Sublime

get out of my door,” Bessie Smith lamented in “Backwater Blues.” In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of

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DC is being gentrified like major cities everywhere. It raises the question: To whom does this place belong? That is a local question, but it is also an existential one. We are literally still fighting over whether Black people belong to their home places and whether their home places belong to them. Once, the formerly enslaved migrated to DC with

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While a return to what is essentially piecework in the place of waged labor seems to promise a salve against white-collar malaise, it opens up another set of problems. Work Without the Worker, a new book by labor researcher Phil Jones, tries to make sense of the rise of “microwork,” best exemplified by platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk... See more

The "zeitgeist" of ARPA-Parc stretches back to the WWII musterings of scientists and engineers, much of it fostered by Vannevar Bush. One of the things they learned how to do was to "do Art at scale". The ARPA funding by Licklider starting in 1962 carried that context forward into computing, and the results speak for themselves. It's not that it is... See more

We know, as well as we know anything, that human beings can grow and change for the better. And it’s no longer optional. In fact it’s the new categorical imperative. We simply have to understand what it means for human beings to grow and develop and think about what follows for political and civic institutions and social and economic policy. It’s... See more

But on Saturday, May 1, 1934, the weather turned balmy, and, as they do on the first warm Saturday of every spring, New Yorkers poured into their parks. Seventeen hundred of the eighteen hundred renovation projects had been completed. Every structure in every park in the city had been repainted. Every tennis court had been resurfaced. Every lawn

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