Nathaniel Popkin

I’ve spent the last two months wandering, loitering, dancing. Above all, I’ve been listening — to some four centuries of voices; to ideas and inventions, to observations and recriminations, to stories of love and stories of horror. The journey began in pre-history, passed through a remarkable Lenape meditation called the …

In The Origins of the Urban Crisis and now Sweet Land of Liberty, Penn historian Thomas Sugrue has shattered the conventional narrative about the struggle for Civil Rights in this country. The new book was published on the same day a black man was elected president; still, says Sugrue, …

“You have to do it piece by piece and mile by mile,” said Philadelphia’s Commerce Director Andy Altman earlier this month, while announcing progress in the city’s effort to reshape the Delaware waterfront. The city will adopt Penn Praxis’ plan to restore Philadelphia’s intimate urban fabric to the waterfront.

Altman’s statement …

I’ve been reading D.T. Max’s profile of the late novelist David Foster Wallace, which appeared in last week’s New Yorker. Wallace apparently struggled — in his writing and in his life — to come to terms with what felt to him like an increasingly vapid and seemingly inane American …

Max Page is the scholarly observer of New York’s destruction, its gleeful and energetic documentarian. In his first book, Creative Destruction (1999), he set out to understand the process by which, in the words of author Jerome Charyn, “New York…reproduces itself according to the ideals of each generation.” …