friend of the built environment

It’s only started to occur to me very recently how I deal with pain, loss and grief. Every time I say goodbye to someone or someplace which means a lot to me, I die a little inside, and it erodes a bit of what makes me who I am. As antisocial as I am in [...]

The Big City means high-end urban areas such as NY, SF, LA, Philly and Chicago. Places where owning a single-family detatched dwelling is not feasible for the vast majority of residents. This rules out up-and-coming cities with rational real estate such as Charlotte, Raleigh, Austin and Denver. It also rules out most of the rust [...]

Marriage is a red-button issue in America (and maybe beyond?). Queers have spent the past year making strides and taking stock of setbacks. The majority of American voters loathe the concept of universal marriage equality. The war on contract law is taking some unsettling turns in places like Virginia, Ohio and Louisianna. Logical reasoning and [...]

I hate passwords. They were specifically designed by the software industry to make our lives hell and remove any blame for that state of hell from themselves. “O, well, you failed to give yourself a secure password, so it’s not our fault you got hacked”. “O, you forgot your password, then we’ll have to give [...]

One of the real casualties of the changes in the consumer market of the past decade or so has been the good used book or record store. They don’t really exist anymore, as far as I’m concerned, and here’s why:I’m a ‘list shopper’. I have limited resources and thus must choose those things I intend [...]

Yes, it was very normal.
Some people, including me at times, have argued that homo culture is a sort of dissent, and succumbing to normalcy is a bad thing. But normal in this context was so much different than normal as seen in its dark light by certain authors.
This sort of normal was amazingly diverse, celebratory [...]

…That the two most common emotional reactions I have to the concept “the future” are terror and despair.
And yet, peak-everything deniers seem to consistently think that those of us who understand crash concepts are all cheering for some neo-agrarian utopia. I guess I know what Sarah Connor felt like.
Note, however, that Andrew Potter writes more like [...]

Yes, I d00m a lot. It’s been a rough couple years for me. For most Americans I’d assume.
My case is particularly acute because I’ve got some major life decisions to make soon here, along with having a bit of a premature mid-life crisis (not to minimize anyone else’s acute case of d00miness). In any case, [...]

I’ve spent about 7 years in San Francisco. I tend not to think about the past four years of my life as years spent in San Francisco, since the majority of my home life has taken place in NC and Pittsburgh, but in fact the majority of my time since 2005 has been spent in [...]

With only a half hour left on this day, I am reminded how lucky I’ve been to have been left so untouched by the AIDS epidemic. No close friends of mine have been affected by it, that I know of. In some cases, maybe people I’ve met along the way have hidden their status, believing [...]

Excellent, excellent article (hat-tip, Jim Russell).
Trunk recognizes her condescension, but she also envies the people she’s judging. Because they’re happier.
This is the feeling I get every time I spend a weekend in Lawrenceville. “They po’ but they happy” is a quote David gave me. Of course, happy being subjective, are they really any happier than [...]

Zarathustra’s eye had noted that a youth avoided him. And one evening as he walked alone through the mountains surrounding the town which was called The Motley Cow - behold, on his walk he found this youth as he sat leaning against a tree, looking wearily into the valley. Zarathustra gripped the tree under which [...]

What is the difference between ideals and goals? Is it only one of scale? How does one determine when a goal is so lofty and ‘unrealistic’ as to have transformed into a perspective-distorting ideal?
What is the difference between idealism and ideology?
Jane Jacobs warned against ideology, as something that can cause people to ignore facts on [...]

One year ago this evening, David and I were standing on the Fort Duquesne Bridge over the freezing Allegheny welcoming in the new year with riverboat horns and a gaudy Bayer electronic message board on Mt Washington as backdrop. Four months later we would own a cute old house in the most wonderful neighborhood in [...]

In the spirit of Sublime Oblivion’s revisitation of old political and social values declarations, I thought it would be fun to do the same: contemplating what I used to think or believe (either from the archives here or just from my memory) and making some values statements that I could use for comparison and review [...]