns in Italy and Greece built long before the advent of cars, Culdesac Tempe is what its developers call the country’s first neighborhood purposely built to be car free.

Every spring, Harvard’s freshmen are sorted across 12 residential houses. But the children of the 0.1 percent have a 13th option: 1075 Massachusetts Avenue. With a tenant directory resembling the Forbes Four Hundred, the 20-unit building is the go-to off-campus option for nepo babies at the Ivy League college.

A big problem with homeownership is that we ask it to do the impossible: We want it to remain affordable to young families while at the same time serving as a magical tool for accumulating personal wealth. But a house can’t build wealth while remaining affordable. The math is the math. The less affordable my house becomes, the more housing wealth I build. In fact, purchasing a home is never really a great investment unless your home grows less affordable in relative terms.

In the first month of congestion pricing, the MTA reported over 1 million fewer vehicle entries into the toll zone than would be expected without the program​, driving the significant traffic reduction seen above. It’s also worth noting that the above chart shows reduction in travel times rather than congestion—in many cases, congestion has completely disappeared, and the new travel times represent a congestion-free trip. This reduction reverses a years-long trend of rising traffic into Manhattan​ - congestion pricing took a worsening gridlock problem and solved a significant portion of it overnight. Additionally, while there were fears that congestion pricing would just re-route traffic to other boroughs, the data from the first months of congestion pricing suggests that traffic has not increased elsewhere in the city.

An hour and a half: That’s how long it used to take Juan Carlos Plata to travel to and from work along the winding, car-choked streets of La Paz, Bolivia.

A center-left think tank went viral for concluding in the aftermath of the 2024 election that Democrats “need to own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities”. Although the think tank doesn’t specify these governance issues, this is part of a larger and now very strong narrative that refers to homelessness and the impacts of encampments on local communities in Democratic areas. This has been a common post-2024 election autopsy from pundits mostly based out of the coasts: that Democratic-run cities with high homelessness and encampments are radicalizing housed citizens into voting against Democrats.

The large labor markets of big cities offer greater possibilities for workers to gain skills and experience through successively better employment opportunities. This “experience effect” contributes to the higher average wages that are found in big cities compared to the economy as a whole. Racial wage inequality is also higher in bigger cities than in the economy on average. We offer an explanation for this pattern, demonstrating that there is substantial racial inequality in the economic returns to work experience acquired in big cities. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 we find that each year of work experience in a big city increases Black and Latinx workers’ wages by about one quarter to half as much as White workers’ wages. A substantial amount of this inequality can be explained by further racial disparities in the benefits of high-skill work experience. This research identifies a heretofore unknown source of inequality that is distinctly urban in nature, and expands our knowledge of the challenges to reaching interracial wage equality.

In nearly every American city, state and local ordinances dictate the minimum number of parking spaces required for everything from homes and restaurants to retail. Many of these regulations have remained unchanged since the 1960s, forcing today’s businesses, residents and cities to conform to the outdated priorities of planners from generations ago.

Despite a population of 37 million, there’s relatively little congestion and pollution here since the majority of its residents rely on public transit rather than cars. But while Tokyo’s mass transportation system may serve as a global success story, it may not be replicable, because its organic growth over the decades has fostered a unique culture of transit.

Does not fit 100% to technology category, but

Along with the hype, the ambitious experiment—building a “car-free” neighborhood in one of the most auto-dependent population centers on the planet—has aroused skepticism. An article by the nonprofit advocacy organization Strong Towns, for instance, contends that Culdesac is a far cry from “the incremental urbanism and thickening our cities need. A dozen or even a thousand Culdesacs can’t solve that problem,” because they would lack long-term growth benefits including “the resilience of a system where many hands have built the neighborhood and have a financial stake in it” and would reflect “a zoning and finance stream that favors industrial over incremental production.”

Archived link: https://archive.ph/BdFwc

Why hasn’t Oakland and the urban East Bay’s public transit system been improved, even as city gets more congested with population growth? Why does Oakland have significantly worse bus service in 2025 than it did in 1990, despite having 40,000 more residents today? Why has San Francisco been building out new subway lines and streetcar routes in areas they’re redeveloping for the last 40 years, while Oakland — whose population increased by 12% in the last decade alone — hasn’t added a single new rapid transit station or line since 1972? Why does Oakland have basically zero plans in the works to expand fast, rapid transit in its city — except for a regional rail plan that mostly is about passing through West Oakland?

State transportation officials on Friday narrowed down the designs being considered for the reconstruction of Interstate 94 between Minneapolis and St. Paul, eliminating options with strong community support that would have removed the highway.

The connection between transportation and health may not be obvious. But how people get around communities is interconnected with physical and mental wellbeing. Easy access to public transit is linked with direct health impacts, like increased levels of physical activity. Transportation also opens doors to other factors that contribute to health — as Sylvaine found with her health care appointments.

Following horrifying revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic sexual assaults and trafficking of underage girls, the United States Department of Justice has been forced to publicly release millions of the late sex offender’s emails and texts.

