Tag
Development
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Walking Lahore, Watching the World
The new mosque’s central dome dominates the town’s skyline, but competes with an 80-metre-high replica Eiffel Tower, and a scale reproduction of Trafalgar Square.
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Patricia Banks on Supporting African American Museums
Studies of museum patronage mostly focus on social class. That’s not the whole story.
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San Francisco; or, How to Destroy a City
As New York City and Greater Washington, DC, prepared for the arrival of Amazon’s new secondary headquarters, Torontonians opened a section of their …
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The Big Picture: Trump’s New York
The lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, right next door to Grand Central Terminal, presents a generic corporate luxury—an aesthetic of high ceilings, sleek fountains of black granite, dark wood pillars. As a reporter for the New York Times wrote in 1980, shortly before the hotel opened, the glass-wrapped exterior looks like…
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Planning Happiness: A Postcard from Christianshavn, Copenhagen
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. This street used to be quieter, just an occasional bike rattling over the cobblestones along a pretty stretch of Copenhagen canal. The 19th-century residential apartments were built to service an older naval and industrial quarter. When we were renovating our…
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Design Against Disaster
What is to be done? We are the hapless victims of rising temperatures and tides, droughts and superstorms. Infrastructure buckles and the water is full of lead. Of course all urban ecological disaster is of our own making, but that doesn’t change the fact that the future looks bleak. Yet our narrowing horizons for joyous…
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Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets …
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Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this dialogue resulted from Rebuild by Design (RBD), an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. To deepen that conversation, RBD…
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Beyond the Bubble
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. In 2002, a year after Amartya Sen’s well-known essay on hunger, “Old Torments and New Blunders,” was first published, I travelled through parts of northwest Madhya Pradesh and adjacent areas of Rajasthan, which are home to Sahariya tribals, to report on hunger-related deaths in the community. I…
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Indian Writers under Siege: A Roundtable
It is hard to remember a time when literature attracted so much front-page space, prime airtime, or mass attention in the Indian public sphere as it did in 2015. But not only was this importance accumulated through a particularly perverse chain of events, it was also a particularly toxic kind of importance. Writers, scholars, and…
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To Be “A Glorious Thing Made Up of Star Dust”: A Suicide Note from the University of Hyderabad
In India, like elsewhere, the university is a place of upward mobility. It is also the tense meeting ground of social difference; of young people across caste, gender, religious, and sexual identities who encounter each other in the space of the classroom, where the divide between urban and rural, between English and the regional languages,…
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City of the Future
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “Been gardening?” the Greens campaigner asks. I’ve stopped to chat, knees and hands grubby from the morning’s activity. “Yeah—just in the park back there, next to the oval!” I point behind her. “We’re planting a food forest.” “I…
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How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the restaurant—with a menu that includes frog legs and a bottle of Bordeaux that sells for $2,000—is an incongruous new addition to an area of Brooklyn where…
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Open Markets, Open Projects: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness
A decade ago, the precursors of today’s social media were known as “Web 2.0,” and came complete with a barrage of ideological presuppositions. According to rhetoric pioneered at O’Reilly conferences and echoed in Wired and on BlogSpot, the “1.0” web, cluttered with proprietary plugins and e-commerce failures, would be abandoned in favor of an Internet…
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Everyday India
Nikhil Suroshe is the child of small farmers in Yavatmal district, Maharashtra. He is fair-skinned, with a mop of brown hair and a regal nose, and in India, where skin is often read as an indicator of caste background and class privilege, it is the first thing you notice about him. He is a handsome…
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The Dress Has Always Been News
As “the dress” befuddled the Internet’s hive mind, our newsfeeds swelled. Tumblr and Buzzfeed, recognizing the viral power of a garment that appears gold and white to some but blue and black to others, got the freight train rolling. Soon, bastions of journalism such as the New York Times and Washington Post hopped on board. Experts in cognition assured us that…
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American Cassandra
A Prophet for Our Times The modern American prophet cloaks himself in the trope of youthful utopianism lost, and the latest practitioner of this prophetic genre is Francis Fukuyama. His prose is a measure of his times and, as his readers, ours: times of disenchantment. A classics major at Cornell, Fukuyama came under the spell…
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A World of Connections and Inequality: A New History of the 19th Century
The 19th century poses special problems for historians and social scientists. If conventional views of the march of history are correct, the world should have become modern over this period. Following upon the political revolutions in France, Haiti, and North and South America and the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century should have produced a definitive…
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All Eyes On Brazil
With the 2014 FIFA World Cup now well under way, and the Olympics coming in 2016, Brazil is assuming its place on the world stage. The current tournament has generated more coverage of the country—and its far-flung corners—than ever before. Be it David Beckham’s trip into the Amazon for BBC television, or writers “slumming” it…
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Masters of Reinvention
For the first 40 years of his life, Albert O. Hirschman was a little-known accessory to world-historic events. Born in Berlin in 1915, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany who wound his way through Europe’s anti-fascist movements, US wartime intelligence, the Marshall Plan, a McCarthyist investigation, and the World Bank’s first foray into Third…
