During my visit to China, high-speed rail was one of the most visible expressionsof modernization, progress, and technology. In California, taking the Amtrak was a reprieve from it.

Designers, wrote Brentin Mock, who covers social justice and equity for City Lab, ‘have been wowed by [the nation of] Wakanda’s mechanical marvels of hyperloop rapid transit, maglev trains, dragonfly-shaped spaceships, hoverbikes, skyscrapers orchestrated from chords of stone, wood, and metal, and other innovative spectacles’. In conjuring this... See more