Like many thousands of educated Americans, I began 2012 by getting used to co-working. This means nothing about working collaboratively with teammates, which I still do much less than I’d like to, and everything about working in a place full of strangers who do similar things.  Firms like…
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A round of climate-treaty negotiations that ended last week in Durban seems a whirlwind away from the bleary discussions in city halls across America about which jobs and which schools should get less money next year. According to the Economist, Cassandras in South Africa are holding signs…
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Yesterday,  with no input from sniveling movie producers or rioting by football fans, America’s biggest city unveiled a wide flowery tree pit on the grotty edge of a chichi section of Brooklyn. The debut may have faded in the uproar over power and its perversions, so let’s look at a…
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Thanks to the New York Times’ new architecture critic’s columns hoisting the flag for civic-minded urban design, folks have been asking me if design’s social moment has dawned. Design has always reflected social pressures and tried to express social values, but it probably is true that the…
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(Disclosure: I have worked with or sought work from every entity in this column, and I’m friendly with most of the principals. So I must mean what I say.)

With shirtsleeve temperatures and trenchfuls of rain, autumn in New York this year gets me thinking about autumn in New York in 2040. …
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The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street and climate change, normally not forces likely to zig together, have creatively destroyed the theory of creative destruction.

Joseph Schumpeter, law professor and dandy, posited around a hundred years ago that capitalism and democracy would feed each other…
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Steve Jobs melded many American business ideals. As inventor, inspiration, lone wolf and comeback artist, Jobs became a one-body operating system. You could look at him many ways at once, as you could with the iPhone, and life would feel quicker as you looked. But while Jobs’ integrity and his…
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The flatscreen TV in my apartment complex’s gym told me this morning that Starbucks plans to drop collection boxes in select outlets soon, for coffee-grabbers who want to boost the hiring among small business. In my sweaty LifeCycle haze, I thought I’d dropped some mental plank in this plan-…
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On the fair Manhattan morning of September 12, I got around to reading the twinned essays in this week’s New Yorker that consider whether America’s health must keep declining. Adam Gopnik treats decline as an intellectual conceit. George Packer treats it as woodworm in our political ship. Both…
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Compared with the carpet-bombing of London or the blasting of Rome, the World Trade Center collapse was a personal tragedy. Most of the city’s infrastructure stayed in place or recovered fast, leaving the howl of loss for family and friends whose loved ones flew to dust. And because New Yorkers…
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