Are you an expat? Do you travel a lot?

What difference does it make to live somewhere for a time? It's a pretty difficult matter to pin down. There are a lot of people with a vested interest who insist that it makes all the difference. Usually that's the people who've lived in the world as well as the home, and who gain some precious (and often quite material) advantage by insisting that they know the world and its travails better than you, the mere reader, the viewer, the armchair general, the person who has never been there.

But it does make a difference.

Mating by Norman Rush, reviewed by Tim Burke for National Book Critics Circle.

In Retrospect: On Mating & Memory

One of the oldest and soundest rules in intellectual life is “never get in a parsing contest with a skunk.”

Log On. Tune Out.

A modest proposal to fix the schools

First, Kill All the School Boards

Call it a pivotal moment, a rare window of opportunity, for Downtown Los Angeles. More and more people are moving into its stock of obsolete warehouses, restored office buildings and shiny new high-rises. City planners are writing a land use plan for the historic heart of town, proposing 21st century pedestrian-oriented commerce where industry has dominated for more than a century. The Grand Avenue project from City Hall to Disney Hall has been launched, and the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan is finally turning vision along the River into reality, with new state parks at the Cornfield and Taylor Yard leading the way.

Downtown can be a vibrant place where people exchange goods and services, share ideas and food and drink and serendipity - run into people they know or want to know, experience worlds the suburbs can't provide. "When the city comes together physically, it comes together socially," says Downtown developer Dan Rosenfeld. "Social contact creates social contract."

We have some specific ideas about how to make this happen. But none of them will matter much if we can't make the Central City friendlier for pedestrians, with more public spaces, places that people want to experience and enjoy. Instead of prioritizing the movement of motor vehicles, we have to open up Downtown for people.

D-Town Visions

Kay Hymowitz in the Winter 2008 issue of City Journal:

Today’s single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood.

Child-Man in the Promised Land

Author and artist William T. Vollmann has explored some of the edgier parts of life and written about it with what critics call blunt honesty. He joins us for the hour to discuss his latest book all about hopping freight trains, "Riding to Everywhere." Vollmann's previous books include "Poor People," "Europe Central" and "The Atlas."

KQED | Forum: William T. Vollmann

Lori Gottlieb, in the March 2008 issue of The Atlantic:

The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough

Marry Him!

It's time to figure out how to work with the freshmen we have, rather than the ones in our admission brochures

The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment

Think of Blue Cities.

Urban proximity can reduce the costs of shipping goods and speed the flow of ideas. Improvements in communication technology might erode these advantages and allow people and firms to decentralize. However, improvements in transportation and communication technology can also increase the returns to new ideas, by allowing those ideas to be used throughout the world. This paper presents a model that illustrates these two rival effects that technological progress can have on cities. We then present some evidence suggesting that the model can help us to understand why the past thirty-five years have been kind to idea-producing places, like New York and Boston, and devastating to goods-producing cities, like Cleveland and Detroit.

Did the Death of Distance Hurt Detroit and Help New York?

The economic approach to cities relies on a spatial equilibrium for workers, employers and builders. The worker’s equilibrium implies that positive attributes in one location, like access to downtown or high wages, are offset by negative attributes, like high housing prices. The employer’s equilibrium requires that high wages be offset by a high level of productivity, perhaps due to easy access to customers or suppliers. The search for the sources of productivity differences that can justify high wages is the basis for the study of agglomeration economies which has been a significant branch of urban economics in the past 20 years. The builder’s equilibrium condition pushes us to understand the causes of supply differences across space that can explain why some places have abundant construction and low prices while others have little construction and high prices. Since the economic theory of cities emphasizes a search for exogenous causes of endogenous outcomes like local wages, housing prices and city growth, it is unsurprising that the economic empirics on cities have increasingly focused on the quest for exogenous sources of variation. The economic approach to urban policy emphasizes the need to focus on people, rather than places, as the ultimate objects of policy concern and the need for policy to anticipate the mobility of people and firms.

The Economic Approach to Cities