After what felt like five years of mayoral begging and media gimmicks, we finally know the top 20 finalists in the brutal battle for Amazon’s second headquarters. The cities are about as predictable as you’d think. Basically, all the big ones.
In the latest example of “Philip K Dick-inspired nightmare becomes real life,” Saudi Arabia just became the first nation to grant citizenship to a robot. The robot’s name is Sophia. It is artificially intelligent, friends with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and, arguably, a glimpse into the dark future that will kill us…
If you’ve ridden the New York City subway, you know the feeling. You buy a flimsy plastic card that lets you ride the train, and when you try to swipe it at the turnstile, it doesn’t work. You swipe again. The machine asks you to swipe again. You swipe again. The machine asks you to swipe again at the same turnstile.…
A so-called “fatberg”—a tightly congealed mass of fat, wet wipes, diapers, and condoms—is blocking a section of London’s Victorian-era sewage network. It could take weeks for utility crews to remove the horrific mass, which, if not removed, could cause raw sewage to spill onto London’s streets.
Jeff Bezos and friends are on a bit of a spending spree. Amazon just announced that it’s looking to drop a cool $5 billion on a “second headquarters” that will employ as many as 50,000 workers. In characteristically splashy fashion, the company also announced that cities across North America will get to bid on the…
In Julius Horsthuis’ short film Recurrence, he takes the audience on a slow descent into a sprawling metropolis he’s created. But as you get closer and closer to the city, and try to make out details like houses and skyscrapers, you start to realize that those tiny details only reveal more of the same, and that your…
Some Dubai residents woke up to a familiar sight early Friday morning: flames engulfing an enormous skyscraper. In fact, the fire that spanned 50 of the 86 stories of the massive Torch Tower was all too familiar. The same skyscraper burned in 2015, and the causes appear to be related.
When the world is descending into chaos, it can be hard to believe that optimistic visions of the future are within our reach. But personally, I think I’ve hit that point where escapist fantasy worlds of tomorrow are the only thing that can ease the stresses of our modern world. This 1923 illustration, for instance,…
Few cities represent the remarkable 20th century trend of skyscraper-filled, obscenely dense cities better than Hong Kong. At its height, The Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished in 1993, was perhaps the most dystopian portrait of urban living. And according to photographer Andy Yeung, 21st-century Hong Kong…
The more I learn about Elon Musk’s Boring Project—a batshit idea to build a tunnel that sends cars at breakneck speeds under Los Angeles—the more I want to take a ride. The twisted genius just posted video of a test sled zooming through a test tunnel. Holy shit, it’s like going into hyperspeed, and I want to ride! And…
On Tuesday, The New York Times decided to reignite the age old debate of walking versus standing on escalators. And do you know what the paper concluded? “You shouldn’t walk on escalators.” This is a patently incorrect and essentially un-American conclusion for at least four reasons.
In my particular Oakland neighborhood, not that many people smoke or binge drink (about 13%) and a lot of us exercise (about 80%). Not bad. We’re even doing a tad better than the city of Oakland overall, where 14% of people binge drink, nearly 16% smoke and closer to 75% of people regularly engage in physical…
The Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics were never going to go well. Thanks to decades of inequality and urban decay, the city always seemed ill-prepared to host athletes and fans from around the world. So it should come as no surprise that just six months after the games, the very expensive and sparkly venues built for…
Have you ever wondered why the world’s largest cities sprout up where they sprout up? It has a lot to do with water, natural resources, history, and being in the northern hemisphere.
Cities will grow alongside growing populations, turning the land in their wake into housing and infrastructure. And when that happens, we can goodbye to the food, a new study warns.
Residents of the southern Japanese city of Fukuoka had a rather rude awakening this morning when a gigantic sinkhole formed near the JK Hakata train station. Local officials are now desperately working to prevent the collapse of nearby buildings.
