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where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment.

Kristen R. Ghodsee • Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

We must recognize that if we try to make one neighborhood greener by stopping new building, we can easily make the world browner, by pushing new development to someplace far less environmentally friendly.

Edward Glaeser • Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

His biggest worry, though, is that we still mostly fail to acknowledge that we live in a roaring attention economy. In other words, we tend to ignore his favorite maxim, from the writer Howard Rheingold: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”

nytimes.com • Opinion | Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age - The New York Times

T he best third places are rec centers and libraries. Modern third places need to offer transformation, not just transaction. While cafes have become laptop farms, gyms and libraries remain sacred spaces for the body and the mind.

Matt Yao • Short Hot Takes, Long and Loosely Held

in a non-Essentialist culture these things – space, listening, playing, sleeping, and selecting – can be seen as trivial distractions.

Greg Mckeown • Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Oldenburg contends the most important “first place” in a community is the home. The places where we work are our “second place” since work is required and serious and “reduces the individual to a single productive role.” Our “third place” is composed of those informal, neutral, public social spaces we visit voluntarily—where “conversation is the pr

Marie K. Shanahan • Journalism, Online Comments, and the Future of Public Discourse

Karaoke bars have recently been adapted to be spaces that are comprised of numerous solo karaoke booths. This new arrangement can be used in a manner that exemplifies the contemporary condition of living in a city: a group of people may go to a karaoke parlour together, upon arriving, each person goes into their own solo booth, and, after an hour o... See more

404 - e-flux

Day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life—its comforts, its ready entertainments. But convenience can be a curse. Our habits are creating what Atalay has called a “century of solitude.” This is the anti-social century.

Derek Thompson • The Anti-Social Century

But it’s bad if you can never disconnect from the internet. That’s why apps like “Freedom” are so popular. That’s why people use commitment devices like timed cookie jars to hide their phones. That’s why apps like Twitter and Snapchat got popular on the basis of artificial constraints, like limited characters or disappearing messages, because they