I have found myself, as I’ve eked on into adulthood, more and more fascinated by work. By the tasks and responsibilities people, billions of people, rise each morning (or night) to perform. How did they find this job? What does it mean to them? Is it what they envisioned doing? All the jobs I ever had before, in high school and college, were [...]
The 2010 Federal Census data documents a faster rate of growth in cities compared to their respective suburbs, for the first time in nine decades. The cities with the sharpest growth rate change are Washington, D.C., Denver, and Atlanta. Every region of the United States sees this shift in the 2010 data, New York, Milwaukee, [...]
In 2008, the Knight Soul of the Community Project was created, by a partnership of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup. I had not heard about their research until recently, but it relates closely to what I think about cityscapes, and how I feel about connections people have to their spaces, [...]
… and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same. This little ditty was the opening theme song for the television show Weeds, whose primary theme for the first three seasons was a critique of the suburban culture, lifestyle, vanities, and contradictions. Housewives and business professionals are smoking dope far more often [...]
I collect names. I love spotting a new one (my job working in naturalization records, etc. at the national archives means I get many opportunities to collect and find new muses), saying it, relishing the syllables and imaging what type of person is a Josefina or a Beryl or Basilia or Louise. But many of [...]
For one year, which was the maximum amount of time my (then-more-limited) budget could handle it, I lived alone. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my cat, and I adored it. The New York Times reported on the “freedom, and perils, of living alone” a few months ago, and spoke to many of the great and [...]
In her recent book, comedian and writer Mindy Kaling makes a comment about those articles that come out every year or so that declare the end of marriage and convention, and cause the women reading them to vow to buck the conventional marriage set-up, and seek moving instead into one of those single convents, to perhaps [...]