An essay built around a 2x2 that describes the dynamics of cities.
The city I live in, San Francisco, is an amazing place where there’s seemingly boundless capital sloshing around, tons of smart people who are motivated to solve the world’s problems, and a total and complete lack of political will to do anything about the most immediate issues. Reading about the self-inflicted wounds of this city is painful.
Lots of interesting data is available on the internet if you have the patience to figure out how to join two separate streams. Here’s a data scientist who decided to join publically available home sales data with scraped data from LinkedIn and other job sites. His data is incomplete, very biased, and it leads to the unsurprising result that the people who share their employment information on the internet and buy homes in SF tend to work in tech. That doesn’t make the data any less interesting.
In this piece, Appelbaum quotes Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who observed that “preservation is not the enemy of modernity but actually one of its inventions… The whole idea of modernization raises, whether latently or overtly, the issue of what to keep.” We might be keeping too much.
Living in SF means constantly seeing the suffering of the homeless. Their hardship is the consequence of policy decisions. I don’t like living in a society that finds this acceptable. As Applebaum says, we can “end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.” Policy is a decision.
Squirrels are everywhere. You’re telling me that’s by design? We literally brought them into the city?
I was recently introduced to this project, which looks great. After skimming the reading list and adding a bunch of things to my queue, now I’m wondering: what other projects have similarly structured survey lists? I really appreciate the mix of breadth and depth.