Stories, threads, and ideas—mostly about places.
The Canal de l'Ourcq to Pantin
A bicycle ride along an old canal and into the future of Grand Paris.
To Bercy and back
The light turns green, and the cars stand still. But the bicycles? We're liquid. It's so efficient. It's so coordinated. It's like dancing.
On rediscovering home ecologies
I never fully appreciated the subtle and breathtaking beauty of these landscapes when I was growing up in them.
Taking the waters
With every final turn, with every additional quarter-mile of distance from the city and every hour from the endless and unjust snows of October, a burden is lifted and a lightness replaces it, and lightness can feel just like a joyous speed.
San Francisco the Confounding
It's tough to know what to make of San Francisco. How can a place so dramatically beautiful, so awash in wealth, so jam-packed with brilliant minds, also encompass everything that makes American cities an absolute shame?
Morning characters
The city is humanity's most beautiful piece of theater, and that opening number really is something to see.
Rue de Lévis
This street's design—its intimate, conversational quality—makes it feel like a place for the daily social life of the neighborhood residents to unfold.
Lovers and friends
Los Angeles: A broken possibility. It's not a happy take, but it's the best this natural pessimist can do at balancing the city's hard present realities with some hope for a better future.
A broken possibility
Los Angeles has always been a tough city for me. It is the city, more than any other, that shaped my world-curious mind.
Grand Central Market
To know the market is to know the original heart of Los Angeles. It is the very best of what downtown, and therefore the whole city, ought to be.
Jeremy
Rage Against the Machine. As we plopped ourselves into the car, cranking the heat and wiping the crust out of our eyes, Jeremy would blast Rage Against the Machine. The wall of noise, the intensity, would fill our quiet neighborhood and assault my eardrums while I waited for him to scrape the ice off the windshield.
Via Carota
"What brings you out tonight?” The young stranger struck up a conversation with me as she moved her plate, heaped with a tantalizing mix of fresh lettuces, across the marble bar to make room for my glass of champagne. I usually avoid conversation with a strangers in restaurants, on airplanes, and anywhere else where I might unwittingly and mistakenly be seen as a captive audience.
Cumberland
An hour ago the sun bathed this room in light, and now rain drenches a city that has gone quiet and I can hardly see the ink I'm scratching into the page. The weather turned quickly, just like it does in summer back home.
