Malls across the country, large and small, urban and suburban, enclosed and open-air, are dying. They’re getting sucked into a vortex of shifting consumption patterns that rejects what we might call peripatetic shopping. The image of an attractive woman clothing multiple large paper bags is increasingly passé. People shop while seated at their home computers,
I’m breaking all of my own rules these days. Averse as I am to including two analysis-free montages in a row, now I’m taking the violations a step further by featuring two consecutive articles that a) offer very timely content (likely to seem irrelevant in a few days) and b) carry heavily political undertones, though
My over 900 articles on this site have rarely gone viral in that they amass thousands of responses or get picked up by national media. I’m just not that big. (And I don’t try to be; after one unpleasant experience, I vowed never again to pay to boost visibility of blog posts via social media
Coming on the heels of an article where I unexpectedly concluded that the best decision might be to save a strip mall in College Park, Maryland, I now view more or less the same subject through a different lens. Leaping across the Potomac River to Virginia, the state might change but the metro area is
Cute little dog! A French bulldog, it seems? It’s got those bat ears. Are they still both the most popular and most expensive dog breed in the country? Doesn’t matter. I wrote a feature about regulating animals in privately owned businesses barely a month ago; I don’t usually return to a topic that quickly. And
As a person who loves bicycling, I am hardly one to cavil when a municipality installs new bike-friendly infrastructure. Quite the opposite, in fact. As a general rule, most places in the US are still less bike-friendly than they could be. And while we have witnessed visible improvement over the last two decades, and I
Bear with me. This article is almost too dinky for a mini-post. Really more of a Tweet (what do they call those now, after the renaming?), so I’m stretching the content to its limits, inversely, by posting fewer words than just about ever. But the previous article on the Durham Can Opener took me way
Durham, North Carolina: as is often the case, a railway bisects the downtown. It became a viral video feature long before it became a commodity. And, somewhere along the way, it achieved something akin to meme status—though I’ll admit that I am stretching the definition of meme pretty generously to get there. Oh well. I’ve
It’s been a long time coming. But only within the last few weeks, after encountering a big sign at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), did I achieve full awareness of a condition that has crept across the American social domain: indoor dogs everywhere. Here was my indicator: If it’s not immediately obvious, the overhead
Several weeks ago I featured the borough of Wilson, Pennsylvania—a small municipality in the Lehigh Valley region, where Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton are the most prominent cities. Wilson is adjacent to Easton and in most respects is culturally indistinct: at a certain point it incorporated as a separate municipality, but it shares Easton’s street grid,
Malls across the country, large and small, urban and suburban, enclosed and open-air, are dying. They’re getting sucked into a vortex of shifting consumption patterns that rejects what we might call peripatetic shopping.
I’m breaking all of my own rules these days. Averse as I am to including two analysis-free montages in a row, now I’m taking the violations a step further by featuring two consecutive
My over 900 articles on this site have rarely gone viral in that they amass thousands of responses or get picked up by national media. I’m just not that big. (And I don’t
Coming on the heels of an article where I unexpectedly concluded that the best decision might be to save a strip mall in College Park, Maryland, I now view more or less the
Cute little dog! A French bulldog, it seems? It’s got those bat ears. Are they still both the most popular and most expensive dog breed in the country? Doesn’t matter. I wrote a
As a person who loves bicycling, I am hardly one to cavil when a municipality installs new bike-friendly infrastructure. Quite the opposite, in fact. As a general rule, most places in the US
Bear with me. This article is almost too dinky for a mini-post. Really more of a Tweet (what do they call those now, after the renaming?), so I’m stretching the content to its
Durham, North Carolina: as is often the case, a railway bisects the downtown. It became a viral video feature long before it became a commodity. And, somewhere along the way, it achieved something
It’s been a long time coming. But only within the last few weeks, after encountering a big sign at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), did I achieve full awareness of a condition
Several weeks ago I featured the borough of Wilson, Pennsylvania—a small municipality in the Lehigh Valley region, where Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton are the most prominent cities. Wilson is adjacent to Easton and