Books on Cities
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When Jan Morris died this past November, her fellow writer of place Pico Iyer saluted her on Twitter as "the kindest, shrewdest and most indefatigable …
Colin Marshall
Mar 30CommentShare
Since moving to Seoul in 2015, I’ve written the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog on South Korean literature, cinema, current events, and daily l…
Colin Marshall
Mar 8CommentShare
When a podcast hits it big, it becomes something else: ideally a streaming television series, that most prestigious of all 21st-century cultural forms.…
Colin Marshall
Mar 1CommentShare
We who write about cities obviously have an interest in the city as a subject. But I suspect we value it even more as a nexus of subjects, an ostensibl…
Colin Marshall
Feb 15CommentShare
"You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers," Michael Tilson Thomas once declared. "They simply define what music is." By the…
Colin Marshall
Jan 16Comment 1Share
When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the United States, Michael Sorkin became one of its earliest high-profile casualties. He died in New York City…
Colin Marshall
Jan 4CommentShare
When you hear something described as "only in L.A.," rest assured of its being neither unique to nor representative of Los Angeles. Take, mundane thoug…
Colin Marshall
Dec 15, 2020CommentShare
When Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York in 1978, he hadn't yet built his best-known work. Central China Television Headquarters was 35 years awa…
Colin Marshall
Dec 4, 2020CommentShare
Anyone with an interest in American cities today has heard of Walk Score. Launched in 2007, the web site calculates the proximity of any given address …
Colin Marshall
Nov 15, 2020CommentShare
Andrei Codrescu moved to New Orleans in 1985, and Hurricane Katrina followed two decades later. "New Orleans will be rebuilt, but it will never again b…
Colin Marshall
Nov 3, 2020Comment 1Share
The publisher of Owen Hatherley's Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent sent me a copy addressed to "Colin Marshall, Cities Writer." Though I…
Colin Marshall
Oct 19, 2020CommentShare
When urban theorists speak of "reading" the city, they usually leave the mechanics of the act to the reader's imagination. In 1977, Christopher Alexand…
Colin Marshall
Oct 4, 2020CommentShare
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