Finally, why are there so many vacant lots even in economically healthy cities? Grabar tells us that Los Angeles is full of unbuildable lots because the parking requirements are impossible to meet, financially or in terms of space, something that is true for most American cities overall. Parking requirements have rendered existing traditional cities unusable as raw material for development rather than only as blank slates; they’ve broken the continuity of the physical and geographical history of these places, disregarded the reasons for how and why they were built in the first place. A radically different pattern is now required, one that is at odds with these places as they exist. “Los Angeles banned itself,” says a tour guide in old downtown LA.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/huge-effect-of-parking-policy-on-how-we-live
Once you see the effects of making sufficient car space in a town, it’s impossible to unsee. I’m not rabidly anti-car – in fact, I love a good road trip with motor hotels and diners as much as anyone. But since people spend millions every year to marvel at the dense, picturesque, highly communal places built prior to cars, it is worth asking: What’s the happy medium between our auto-centric urban planning and the density that seems to encourage more community, especially in a time of growing loneliness?
In Mario Kart 8, choosing your driver, kart’s body, tires, and glider isn’t just about style — it’s as crucial as your racing skills to win a race. Ever wondered how to truly find the best ones?
https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav
The Internet remains undefeated.
The Arkansas Delta is a landscape continually in flux, made and remade, often violently, by earthly and human forces. What was, for millennia, an expansive forest of cypress, tupelo, pine, oak, and persimmon, and a complex system of rivers, swamps, and upland prairies, is today a largely rationalized landscape of rice and cotton fields, dewatered through a 5,000-mile network of drainage ditches and canals, and harvested by massive, chaff-spewing machines. 1 Dotted with towns still often (informally) segregated by race, where historic buildings succumb to planned demolitions to avoid the liabilities of unplanned ones, the region embodies, and in many ways magnifies, the paradoxes of a century of American “progress.”
https://placesjournal.org/article/the-sunk-country-arkansas-delta/
There are still so many mysterious places, particularly in the Deep South, to my PNW-raised historical recall, and I think it’s about time we had a US-centric Bourdain-style series to really explore how wonderful the US is in so many ways, particularly for our endless bickering about how fragmented we are (I write this a day after someone tried to shoot Trump).
The majority of people that unironically call themselves leaders seem to be fighting a constantly losing rearguard action around what their area of competence actually is. Leadership in the absence of a skill is just aspiring to run a cult of personality. I am assured that while they can’t program, they know a lot about running I.T projects. Then all our projects run late, but I am assured they actually know a lot about finance. Then we are unprofitable, but I am assured they know a lot about retaining staff. Then the staff leave, and I have most recently been assured that they are working hard on increasing salaries – that must be the reason everyone is leaving because it couldn’t be that they’ve lost faith in leadership.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/leadership-is-a-hell-of-a-drug/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=working
A hilarious if oft-scathing read on the strange phenomenon of modern corporate leadership/management. Having been through the brunt of rising the ranks to people management myself, I sympathize with the poor put-upon middle managers of the world in an era where the pandemic, the latest trends in virtue signaling amid quicksand social mores, and now the rife incompetence of universities combined to produce a perfect storm of BS. But yeah, a lot of people somehow also buy into and celebrate such oddities, or worse, try to exercise their power in self-serious ways.
The problem for our young people is that this kind of condescending, talking-down-to is nearly universal in our present civilization, and the White House isn’t helping. Marketers, entertainers, politicians both red and blue, many churches, and schools alike are in the habit of communicating with the public this way, and the result is inevitable: the continuous downward leveling of our capacity for discourse. As everyone gets used to being talked to in this way, everyone also gets more and more comfortable talking in this stunted, juvenile manner. We become less capable of understanding, let alone thinking, thoughts like “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground,” and find instead that “What these dead guys did here was pretty cool. We’re super-excited to be here at Gettysburg!” is more natural and meaningful to us.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2013/12/liberal-arts-educational-technology-language/
In my work, I frequently receive feedback that my research/writing is too complex or wordy. Or, even, aimed at an overly sophisticated audience and thus not friendly to the broader public. I’ve grown somewhat resigned to this, and always take it seriously because often it is good editors that point out that I simply wrote poorly and could be more concise. But at times when it is not valid beyond a concern for this mysterious, semi-educated audience, I do get a little sad. Words are powerful, primarily because a multitude of them are necessary to convey nuanced ideas. We are losing nuance, like McLuhan and Postman foresaw, and I don’t think that loss of such nuance is unrelated to not only the death of bipartisanship but also our inability to fix basic things, like aging infrastructure. We are losing the capacity to describe complicated things.
