I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!
This book takes something so in-your-face yet so often ignored about New York and other 21st-century global metropolises—their polyglot nature—and makes it the focus. I know when I arrive in a major city, the cacophony of myriad languages stands out on that first subway, bus, and tram ride. But soon enough, it all becomes background noise.
By foregrounding this phenomenon, arguing that it’s peaking today as global migration swells, and telling the stories of several tenacious language communities in New York’s outer boroughs, Perlin reads NYC through the alphabets that cover its bodega awnings.
Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and - because many have never been recorded - when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York.
In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin…
This book looks at flâneurie, the Gilded Age gentlemen’s pastime of walking through a city purely for curiosity’s sake, through women’s eyes. Of course, a man has opportunities to walk through a city unnoticed and unimpeded in a way that a woman does not.
Walking with Elkin through cities I know well helped me realize how much I take for granted as a man (significant helpings of anonymity and safety) and the particular joys of liberation cities have offered women past, present, and future.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Patti…
A Sumerian tale of irrigation, floods, and the creation of man
By
Ken Goudsward,
Contrary to popular belief, the Atrahasis Epic is not merely a flood myth. In some ways it can be called a creation myth. However, it does not concern itself with the creation of the universe or even of the earth. Rather, the created work in question is one of culture…
I’ve read more books than I care to remember that treat cities solely as markets, using an economic lens that reduces urbanites to mere maximizers of their own economic self-interest. This book does the opposite, and that’s why I found it so refreshing.
Urban observer and activist Jeremiah Moss chronicles New York City during the pandemic, a time when there’s literally nothing to buy—no stores to shop in, no restaurants to eat in, and no fashion trends to keep up with. With the market shut down, Moss finds that neighbors reconnect with neighbors on a human level, and a creative, festival-like atmosphere sweeps the city. This book helped me remember what’s great about living in a big city despite the many obvious cost-of-living drawbacks.
Author, social critic and "New York City's career elegist" (The New York Times), Jeremiah Moss felt alienated in a town that had become suburbanised and sanitised. Then lockdown launched an unprecedented urban experiment: What happens when an entire social class abandons the city? In the streets made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss found a sense of freedom he never thought possible. Participating in a historic explosion of protest, resistance and spontaneity. From queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, he discovers that, without "hyper-normal" people to constrain it, New York can be more creative, connected, humane and…
I love this book because it was so ahead of its time. Written during San Francisco’s first bout of hyper-gentrification—the 1990s dot-com boom—it is a chronicle of and tribute to the economically marginal but culturally central communities that got squeezed out: SRO denizens, Black activists, and queer refugees from Middle America.
In this 2001 book, a yet-to-be-discovered Solnit, in league with photographers Susan Schwartzenberg and Kate Joyce, records it all through the bulldozed and whitewashed spaces where these urbanites once lived. Most indelible is Joyce’s photo essay on San Francisco Starbucks outlets, each with a line below marking the storefront’s former life (“New Manila Restaurant, 1964-1994”; “Melody Video & Sound, 1936-1992”) showing how a flood of corporate money washed away so much that was unique in a great American city.
California's Bay Area is home to nearly a third of the venture capital and internet businesses in the United States, generating a boom economy and a massive influx of well-paid workers that has transformed the face of San Francisco. Once the great anomaly among American cities, San Francisco is today only the most dramatically affected among the many urban centers experiencing cultural impoverishment as a result of new forms and distributions of wealth.
A collaboration between writer-hiostorian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City surveys San Francisco's transformation-skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit…
What happens when a person is placed into a medically-induced coma?
The brain might be flatlining, but the mind is far from inactive: experiencing alternate lives rich in every detail that spans decades, visiting realms of stunning and majestic beauty, or plummeting to the very depths of Hell while defying…
I remember the first time I realized I was in a city without addresses—Dubai, as it happened—and I was dumbfounded that such a place could exist, let alone succeed. In this book, Deirdre Mask unearths the hidden history of street addresses—a relatively recent invention from the Age of Enlightenment—and notes how many places ranging from rural West Virginia to hyper-modern Tokyo and Seoul do just fine without them.
In this wild ride from addressless ancient Rome to meticulously gridded and numbered Chicago, Mask explains how addresses have been used to keep track of citizens (for both good and ill) and how street names allow urban communities to define themselves by, say, changing Robert E. Lee Avenue into Martin Luther King Boulevard.
'Deirdre Mask's book was just up my Strasse, alley, avenue and boulevard.' -Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type
'Fascinating ... intelligent but thoroughly accessible ... full of surprises' - Sunday Times
Starting with a simple question, 'what do street addresses do?', Deirdre Mask travels the world and back in time to work out how we describe where we live and what that says about us.
From the chronological numbers of Tokyo to the naming of Bobby Sands Street in Iran, she explores how our address - or lack of one - expresses…
My book retraces the project of building instant modern cities in the developing world in an attempt to launch a region into the modern age. Starting in St. Petersburg, Russia, Tsar Peter the Great’s eighteenth-century Amsterdam-aping capital-built-from-scratch, the book moves through British-colonial Bombay and Americanized Jazz Age Shanghai to today’s skyscraper-studded Dubai.
“Reading” these metropolises’ modernizations through their purposefully Western-looking architecture, my book unearths the promises and pitfalls of efforts to leap wholesale into the modern world. In doing so, it tells the stories of the architects, authoritarians, artists, and revolutionaries who shaped these cities and turned them into some of the most captivating places on earth.
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for…
Who Will Take Care of Me When I'm Old?
By
Joy Loverde,
Everything you need to know to plan for your own safe, financially secure, healthy, and happy old age.
For those who have no support system in place, the thought of aging without help can be a frightening, isolating prospect. Whether you have friends and family ready and able to help…
