Urban planners at the end of the 19 century faced a "vexing" problem, writes Jill Jonnes: "how to connect the wealthy and influential island of Manhattan to the mainland and the rest of America." In Conquering Gotham, Jonnes chronicles the effort to make this connection, at least architecturally, with the construction of Pennsylvania Station and its tunnels. Jonnes ably recounts the technical challenges posed by a pioneering venture of such proportions, offering a refresher course in New York history along the way. But at its heart the book is an admiring biography of the "cultured, steely engineer" behind the plan: Alexander Cassatt (brother of artist Mary), whose efforts were stymied by politics, real estate battles, the limits of engineering -- and the fact that he was not from New York.

Globalization 1.0

"The week before, when I'd arrived in Shanghai, my first impression of China had been that it was one of the most advanced places I'd ever seen. The scale of Shanghai, which from the sky had presented a dead-flat vista of tens of thousands of neatly arrayed oblong houses—each of which, a closer look revealed, was in fact a large apartment block—and then, on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, 'Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?' and this place had raised its hands and said 'Yeah!'"

Jonathan Franzen on today's Shanghai

Airports are essentially machines for processing people, airplanes, automobiles, cargo, and luggage—all of which move in different ways, and which need to be connected at certain points and separated by rigid security at others. Just getting all the parts to work together seems overwhelming—indeed, it did overwhelm British Airways last month at Heathrow, outside London, when Terminal 5, an eight-billion-dollar structure that was supposed to transform Heathrow from a congested tangle into a place that would thrill passengers with the joy of air travel, all but shut down on its opening day, when a computerized baggage system malfunctioned.

Airports, in short, are a logistical nightmare, and this is surely the reason that most of them today are such depersonalized wastelands. With all those moving parts to organize, the last thing that cash-starved airlines and airport authorities want to think about is aesthetic appeal. Most airports built in the last generation, at least in the United States, have followed a simple, established pattern, along the lines of the huge ones in Atlanta and Denver. Gates, arranged in long, boxy concourses set way out in the field, are linked to central terminals by underground trains. Driverless trains enhance the sense that the whole thing is less a piece of architecture than one big machine. Within the concourse, you walk, sometimes as much as a half mile, or ten city blocks, between gates. It is an efficient layout for airport operations, as long as you don’t consider passenger pleasure to be a part of airport operations.

Situation Terminal: The Sky Line

Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems

Why Americans Hate the Media

Founded by Jesuits in 1554 on a vast, fertile plateau near the Atlantic coast, São Paulo has historically drawn large numbers of opportunity seekers. In the nineteenth century, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Germans came to run its vast coffee plantations. Then, when the coffee economy began to decline in the early twentieth century, the newly industrializing city drew waves of immigrants from Japan, the Middle East, and northeastern Brazil. By 1940, São Paulo was considered Brazil’s economic engine, with a population that had increased by a factor of thirty, to almost 1.3 million, in just under six decades.

Another seven decades on, the figure is 11 million. Rapid growth has combined with the consequences of poor urban planning, military rule, and municipal corruption to cause deep instability. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme estimates that a third of the city’s inhabitants now live below the poverty line, and as the city’s economy begins to shift again — this time toward the service and technology sectors — São Paulo’s lower classes find themselves increasingly marginalized, taking refuge in ever more drastic living situations.

Some stay close to the centre, creating vertical slums in the thousands of abandoned buildings scattered throughout the city core, while more than two thirds of the populace lives in favelas on the outskirts, facing appalling sanitary conditions, overcrowded schools, and rampant crime.

It's Hard To Be A Saint in São Paulo

Joblessness is growing. Millions of homes are sliding into foreclosure. The financial system continues to choke on the toxic leftovers of the mortgage crisis. The downward spiral of the economy is challenging a notion that has underpinned American economic policy for a quarter-century — the idea that prosperity springs from markets left free of government interference.

But with market forces now seemingly gone feral, disenchantment with regulation has given way to demands for fresh oversight, placing Mr. Friedman’s intellectual legacy under fresh scrutiny.

Reconsidering Milton Friedman's Legacy

Coffee beans, cock fights, and mysticism in the tiny Caribbean country.

Haitian Dreams

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

Up and Then Down

Think of us as Google News with human editors and higher ideals.

Our motto is: Clarity not cacophony. The Internet is overloaded with poor quality information run rampant. Almost nobody has the time to filter out the junk and find the diamonds in the rough.

DailySource.org

Nothing about the founders seems as interesting or as timely to us, 200 years and more farther on, as their religious views — who, if Anyone, they worshiped, how they marked the boundaries of church and state. As a Washington biographer, I have been assured, during the Q. and A. periods after talks, that George Washington saw the Virgin Mary at Valley Forge and converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed (why wait, if he had seen the Virgin 21 years earlier?). I was also once asked if he was an “illuminated Freemason”; I sped away from that question as fast as possible. Whether in legal briefs or op-ed articles, we are as passionate about religion as the founders were. Unfortunately, our passions make for a lot of sloppy and willful historical thinking and writing. In “Founding Faith,” Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious Web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.

Religious Intent