March 18th, 2019
I recently spent a day at Sea Ranch, a strange and beautiful place. Sea Ranch is a planned community with a distinctive architectural style: simple timber-frame structures clad in wooden siding, and gardens all planted with native flora. The Sea Ranch ...
December 28th, 2018
YC Cities application essay
The concepts of ownership and citizenship will never perfectly cover all cases and disputes in society, but they are particularly insufficient in cities. Cities are practically defined in terms of public ownership and dynam...
December 2nd, 2018
I was in London for a conference for a few days in late October. The city was lovely, an unexpectedly nice place to wander. I came in with low expectations, expecting a drab, grey metropolis congested with traffic and filled with suited financiers scur...
November 4th, 2018
Manchester was a memorable place. The city became famous a few years ago when this Renaissance painting-grade photo went viral:
Internet Mancunians (as I learned people from Manchester are called) joked it was a perfect portrayal of the city, which ...
June 29th, 2018
The way we live is shaped by our infrastructure—the public spaces, building codes, and utilities that serve a city or region. It can act as the foundation for thriving communities, but it can also establish unhealthy patterns when designed poorly.For d...
May 22nd, 2018
I originally published this in May of last year in Idea Collector, one of my old blogs.
Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience wandering Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo last May. I'd be curious to learn how it compares to objectiv...
May 8th, 2018
I spent Thursday, 8 March 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Of the cities I visited during this trip, Jakarta was the one I disliked most. I try to be as positive as possible on the internet (it's just too easy to be negative), but in this case it would be i...
May 7th, 2018
Cities are fractal. You can always go a layer deeper and there’s just as much complexity.
Following this principle, I sometimes think it might make sense to just stay in San Francisco my whole life and explore the infinite levels of that fractal. It’...
February 13th, 2018
Dan Wang emailed me with some interesting additional hypotheses regarding the question of flaking that I raised last week:
I liked your piece on flaking. When I moved to New York, I found that flaking declined dramatically. So I think that any piece t...