Was the Eclipse Anticlimactic?

Totality. Just the word feels like an exhale. The reassurance of awe, of completion. The promise of grasping an immensity whole, rather than contenting oneself with the usual sliver.

What Should We Delegate?

Leisure, even subsidized, does not interest me. Given enough books and bonbons, I could adjust. But the real problem is that we will not simply coexist with the machines to which we delegate our prior work. The artificial will subdue us.

What the Brooklyn Bridge Still Says About Us

The Brooklyn Bridge is, and has always been, us: teeming, diverse, sociable, aspirational, and entrepreneurial, which is a nice word for scrounging.

The Doting Baby Book Kept by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mom

A quirky kid, Robert Louis Stevenson had a mum who watched over him tenderly and noted each illness in his baby book

A Woman in a White Dress

All too often, a woman in white is a ghost. Or she is Ophelia, gone mad and trailing her dreams behind her. White is fragile in so many ways.

Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness

It is enough, Montaigne insisted, to simply live. If someone is upset about wasting time, muttering, “I have done nothing today!” he scoffs, “What, have you not lived? That is not only your fundamental occupation, but your most illustrious one.”

They Snuck Into the Panthéon and Saved Paris

Once, in the middle of the night, six Parisian teenagers managed to get into the Panthéon in Paris. They went on to explore the catacombs, set up an underground movie theater and art exhibits, and repair Paris's neglected treasures.

A Different Kind of Reverence

I was city through and through. And then we moved to rural southern Illinois. Pausing to check messages in a parking lot, I near dropped my phone when a rooster crowed in the back of the rusty red pickup next to me. On one of my first trips to Rural…

How the St. Louis Wheel Could Change the City

Glowing at the west edge of downtown, the new St. Louis Wheel rounds out the city’s geometry. We have the rectangular high-rises, the diamond points of Union Station’s red tile roof; the diagonal lines, like thumb-tacked string, of the Stan Span; the sharp angles of Lumière Place casino; the gentle…

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