Search results for: “amazon”
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Diet Denier
Perhaps you could call Nina Teicholz a “diet denier.” The journalist and author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Health Diet,” is part of the growing backlash against a half century-long orthodoxy that aimed to limit fat and cholesterol in the American diet. That orthodoxy, which ruled the medical establishment and the…
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How Planners Can Rescue Virginia from the Fiscal Abyss
This is a copy of a speech that I presented to the Virginia Chapter of the American Planners Association Monday, with extemporaneous amendments and digressions deleted. — JAB Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here. Urban planning is a fascinating discipline. As my old friend Ed Risse likes to say, urban planning isn’t…
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Tech Insurrection
Smart cities, says Anthony Townsend, will be forged by geeks, activists and civic hackers through bottom-up technological innovation.
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Sprawl’s Hidden Subsidies
The answer to sprawl isn’t more regulation, says Pamela Blais, it’s fixing the endemic biases embedded in taxes, utility fees, municipal services and mortgages.
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The Long, Sad, Inevitable Demise of Small Town America
by James A. Bacon In theory the past decade should have been very good for America’s small towns and rural areas: The fracking revolution has created an energy boom in places as far flung as western Pennsylvania and North Dakota. High prices for agricultural commodities have propped up incomes across the grain belt. Yet, despite…
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Exposing the Black Friday Parking Myth
by James A. Bacon The Strong Towns blog has published a brilliant piece of crowd-sourced content on the topic of Black Friday parking. Here’s the issue: Smart Growth advocates are highly critical of local government regulations that mandate a minimum number of parking spaces around retail establishments. The resulting expanses of parking lots, they say,…
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An Inquiry into the Origins of Social Disorder
by James A. Bacon The conventional wisdom in housing-reform circles these days emphasizes the need to bust up concentrations of poverty. When Mayor Dwight Jones recently explained his thinking behind Richmond’s latest plans to inject mixed-income housing into the City of Richmond’s desolate East End, he said he wanted to change the culture of poverty. Poor people…
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Innuendo vs. Substance In the Governor’s Race
By Peter Galuszka Virginia’s nasty gubernatorial race fills television screens and Web sites with suggestions of corruption by both candidates, involving everything from gifts to natural gas rights to a struggling electric carmaker in Mississippi. There’s anything but a smoking gun, but no shortage of innuendo. And I think it is important to point that…
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A Logical Approach to Reforming Parking Policy
by James A. Bacon The United States has hundreds of millions more parking spaces than it needs. As a result of this excessive supply, mandated by local government regulations across the country, acreage worth billions of dollars is tied up in unproductive land use. So-called “free” parking really isn’t free. It drives up the cost…
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Richmond’s Remarkable Underground Press
By Peter Galuszka With its broad, tree-lined avenues, Georgian-style redbrick buildings and statues of Confederate generals, Richmond comes off a snooty and tranquil. Yet, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel, it is a place “with larger-than-life personalities and a façade of gentility and political etiquette covering an underworld of cut-throat, back-room politics…
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They May Be Reading Trash, but at Least They’re Reading
It’s gratifying to see that two Virginia cities snagged top spots in Amazon.com’s 2012 ranking of the Most Well-Read Cities in America (“well read” being based upon all book, magazine and newspapers sales in print and Kindle format on a per capita basis for cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants.) Alexandria ranked No. 1 in…
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McAuliffe Pitches Jobs vs. Ideology
By Peter Galuszka “Fantastic,” says Terry McAuliffe as he listens to officials at the Culpeper, Va., campus of Germanna Community College talk about projects ranging from designing machine controls to a weight-loss competition. The tall, curly-haired McLean businessman — a Democrat who wants to be Virginia’s next governor — walks through a campus building while…
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Doubling Down on a Broken Growth Model
by James A. Bacon I’ve just finished an extraordinary little book. “Thoughts on Building Strong Towns,” that has helped crystallize my thinking on the fiscal trap of the “suburban sprawl” model of growth and development. The author, Charles Marohn, is a Minnesota-based civil engineer, urban planner and executive director of the Strong Towns organization, and,…
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The American War that Time Forgot
by James A. Bacon Two hundred years ago, a young America was engaged in one of the most obscure wars in its history, the War of 1812. Most Americans, if they know anything at all about the war, may recall that Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner during the siege of Fort McHenry…
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The New Geography of Jobs
by James A. Bacon “The New Geography of Jobs” is arguably the most important book about urban economics published in 2012. Author Enrico Moretti, an Italian-born economics professor at Berkeley, analyzes the great divergence occurring between metropolitan regions in the United States. While much of his narrative about the “innovation” sector as the key driver…