The search "January 2019" yielded
5 articles

Rethinking a restroom from just the right angle.

I have yet to create a special tag or keyword on my blog for my numerous articles on public restrooms. Perhaps I should. Sometimes I feel like a letch for writing about them so much, and yet I know I’m hardly alone having a certain fascination—not only in the interior design, but the engineering for

Colorful commemorations: what do painted bikes mean to the unschooled?

Nearly four months had passed—a long time for me—since my last visit to Pentagon City in Arlington County, Virginia, home to a big, well-situated, and (as malls go) prosperous mall, a booming multifamily housing sector, numerous key big-box retailers, and a variety of office complexes—all within walking distance of the none-too-pedestrian-friendly Pentagon. The area is

Tendencies in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that polarizes.

My first blog post in San Francisco is atypical (if anything about this blog topic could ever be considered typical), but it’s probably a significant one given the socioeconomic context. The wealthy core to one of the richest regions in the country—probably among the wealthiest in the world—San Francisco is also the only city I’m

First Harvest: seeking a fertile ground amidst the expanding blight.

Over the holidays I briefly visited my hometown of Indianapolis, and even more briefly made a stop to the Greenwood Park Mall, which was “my mall” growing up and a frequent subject of this blog in earlier years. Back then, I singled this mall out for its resilience, as other malls (in Indianapolis and across

When a state chooses to feast on its identity, what does it use to fill its plate?

It is completely unreasonable for me to use license plate background art as a synecdoche for a state’s prevailing ethos, but I’m going to do it anyway. Why not? The design of a license plate is broadly attempting to achieve this effect, more so than even a flag. Whether license plates originally intended this or