The generic city is a city without names. The great city, on the other hand, is a collections of names.…
When Everything Now Is Exactly Enough
After dinner we drove the short distance from Urban Belly to the United Center for the Arcade Fire concert. First…
A Species of Hunger Native to the City
One night not long ago my wife and I attended an Arcade Fire concert at the United Center in the…
The Arcades Project on Film
Filmmaker and art historian Judith Wechsler has made a beautiful film about Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, entitled, appropriately enough, The Passages…
The President of Magical Thinking
From Michael Chabon's open letter to "our fellow Jews, in the United States, in Israel, and around the world." The…
Mr. Dob and the Wall-Eyed Monsters: Takashi Murakami’s The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg
I got a chance to attend the preview of the Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg exhibit at…
Parallax Sounds Now Available to Stream
Parallax Sounds, a film I wrote about in this space in 2011, is now available for streaming. The film…
When Pigs Fly by Trump Tower
New World Design Ltd., a Chicago design company, has hatched a plan to have giant inflatable pigs hover beside Trump…
Protecting the Guilty: Kristóf Deák’s Sing as Political Allegory
Kristóf Deák’s Sing won the 2017 Academy Award for a live-action short film–remember? Ivan Krastev, a New York Times reporter…
Ground, Sky, Envelope: On the Villa Savoye and the Robie House
This is my response to the first assignment in the Architectural Imagination course I'm taking online from the Harvard Graduate…
One-Way Street 