“Montgomery Ward’s “Busy Bee Hive” in 1899. The open-air observatory at the top of the tower was the highest point in Chicago.” Worth zooming in. (Was just reading about this marvel in Nature’s Metropolis, an all-timer.) drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-...

This art is in the restaurant of the hotel where we stayed last night and I want it. (“Chicago Curve” by David Sewall)

Thank you to @kcranews.bsky.social for having me on to discuss SB 79 and where pro-housing policy going forward in California.

CFP: Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory, Volume V. We're seeking contributions in contract, property, tort, fiduciary, equity, unjust enrichment, and remedies law. Submissions are 12,000 words, and you get a trip to Cape Town! Deadline August 1, 2026! philevents.org/event/show/1...

You’d look quite Smart in this car.

For the corporate law professor in your life.

I can get Apple Music for free but pay for another service instead because a single mistake during the syncing process will kill your entire mp3 library. There’s app updates as well as the setup to worry about. If you have sepia-toned memories of Napster & Limewire, you can’t take that kind of risk.

Nonsense. They moved there for the schools (of fish). Showing myself out…

The lesson of YIMBY is that you need people who are thinking about the problem statement at higher orders of geography and time. That’s important for transit as well.

Incredibly, not one of these milestones scores as a “win” using the traffic engineering metrics that quietly dictate city planning. Urban planning prof Jonathan Levine and I have one paper detailing why and another explaining why it has to change for any vision of abundance to succeed. Links below.

My hometown, another beneficiary of self-destructive trade, tourism and travel policies. (Not just tariffs, can we stop with that trope, please?)

Modern postmarking dates to 1661: “A stamp is invented, that is putt upon every letter shewing the day of the moneth that every letter comes to this office, so that no letter Carryer may dare to detayne a letter from post to post; which, before, was usual.” www.earsathome.com/webgil/bisho...

When you’re definitely not leading a heist of German bearer bonds

Inspired by @besttrousers.bsky.social, I tried to figure out how many gig workers there are kevinonthemargin.com/the-great-gi...

🧠: gondolas for ski 🧠🧠: gondolas for urban transit 🧠🧠🧠🤯: gondolas for apples The gondola connecting the central treatment hub of the largest apple producers consortium in Italy to the underground storage facility. Opened last November.

One of the small innovations I’m grateful for is the ability to autobuy ETFs every day, in any amount. This incorporates a bunch of other changes in securities markets (index funds, commission-free trading, fractional trading) and makes it easy to slowly accumulate shares of economic growth.

Niche legal education tweet: I’ve come to see the problem with Kingsfield not in the Socratic method but with his being an a**hole. Oral exams may not be feasible, but the Socratic method, tailored by each prof to the material/methods/skills they want to emphasize, is right there as an option.

These two images of Chinese train driver Han Junjia were taken less than 30 years apart. Transformative change is possible when it is relentlessly pursued.

One of the more on-point local govt observations I've seen in passing on the interwebs in a long time. You can extrapolate - correctly - in several directions from this point. ⬇️

It all comes back to operating expenses. Operating agencies are always* hunting for ways to economize on them. So, parking is free on Sundays for the same reason that transit often doesn’t run at all. Lower trip volumes provide a rationale for curbing opex. *subject to various constraints

Super low hanging safety fruit. US regulators have had a decade plus to get manufacturers to make safe door handles and still they haven’t. www.autoblog.com/news/china-i...

Great thread.

Such a bummer there are so many publicly owned parcels in working class neighborhoods of NYC like Hamilton Heights which would be the cutest pocket parks on snow days EXCEPT they're locked up for half the year because they're nominally "community gardens".

Very thoughtful post on two languages of empiricism (build and test vs. describe and defend) and understanding them as complementary.

Georgism makes sense in the (laissez faire) land use regime in which it was originally proposed and, for the same reason, where land value is determined by (weak) fundamentals rather than regulation. How would it work in high-demand areas where demand is mediated by fragmented, uncertain regulation?

I don’t think this can be fixed directly, given the cost structure of transit and car use. The main cost of using transit is time. A bus pass you already own thus may make a half-mile trip costly. The car you own makes it ~free. The opportunity is in enabling car-lite and -free lifestyles.

The American mind cannot comprehend this level of interagency operational coordination. My local parks district doesn’t want to collaborate on a pool project with my local school district, so they’re building two.

Friction is good and one of the most consequential tasks facing the designers and managers of social-technical systems in the 21st century is putting it back in in the right ways and right places.

One of the problems with NYC's incredibly labor intensive trash removal system is it collapses whenever there's a holiday. A rich first world city like NYC shouldn't be so fragile.

Cracking down on assumable mortgages was a focus of SCOTUS and Congress in 1982:

Cars can be useful, like pencils, and fun, like Sour Patch Kids, and yet at the same time it was a mistake to fundamentally reorganize society around them.

Jevons paradox behavior plus error fixing has been my base case for the impact of AI on legal services demand. Bullish!

This is the future of exam taking.

Congestion pricing is arguably the biggest policy success of 2025. I wrote up some ideas on what to do next: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Just one of many very cool scale models (this one, of a depot) among the many real trains at the Illinois Train Museum.

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

There's a larger lesson about the importance of prices generally, and the problems that arise from disregarding this knowledge.

Excellent thread.

Fittingly, this quote was sponsored by Countrywide Financial and only came to be sponsored by Bank of America following its acquisition of the subprime lender in early 2008.

Grim, especially for those of us who want to see more private investment flowing into major infrastructure.

You either allow more housing to be built to meet demand, or you create increasingly complicated and expensive ways to deal with the lack of supply

Weird how this keeps happening. www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

Big 'W' for my pals at the Marron Institute's Transit Costs Project!

City officials are the figures most often held accountable for traffic safety, but states and U.S. DOT set the rules. To save lives, we must remove institutional roadblocks and advocate for the creation of national standards that put safety first. nacto.org/latest/the-1...

The new MUTCD still falls short in areas that play an outsized role in the unsafe design of our streets and continues to prioritize motor vehicle movement over the enormous range of other urban street users. nacto.org/latest/thous...

Pre-kids: who on earth is buying these multiple-terabyte shared cloud plans? Post: excuse me while I upload this two-minute HD video

I think the TikTok divestment requirement very clearly *was* about national security when it was enacted in April 2024, but there’ve been one or two changes (really just one) since then.

9️⃣ CTA The gold standard. The cars themselves have a solid wrap job and good LED light show (including on the roof!), but putting Santa and his sleigh on a flatcar is absolutely next level. Grade: A+

Welcome, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader. www.ft.com/content/c395...