This episode was previously called, “The City That Never Sleeps.”

… the massive increase in demand for cheap, subsidized autonomous vehicle rides will result in an increase in the number of cars in our cities. AV companies will then lobby for some roads to be designated as ‘autonomous only.’ This will be pitched as a way to increase safety and efficiency but the ultimate goal will be to eliminate public transit and human driving in order to force people to sign up to an AV subscription.

The distopia self-driving car companies are trying to build and what we could do to design our cities for people instead.

It was the kind of science I’d moved to Atlanta to learn to do…

To present slowness and simplicity as prophetic counterpoints against the dizzying excesses of the contemporary metropolis; and to offer contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource for life in the modern world.

This paper studies the ways that Walker, a short film by the Malaysian-Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang, visualizes the relationship between Buddhism and modernity.

You can also watch on YouTube:

• a clip from the film discussed in this article
• a sped-up version of another film from the series
• and an interview with Ng about this article

… the origin of Buddhism did not in any way depend upon the role of iron.

… back in the 1800s, Ellis Chesbrough was the man. And no one has ever worked harder to save Chicago from its own poop.

To have rejected strategy; to sit, instead, with one’s bafflement

This chapter explores the sites of production of what consumers in Vietnam perceive to be clean and safe vegetables, that is, urban gardens in Hanoi and rural areas. Adhering to the historical continuity of home gardens, the chapter identifies a semantic shift of gardens from aesthetics to utility in the light of food anxiety.

We wrote our names all over the city because we felt invisible. And it was fun. I existed when I did graffiti.

Morning: walking my neighborhood, I come upon a colony
of ants busy at work…

Because he’s neutral. I mean if we threw Christ up there, he is controversial. Everybody has got a deal about him. But Buddha, nobody seems to be that perturbed about a Buddha.

… human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster. We revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.

Disasters reveal, in their failure, how social hierarchies are a product of state violence, not “human nature.”

Welcome to the Sunshine Hotel, […] the end of the line.

A portrait of the last of the Bowery’s great flophouses.

All-knowing lords, buddhas of past, present and future
Bless this practitioner with thoughts of roaming abroad,

This sequence of images of cities may lie behind the location of Nibbāna at the pinnacle of a cosmological hierarchy as has been frequently noted in ethnographic studies of contemporary Theravādin Buddhism.

The Nibbānasutta displays, at least in part, the processes through which summaries and new suttas were created in the Theravāda tradition.

A late, apocryphal “sutta” in the Theravāda tradition, building on the famous simile of Nibbāna as a hidden, jungle city.

… the secret ideology hiding in the formula that built SimCity, and how that’s reflected in one of the most popular gaming series of all time

… early Buddhism rode to popular acceptance on the crest of a significant urban revolution that swept across large parts of the Gangetic region in the sixth century B.C.

The song goes on forever then it stops. Its basic idea is that time can be defeated for an hour if everyone breathes together, but songs are not made out of ideas

… poets do not [normally] get this kind of attention

The story of an unusual fence in New York City and its bold rejection of cynicism.