Influencers have had a bad time of it at restaurants recently. There they are, just trying to record a quick video and take a few pictures of their lunch, and restaurateur Jeremy King (of the Ivy and the Wolseley in London) goes and writes an article saying they’re ruining the dining experience of “bona fide guests” – something he says staff are “desperately trying to stop”. I’ve read pieces calling TikTok the end of the London restaurant scene. Friends’ parents have even said they would get up and leave if they were sitting next to anyone filming their meal.

From ancient times, people have always tried to pass on messages to others by drawing pictures. Sometimes these pictures are self-explanatory, like the drawings of mountains or trees on a map. Sometimes they represent quite complex ideas that need to be learned. Egyptian hieroglyphs are one example, mathematical symbols another.

Robin Giles did not quite believe the rumors that passed among his neighbors. He couldn’t yet picture the carnage: pastures bloodied by the carcasses of sheep and goats with highly distinctive wounds—bite marks at the throat, abdominal cavities emptied of lungs and liver, entrails left to rot in the Hill Country sun. Coyotes.

Most Americans say race doesn’t drive their daily decisions, even as the country feels more divided than ever, a new national survey finds.

The utility room is where many of the more intimate aspects of our family life unfold: parenting conferences about so-called “natural consequences,” muttered curse words, and quick visits with my secret chocolate stash. For one strange month last January, it was also where I read several Stephen King novels in bite-size increments between dinner prep and bath time. And maybe that is why I keep thinking about its architectural cousin and opposite: what I call the aspirational pantry.

There’s a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you “lose” one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured in a metric and deployed at scale.

On Valentine’s Day, there’s the temptation to believe that somewhere out there is “The One": a soulmate, a perfect match, the person you were meant to be with.

A few years ago I spent more time than I thought would be necessary to find a quality historical resource for a broad introduction to West African history from West African scholars. I found this instead, which covers the entire continent and its many regions and is composed by scholars of those regions.

Out on the water, paddling across the straits between two small rocky islands, the dusk fades and the stars appear. Jennie has done her best to coach me in local geography before darkness, showing me the map with its patchwork of islands and bays, and describing the shape of each landmark. All to no avail. I’m more than happy to be lost at sea, leaning back in my kayak to gaze at the constellations, occasionally checking that the red light on the stern of her kayak is still visible ahead. We stop in the sheltered lee of an island and hear a hoot. “Eurasian eagle owl,” says Jennie. “They nest here.” Then she switches off all the lights. “Let’s paddle slowly close to shore. Watch what happens.”

The city of Shenzhen is one of the most striking examples of China’s super-rapid development in recent decades. As recently as 1955, it was just a collection of fishing villages in the Pearl River Delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton), with an estimated 5,000 residents. The name “Shenzhen” meant “deep drainage ditch.” It was nowheresville, a patch of emptiness only distinguished by proximity to better-known cities. In American terms, a patch of Long Island that was mostly empty lots.

AI tools like Sudowrite, Novelcrafter, and Squibler promise full-length books in minutes—or seconds. AI-produced books have begun to flood Amazon, and range from kids and coloring books to derivative novels and faux biographies repurposed from Wikipedia pages. It’s a mess, and it is only going to get worse.

Happy MLK Day!

There’s a certain serendipity that happens at a potluck. Foods that have never mingled together find themselves side by side: jambalaya in a crockpot, a cardboard pizza box, a plastic tub of Trader Joe’s hummus, a platter of gluten-free brownies. None of it really makes sense when scooped together onto a plate, but all of the flavors blend like fast friends—and if you’re lucky, oftentimes, the people do, too.

In the last 15 years, a linked series of unprecedented technologies have changed the experience of personhood across most of the world. It is estimated that nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.

Understanding the significance of our own lives requires some understanding of scale. “Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences,” Marcia Bjornerud, a geologist, writes. The Anthropocene, she suggests, is a fine time to “adopt a geologic respect for time and its capacity to transfigure, destroy, renew, amplify, erode, propagate, entwine, innovate, and exterminate.” We need to know how to navigate our epoch: to recognize our profusion of scales and strive to understand, amidst their collisions, not just how to care for the world beyond us but how a person can be, what it means to stand as a morally vested individual.

There aren’t many escapes from the grim onslaught of terrible news these days. You can stare at a blank wall, obsessively count the hairs on your arm, or, in a true moment of desperation, ponder the state of global fashion. I prefer the last one. I love being on the cutting edge of style, peacocking out in the decaying slopfest that is our planet. A crisp, well-made suit is a cure for all manner of emotionally trying times. I relish being hyper-aware of the goings-on of fashion, so I was one of the first sorry souls to learn of the current global obsession with flimsy canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags.

In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.

A new year is upon us. Traditionally, we use this time to look forward, imagine and plan.

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

‘A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.’ VS Naipaul’s first rule for good writing is a popular one. From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter.

Two Palestinians are gathering donations to create a public library in Gaza, after Israel’s war and genocide destroyed nearly all existing libraries, schools, and universities. The two men, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim, are avid readers who have spent years trying to save books as they struggled to survive in Gaza.

We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can’t define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.