What do cities reveal about us? Not just our engineering or art, but our longings—what we value, what we revere, how we choose to live together.  read more »

It’s been over a decade since I wrote the original “screwed generation” piece for Newsweek. In the subsequent years, the idea that younger people face a difficult future has become commonplace in public debate.  read more »

America’s public transit systems carried 80.43% as many riders in June 2025 as during the same month in 2019  read more »

Over the years, the so-called forward-thinking policymakers in California have achieved questionable results:  read more »

I’m an urbanist. If you’re reading this, you probably are one too. You, like me, want to make cities better places. That’s at the absolute core of being an urbanist.  read more »

I recently experienced Edward Burtynsky’s The Great Acceleration at New York’s International Center of Photography—and it was nothing short of remarkable.  read more »

Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability.  read more »

If there's one thing that really bothers me in urbanist circles, it's that there's no real agreed upon definition for what exactly is "urban". This is a fundamental problem, because it leads to differing sides always talking past each other, often using the same data to drive home vastly different points. Could astronomers and astro-physicists talk to each other if there were similar debates about what "space" is?  read more »

As they contend with their lowest approval ratings in recent memory, Democrats may wish to reconsider some of their least popular positions. Some even suggest the party is preparing to jettison Joe Biden’s “Green New Deal” — once central to his floundering economic agenda.  read more »

According to Newsweek, some nutty group called AmeriStarRail is proposing to run high-speed trains from New York to Los Angles, which it says can be done at a profit.  read more »