Not quite random, but not quite organized, either

I've been rather busy lately, finishing up work in New York and planning my move to Seattle, so I haven't had time to note a few interesting articles and a few thoughts:

1. The NYT visits the new green roof being installed at Silvercup Studios (August 10)

2. Also, David Brooks of the NYT extols the virtues of cultural geography. It seems like bad career advice, since the kids who take his advice are likely to become Marxist urban planners, but aside from his twerpy apologies for all things conservative, David Brooks does manage to write some offbeat and interesting stuff. (August 10)

3. Blaine Harden of the Washington Post goes to Los Angeles and examines the paradox of high-density sprawl. (August 11)

4. The new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was not involved in the 1979 embassy hostage taking, but he is.... a traffic planner! The only comment I've seen on this appeared offline in the August 11th New York Review of Books: "Ahmadinejad is a professor at Tehran's University of Science and Technology, but his special subject, traffic planning does not promise imaginative leadership." Perhaps unfair, but amusing. Iranian bloggers have already expressed their despair at the result here, but hopefully he can apply "traffic calming" to calming Americans, Europeans, and Israelis all terrified at the prospect of an Iranian nuclear bomb (but seriously, some of my best friends are traffic planners).

5. Mayor Michael Bloomberg disses Chinese food, stirring ethnic passions (August 14)

6. Again, sprawl: the NYT finds that America is growing fast (August 15)

More later.

Technorati Tags: cities, sprawl, urban