The City Journal Electronic Journal

With advice and informative readings of the great Greek texts, this title shows how we might save classics and the Greeks. It is suitable for those who agree that knowledge of classics acquaints us with the beauty and perils of our own culture.

Manufacturing Decline argues that antigovernment conservatives capitalized on--and perpetuated--Rust Belt cities' misfortunes by stoking racial resentment. Jason Hackworth traces how the conservative movement has used the imagery and ideas of urban decline since the 1970s to advance their cause.

Shaping Neighbourhoods is unique in combining all aspects of the spatial planning of neighbourhoods and towns whilst emphasising positive outcomes for people’s health and global sustainability. This new edition retains the combination of radicalism, evidence-based advice and pragmatism that made earlier editions so popular. This updated edition strengthens guidance in relation to climate change and biodiversity, tackling crises of population health that are pushing up health-care budgets, but have elements of their origins in poor place spatial planning – such as isolation, lack of everyday physical activity, and respiratory problems. It is underpinned by new research into how people use their localities, and the best way to achieve inclusive, healthy, low-carbon settlements. The guide can assist with: • Understanding the principles for planning healthy and sustainable neighbourhoods and towns • Planning collaborative and inclusive processes for multi-sectoral working • Developing know-how and skills in matching local need with urban form • Discovering new ways to integrate development with natural systems • Designing places with character and recognising good urban form Whether you are a student faced with a local planning project; a public health professional, planner, urban designer or developer involved in new development or regeneration; a council concerned with promoting healthy and sustainable environments; or a community group wanting to improve your neighbourhood – you will find help here.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

Media business that mostly relies on ad revenue requires an audience that consists of happy and economically able consumers. Media business that mostly relies on reader revenue requires an audience that consists of frustrated and politically strangulated citizens. The media not only address these audiences; they create and reproduce them.All we knew about journalism was related to a news business funded by advertising. Advertising has fled to the internet. The entire media environment is shifting. The media are forced to switch to another source of funding - selling content to readers. However, they cannot sell news, because news is already known to people whose media consumption is increasingly centered on social media newsfeeds. Instead, the media offers the validation of already-known news within a certain value system and the delivery of the "right" news to others. The business necessity forces the media to relocate the gravity of their operation from news to values.Media outlets are increasingly soliciting subscriptions as donations to a cause. To attract donations, they have to focus on 'pressing social issues'. However, for better soliciting, they must also support and amplify readers' irritation and frustration with those issues. Thus, the media are incentivized to amplify and dramatize issues whose coverage is most likely to be paid for. Ideally, the media should not just exaggerate but induce the public's concerns.The ad-driven media manufactured consent. The reader-driven media manufactures anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serves polarization.Because the largest mainstream media outlets in the US, both liberal and conservative, performed incredibly well in commodifying Trump in the form of soliciting subscriptions as donations to the cause, the rest of the media market has started moving in the same direction.The need to pursue reader revenue, with the news no longer being a commodity, is pushing journalism to mutate into postjournalism. Journalism wants its picture to match the world; postjournalism wants the world to match its picture. The media are turning into crowdsourced Ministries of post-truth not because of some underlying conspiracies but due to their business needs and the settings of a broader media environment. This book is about the origins and propelling forces of this mutation. The book explores polarization as a media effect, seeing polarization studies as media studies.Andrey Mir (Andrey Miroshnichenko) is a media scholar and journalist with twenty years in the print media. He is the author of "Human as Media. The Emancipation of Authorship" (2014) and a number of books on media and politics. His dissertation in journalism and linguistics (1996) focused on the linguistics of the Soviet media and propaganda. He lives in Toronto, Canada. His blog: Human as Media (human-as-media.com). Twitter: @Andrey4Mir

"Fight House looks juicy as all hell" - National Review "Troy seamlessly weaves West Wing gossip with significant moments in modern history." - Jewish Insider THE WHITE HOUSE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A FIGHT HOUSE President Trump’s White House is famously tumultuous. But as presidential historian and former White House staffer Tevi Troy reminds us, bitter rivalries inside the White House are nothing new. From the presidencies of Harry S. Truman, when the modern White House staff took shape, to Donald Trump, the White House has been filled with ambitious people playing for the highest stakes and bearing bitter grudges. In Fight House, you’ll discover: -The advisor to President Harry Truman that General George Marshall refused to acknowledge -How the supposed “Camelot” Kennedy White House was rife with conflict -How Dr. Henry Kissinger displaced other national security advisors to gain President Richard Nixon’s ear -Why President Jimmy Carter’s personal pettiness and obsession with detail led to a dysfunctional White House—and played a role in his losing the 1980 election -How the contrasting management styles of President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan led to some epic White House staff clashes -Why the “No Drama Obama” White House was anything but no drama Insightful, entertaining, and important, Tevi Troy’s Fight House will delight and instruct anyone interested in American politics and presidential history.

A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the "city-as-computer" metaphor, which undergirds much of today's urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city's many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs. Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.