Posting from South America will be rather slower than anticipated, unless the gods of chance bring my laptop back to me.  (It would also be helpful to have my comedy notebooks back.  What the hell is a thief in a Spanish-speaking country going to do with an English-keyboard, American-cabled, password-protected laptop and a bunch ofRead moreRead more

My last post about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was written when I was halfway through the show’s fourth season in my grand re-watch project.  Having just finished up Season Six*, I wanted to revisit some of what I wrote about then and expand on it a little.   My central issue with Buffy is thatRead moreRead more

I post a lot here about my love of cities, and my concomitant distaste for sprawl.  For a concise and comprehensive overview of What’s Wrong With Sprawl – covering, in several succinct paragraphs, the economic and policy decisions and ramifications that come from our over-suburbanized nation – give this fantastic post a read.  Even theRead moreRead more

In the last year, I have come to watch, in its entirety, the decade-defining sitcom known as “Friends.” It is not cool, in comedy circles, to be a fan of “Friends.” It is a common, popular show – not as loathed as “Two And A Half Men,” to be sure, but more along the linesRead moreRead more

I don’t understand music.  This is not to say that I don’t love music – I do, and I listen to it nearly constantly, across a wide variety of artists and genres – but, on a fundamental level, it doesn’t make sense to me.  It’s like listening to a foreign language, where I can enjoyRead moreRead more

I’ve been re-watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” recently, a generally agreeable show that I first became hooked on back in college (my roommate showed me the musical episode, and the rest was history).  At the time, I checked all the DVDs out of the library and watched, rapt, as the story unfolded; in the yearsRead moreRead more

I haven’t written in a while, as things have been getting sorted out from various other formats into this shiny new centralized site.  Here are a couple things that have caught my eye:   My favorite thing that I’ve read recently is this, from the intriguing online magazine Triple Canopy.  It’s a history of debtRead moreRead more

Whenever a natural disaster strikes, a certain segment of humanity can always be counted on to respond in the worst way possible: by blaming the event on whichever quality they find most distasteful in the afflicted.  Hence Hurricane Katrina was a curse on the gays, the Haitian earthquake was a response to all that voodooRead moreRead more

Tom Philpott does an excellent and incisive job of laying blame where it belongs: not on urbanity or the rural, which operate in an interdependent binary, but on that interstitial layer we call the suburbs.  Both city and country are vitally – and complementarily – productive, in a fashion yet to be located in suburbanRead moreRead more

I’m a sucker for attempts at conceptualizing the wildly diverse (and divergent) category of superorganisms we call cities: as platform, sites of cloud computing or heightened ambition, scaled behaviors, or structural racism.  Perhaps most remarkable is the truth – that cities in general, and any city in particular, are vast enough to be all these thingsRead moreRead more