The D.C. whirlwind continues
After mentioning how beautiful Washington, D.C. is, I saw a chart in the Washington Post showing that 16.7 percent of families who live in D.C. are below the poverty line—by far the highest in the region. Alexandria came in second at 6.8 percent. So clearly there’s quite a few parts of D.C. that aren’t so nice, but we’re focusing on the pretty parts.
The International Spy Museum isn’t as exciting as all the subway ads would imply, but it’s reasonably fun, and there’s plenty of cool espionage paraphernalia.
The National Building Museum is worth visiting just to see the building, which is remarkable. My friend Brian theorized that it was the result of someone’s attempt to see how many bricks he could put in one place. Don’t miss the interior; the Great Hall is a marvel of late 19th-century excess.
Capitol Mall is enormous, as is the Washington Monument, whose size can’t be appreciated except by walking up to the thing and trying to look up and see the top.
Overheard outside the Department of the Treasury: “That’s not Jesus, that’s Alexander Hamilton!” (There’s a statue of him outside. The boy being corrected was about three years old.)
My legs are tired.
29 September 2002 8:39 PM
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On the road
I’m on vacation for the next week and a half—Washington, D.C. this week and Boston next week—so don’t expect me to post much. (I’m not sure who I think would visit my site while I’m on vacation. Two-fifths of my readership is currently in the kitchen of the apartment I’m staying at, and another one-fifth is in the next room taking a nap.)
D.C. is flat-out gorgeous. There’s the classic old government buildings, of course, plus all the row houses on Capitol Hill. As my friends and I were leaving the Library of Congress, this is what popped into my head: “Brick, brick, colonnade / Around the corner law is made.” That made me giggle. I don’t think they noticed.
27 September 2002 5:41 PM
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The saddest little lamp
Anyone who’s ever made an unnecessary purchase from Ikea will identify with the company’s new television commercial, directed by Spike Jonze. (To see the ad, click on the television set.)
23 September 2002 7:45 PM
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Harlem gentrification
The Village Voice has an interesting, evenhanded take on how gentrification is affecting Harlem. Many of Harlem’s residents have very low incomes by New York City standards—the median income in Harlem is $26,000—but apartments are being rented at market rate for the entire city, and Manhattanites have begun to discover the area’s classic brownstones and new rental properties.
If you aren’t sure what gentrification means or how it happens, this article is an excellent starting point.
23 September 2002 7:22 PM
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Reliving horror
Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease by any measure, but consider how much worse it must be for survivors of the Holocaust.
22 September 2002 7:52 PM
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Yes-men
The scientific advisory committees that assist the United States government don’t always agree with President Bush’s views. In response, the Bush administration is packing the committees with members who support Bush.
This seems like an opportune moment to mention a quotation from that radical leftist Dwight Eisenhower: “May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
18 September 2002 10:28 AM
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More chicanery
At this point, it’s hardly news that the Bush administration is awash in corporate malfeasance, but Paul Krugman’s latest column describes yet another sickening example: There’s now evidence that Thomas White, a former Enron executive and the current secretary of the army, was fully aware of the accounting scams that allowed his division at Enron to show a profit. (In the past, he’s claimed that he wasn’t aware of the fraud.) Nonetheless, White hasn’t been asked to resign.
16 September 2002 10:53 PM
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Poetry in motion
These are the saddest of possible words: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
16 September 2002 8:48 AM
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For all you hawks out there
More reasons not to invade Iraq, as if there weren’t enough already:
- After establishing a significant presence in Pakistan, Al Qaeda has begun to return to Afghanistan as well. Even with support from the American military, the current Afghan government “has been unable to gain effective control of the Afghan countryside.”
- President Bush has told world leaders that it isn’t the United States’ job to replace Saddam Hussein, apparently preferring to believe that any other leader would be better than Hussein. Um, would anyone care to bet on that?
The Nation has a list of nine critical questions that the United States should answer before invading Iraq. Here’s number eight: “Even if we are successful in toppling Saddam, who will govern Iraq afterward? Will we leave the country in chaos (as we have done in Afghanistan)? Or will we try to impose a government in the face of the inevitable Iraqi hostility if US forces destroy what remains of Iraq’s infrastructure and kill many of its civilians?” Sounds like Bush has decided on the first option.
10 September 2002 7:02 AM
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The end of empire
The Nation is running an interesting article by William Greider arguing that America’s trade deficit will eventually spell an end to its imperialist ambitions. The appropriate response, according to Greider, is not to reduce the country’s trade deficit but to accept America’s decline as a world power and “concentrate on building a different, more promising society at home.” Sounds okay to me.
9 September 2002 1:07 PM
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Respect for the living
The New York Times, led by its architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, unveiled its proposal for the World Trade Center site today. The proposal displays a breathtaking disregard for the city of New York. It combines some of the best ideas for the site—restoring part of the street grid; creating a memorial; mixing residential and commercial uses—and turns them into a monstrosity. The proposal is a hodgepodge of unrelated buildings, each one designed to glorify an architect’s vision rather than to serve the city. Its one merit is that it is so awful that many will dismiss it and look elsewhere for inspiration.
The Times plan is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with modern architecture. Many of today’s architects have become preoccupied with theory above all else; they appear to have given up on creating buildings appropriate to their uses and locations. Most of the Times architects have even abandoned all but the most rarified ideas about beauty and form, as Muschamp himself admits:
Some of the West Street projects will appear bizarre or perhaps self-indulgent to those unfamiliar with contemporary architecture. But this is not a lineup of architectural beauty contestants. All are conceptually rooted, in step with the level of architectural ambition in Vienna, Tokyo, Rotterdam and many other cities overseas. You have to look beneath the skin, for example, to appreciate the extraordinary elegance with which Charles Gwathmey has manipulated a single duplex unit into a variety of apartment layouts, which then generate the modeled facades.
Has Muschamp forgotten why architecture exists? If the buildings from his plan were constructed, most everyone who lived, worked, and played near them would be “unfamiliar with contemporary architecture.” Most New Yorkers won’t care how “conceptually rooted” the buildings are, nor will it be possible for them to “look beneath the skin” of the buildings to appreciate their “extraordinary elegance.” (And about those conceptual roots: One proposal for a West Street residential building actually cites the video game Tetris as the chief inspiration for its design.)
The World Trade Center site does not need star architects blanketing its surface with strange buildings. It needs architects who will show sensitivity to their surroundings—not just the tragedy that happened on the site, but the evolution of lower Manhattan and the needs of the people who live and work there, both now and in the future.
8 September 2002 2:08 PM
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The deception begins
Well, that didn’t take long: The Bush administration has already started lying about Iraq’s weapons programs.
8 September 2002 10:36 AM
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Duplicity
Politicians and citizens are clamoring for evidence that Iraq poses a threat to the United States. No doubt the Bush administration will eventually provide some.
Unfortunately, members of this administration have a history of lying about Iraq. Treat their evidence with skepticism.
7 September 2002 11:34 AM
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Semantic Web
The W3C’s Semantic Web initiative proposes to make the Web machine-readable, so that automated tools can make better use of the Web’s resources. I had a hard time getting excited about that idea until I read Paul Ford’s vision of how the Semantic Web might work.
2 September 2002 10:19 PM
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