“It was the biggest mansion I had ever been to,” says a 22-year-old who went to one of the early parties. Security at the gate was charging $1,500 for a table upstairs, he says, and $500 downstairs. Buying a table came with bottle service. If you brought girls, you got in free. Vincent, who escorted the 22-year-old and his girlfriends to their table, told him he was the owner, which he believed until on a later visit he met Gargiulo, who said no, he was the owner. The parties were nearly as wild as the neighbors imagined. “I’ve never been to a party like that,” says the 22-year-old. “I’d get there at, like, 8 p.m. and wouldn’t leave until 4 p.m. the next day.” He saw “people sucking the air out of balloons.” (The housemates describe the admission charges as “suggested donations” and say they’re not responsible for what other people did at the house.)
https://www.curbed.com/article/squatters-rights-california-beverly-hills-los-angeles.html?src=longreads&utm_medium=email
No words, and not much sympathy for the rich neighbors either, but something wild enough you simply gotta read it.
A growing number of farmers are looking to rebuild the microbial ecosystem by adding beneficial microbes into the soil. These microbes can be grown using specific composting systems, such as vermicomposting, and then extracted into a liquid form that can be applied in furrow with the seed at planting or used as a seed coating, soil drench, or foliar spray. This approach can accelerate the transition toward healthier soils while providing a low cost, environmentally friendly alternative to chemical applications. While adoption of this practice is still in its infancy, with only a fraction of American farmland being actively improved though regenerative methods, the results so far have been exceptionally promising.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/sustainable-living/saving-the-soil-saving-the-farm
I don’t know when, but at a certain point, the industrial approach to farming has to be reformed – we can’t fix our healthcare without fixing our food system, for example.
There are secrets within the old houses of Baltimore. The secrets are stashed away in attics and hidden under floorboards and buried in privies.
When Joanna Meade’s family moved intoa1910 house in Roland Park, she tried to picture all the residents who hadcome before her. How many hands had turned…
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/culture/lifestyle/spaeth-underhill-love-letters-baltimore-WCNUBB6QEVEJDGRUXVHKF7JAGI/
It’s amazing how much of the past we can forget or can be lost, relatively swiftly. As the birth of my first kid approaches, I think more and more often of legacy. To quote Hamilton: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? (And yes, I still love Hamilton, like a proud unrepentant millennial.)
In obsessing over who controls Westminster, Washington, D.C., or other power centres, while hoping that green growth techno-fixes will enable them to spread the love from the centre of the nation-state, this kind of traditional leftwing politics has become scarcely distinguishable from the self-justifications of advanced capitalism. It creates opportunities for populisms of one kind and another to organise around the numerous local resistances arising from the economic globalisation that parties of both the mainstream left and right are unwilling to confront.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/03/doppelganger-me-and-george-monbiot-in-the-mirror-world/
This is a really interesting piece that only takes as a foundation the feud between two intellectuals focused on agriculture, food, etc. to expand further upon the ideological structures that are implied by some of the technocratic optimism that is slowly but bitterly ebbing in the fact of growing rejection by people worldwide. The primary fear is that in rejecting the evils of globalization and erosion of the beautiful, necessary varieties of human cultures, rooted in tradition and a key moral foundation, we also end up blowing up our truly beneficial technological achievements. I sense we will muddle through after a sufficiently painful period, e.g., as the CCP slowly grinds its nation down into a demographic disaster and flails into a war that it likely can’t win, enough economic pain will ripple across the world that the isolationist fringe will realize we are now interconnected, for better or worse, while the leftist coalition (if it hasn’t imploded by then) will be forced to confront the fact that flawed as it may be, the US system isn’t that bad. The hypocrisy of much of the fringes of both the US right and left is almost hilarious at this point: Ah yes, the evil imperialist patriarchal gender-conformist implicitly racist structure of the US is so repressive that you can freely make a living as an academic critiquing such things, while the neo-loony far right clearly is correct to reject medicines, academic research, diversity, etc. as they definitely don’t provide benefits.
