Superheated American City Dealing with 110 Degrees for 33 Days -- Phoenix Confronts Apocalyptic Climate Change Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com March 14, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix. Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. In Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought, and violent winds, interacting and amplifying each other that you worry about. If, in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of Superstorm Sandy look mild. In the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe and killed 70,000 people.
The Top 75 ‘Pictures of the Day’ for 2012 *Update: The Top 100 ‘Pictures of the Day’ for 2012 have just been published. Click here to check out the most up-to-date post! After the positive reception from last year’s “Top 50 ‘Pictures of the Day’ for 2011“, the Sifter promised to highlight the top 25 ‘Pictures of the Day‘ at the end of every quarter, eventually culminating in an epic Top 100 for 2012. It’s hard to believe we’re already into the final quarter of 2012. *Please note the photographs themselves were not necessarily taken in 2012, they just happened to be featured as a ‘Picture of the Day’ this year. Enjoy! Liquor-license moratoriums: NIMBY idiots are strangling great neighborhoods by blocking new bars and restaurants Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images An interesting thing happened in my neighborhood recently. A small posse of local busybodies organized as the Shaw Dupont Citizens Alliance proposed a moratorium on new liquor licenses for the increasingly vibrant nightlife corridors on 14th Street and U Street in Washington, D.C. Similar moratoria already constrain longer-established D.C. drinking hubs, and when I heard about the Shaw Dupont proposal, initially I felt despondent. Similar fights play out in cities all around the country but not always with the same happy outcome. My neighborhood is hardly the only nightlife cluster in urban America featuring a version of this controversy. Proponents of curtailing licenses typically cite local nuisance effects as the key reason. These complaints ought to be understood in the larger context of urban economics. In reality, there’s nothing particularly unusual about similar firms clustering together.
60 insane cloud formations from around the world [PICs] Cloud varieties go way beyond the cumulus, stratus, and cirrus we learn about in elementary school. Check out these wild natural phenomena. STANDING IN A CORNFIELD IN INDIANA, I once saw a fat roll cloud (like #4 below) float directly over my head. It’s a 12-year-old memory that remains fresh. I imagine a lot of these photographers having similar hesitations as they set up for the shots below.
Fallacy of the creative class: Why Richard Florida’s ‘urban renaissance’ won’t save U.S. cities It was an urbanist’s nightmare. On Feb. 1, a teenager was shot dead in the middle of a popular art gallery walk and street fair in Oakland, Calif. — a town that highlights exactly what a city wins and loses when it attracts a huge influx of the vaunted “creative class.” Kiante Campbell, an 18-year-old Oakland resident, was killed in the shadow of new condominiums, gourmet food trucks, and buffed art galleries selling oil paintings that cost more than a few months’ rent in the ’hood. The festival, Art Murmur, shuts down much of Oakland’s downtown on the first Friday of each month, drawing 20,000 people, including tourists from both San Francisco and the surrounding suburbs. Now its future was called into question. The shooting highlighted a stark reality: The creative class is remaking Oakland in its own image, but the “urban renaissance” isn’t benefitting everyone. By the urbanist creative-class metric, Oakland is winning. Those gains disappear.
A Closer Look We so rarely look at everyday objects that, when they are pictured under an electron microscope, they take on a new - and sometimes disgusting new life. Used dental floss. Mascara brush. Salt and pepper. Postage stamp. Used Q-tip. Needle and thread. Computer chip parts. Electric shaver with cut whiskers. Guitar string. Velcro. Cigarette lighter. Toilet paper (unused, thank goodness). Pencil lead. Toothbrush bristles. Oakland is for Burning? Beyond a Critique of Gentrification : BayofRage Oakland is for Burning? Beyond a Critique of Gentrification Posted by OaklandCommune on Thursday, October 18, 2012 · Leave a Comment I’m not a nihilist, but I wish they would burn every fucking thing down except for the houses. So that people would begin to understand that we don’t need this system. - Bella Eiko, speaking to the Oakland City Council, during a vote called to ban “tools of violence” at political demonstrations, 2012 During the Summer [of 1966], there were rumors in the Oakland ghetto that Molotov cocktails were being manufactured in empty garages; that arms caches had been discovered; and that new tactics based on a study of Watts were being taught to young Negro militants, stressing the folly of burning their own homes and shops in the ghetto, and urging that their protest would be more effective if they burned City Hall, the business district, and the homes of the Whites on the hillside. Make no mistake: Oakland has changed drastically over the last few years.
China's Abandoned Wonderland In Chenzhuang Village, China, about 20 miles northwest of central Beijing, the ruins of a partially built amusement park called Wonderland sit near a highway, surrounded by houses and fields of corn. Construction work at the park, which developers had promised would be "the largest amusement park in Asia," stopped around 1998 after disagreements with the local government and farmers over property prices. Developers briefly tried to restart construction in 2008, but without success. The abandoned structures are now a draw for local children and a few photographers, who encounter signs telling them to proceed at their own risk. Use j/k keys or ←/→ to navigate Choose: A farmer carries a shovel over his shoulder as he walks to tend his crops in a field that includes an abandoned castle-like building that was to be part of an amusement park called "Wonderland", on the outskirts of Beijing, China, on December 5, 2011.
The Big Squeeze: Can Cities Save The Earth? : Krulwich Wonders... Let's get dense. If we take all the atoms inside you, all roughly 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, and squeeze away all the space inside, then, says physicist Brian Greene: Steve Goodwin/iStockphoto.com That's a very tight fit. So tight that in real life, it couldn't happen. It's not physically possible. They are apartment towers in Hong Kong. ... well, that's not exactly true. ... towers of them next to towers next to more towers ... ...without end ... ... and as I look at Michael's pictures (while sitting in my box-like apartment in New York under somebody else's apartment, surrounded by similar apartments, left and right of me, up and down the block), I'm thinking, "OK, this not be the most beautiful, and certainly not the most natural way to live, but modern cities allow enormous numbers of people to spend their lives in extraordinary close proximity, piling them, literally, on top of each other, and somehow, it works! Well, maybe. Would it cover half a continent?
The 6 Creepiest Places on Earth It doesn't matter whether or not you believe in ghosts, there are some places in which none of us would want to spend a night. These places have well earned their reputations as being so creepy, tragic or mysterious (or all three) that they definitely qualify as "haunted." Places like... Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around. What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. More than 500 fucking people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s. The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. Also skulls. Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing! Winchester Mystery House Oh, bitch...!
Embracing the Urban-Nature Ethic As I walk along the Los Angeles River on a cool fall afternoon, I gaze across a graffiti-ridden concrete embankment and imagine what this landscape must have looked like less than 100 years ago. The LA River today, which dumps the area’s urban runoff directly in the Pacific Ocean, serves as a paved flood control channel for the city. It carries litter, bacteria and other nasty pollutants from the streets of LA straight into the nearby sea, without ever being treated. This is certainly not the type of roaring river I grew up appreciating in the wilds of Montana, but it is rugged in its own right. The engineers that designed this industrial behemoth missed the ecological boat when they drew up plans to channelize this once expansive waterway. The legendary Olmsted Brothers were two men who envisioned something starkly different for the LA River than what exists now. One could blame manifest destiny on the developers’ innate greed and government backing for what happened to the LA River.