Sublime

The United States Army Corps of Engineers has its Chicago District headquarters in a Classical Revival building on LaSalle Street. A plaque outside the building explains that it was the site of the General Time Convention of 1883, held to sync the country’s clocks. The process involved pruning dozens of regional time zones down to four, which, in m

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All of these trends had been decades in the making, but as esteemed urban planner Robert Beauregard notes, it was the summer of unrest that marked a paradigm shift in the minds of the American public. In Voices of Decline , his seminal work, Beauregard traces American perceptions about urban progress and regress in the twentieth century through a d... See more

The United States was now reaching the end of its first era. It had to expand westward. It needed food production to surge. Settlers were being crushed by Hamilton’s formerly useful and now-harmful idea of how credit ought to be managed. And continuing doing what had worked so well in the first part of the era would intensify the crisis. The core f

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What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of 'Gothic High-Tech' and 'Favela Chic' (as ... See more

These conditions, largely the result of decades of anti-government ideology, turn equality into a lie, and the lie deranges everyone. The way to begin reversing the deterioration is to show the American people that government can make their lives better. We’ve been ravaged by a short emergency—the pandemic and the depression-like conditions that it

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