Neither Here Nor There - Urban Omnibus

how to profile people on the 7 to predict which stop they’ll get off so you can snag a seat

If you were a kid growing up in Flushing, you looked around at the neighborhood and people around you, and your path seemed clear enough. Whatever your future pursuit, whether art or finance or deejaying or urban planning, you should do it somewhere else. In its own way, the neighborhood did its utmost to encourage us. The cram school where I took ... See more

We were first immigrants, and then we were expats, and now we are like inhabitants of some extraterritorial, jurisdictionally unclear space.

Perhaps it was the inflated self-importance, a sense of straddling the only two countries in the world that mattered, Middle Kingdom egocentrism meets American exceptionalism.

These days, I mostly interact with China through a veil of mixed media. I put Youtube walking tours and drone videos of Chinese cities on my second monitor, expansive vistas of night skylines set to cyberpunk music. I read Chinese books and research Chinese history and watch Chinese movies. I study memes from the Chinese internet. Gathering all thi... See more

high school kids in the brief exciting limbo between school and home

The ballet isn’t happening on the sidewalk anymore. You can try telling a wholesome story about the interplay of the neighborhood butcher, the baker, and the Chinese herbal medicine shop owner, to the extent that they still exist. Of course, amusing, surprising, eccentric things still occur in New York on a daily basis. But the most desirable and e... See more

As a good urbanist, I know I’m supposed to put the physical city experience first: nothing substitutes for the sidewalk ballet, never bet against New York, touch grass, convert offices to housing, if you are tired of the city you are tired of life.

Nothing ages so badly as our intellectual history.