Japan’s train system is ranked the most efficient in the world, according to Statista. The United States is tied with Azerbaijan for 11th best. Part of this is because Japan’s railway system has more points of connection allowing for easier commutes. Why does the MTA operate at a loss while Tokyo Metro is profitable?
The sad state of office buildings could cause something called the “doom loop.” $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt, is owed to banks, pension funds, and insurance companies before the end of 2025, and secured by properties that may not be worth what they were five or 10 years ago when those loans got made.
Increasing interest rates, inflation, and supply chain disruptions notwithstanding, the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.
Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it. This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond. He shows how employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunities for themselves.
Fort Irwin is a U.S. Army base the size of Rhode Island, roughly three hours outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert. Its scale and isolation make it an ideal setting for immersive military training exercises, which are staged in a series of 14 simulated towns and cities.
Some Black residents and elected officials argue the stores stifle economic growth and job creation, and exacerbate food insecurity. The stores are also disproportionately in areas that are low-income, rural, and Black, which experts say is racist.
Jeff Carpoff was a good mechanic but struggled as a businessman. His machine—a solar generator on wheels—was a sun-fueled alternative. He called it the Solar Eclipse. His invention, he thought, was “crazy, harebrained.” But investors saw the makings of a clean-energy revolution.
A prominent housing analyst expects hundreds of thousands of defaults next year as mortgage forbearance periods end. At first glance, those projections look bad. On closer inspection, however, this round of foreclosures should be mild in comparison to the financial carnage of 2008 to 2010.
American citizens are inundated with political messages—on social networks, in their news feeds, through email, text messages, and phone calls. If you live in the US, you’re almost certainly being tracked by political organizations. They know a lot about you—but some data is just guesswork.
What happened at the Gardner Museum has become the most famous art heist ever, not only because of the money involved—$500 million, making it the largest art theft in history—but also because of the countless FBI agents, private detectives and art dealers who’ve tried and failed to solve it.
American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.
Bob Greenblatt, Kevin Reilly and Sarah Aubrey — the executives leading the charge for WarnerMedia’s ambitious HBO Max streaming venture — outline their vision for a global platform to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others in TV’s new frontier of the direct-to-consumer cavalcade.
If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century.
To shed light on the essential workers who are healing the sick, stocking our groceries, delivering our packages and cleaning our streets, there is a new political art campaign called Immigrants Are Essential. It’s a project of non-profits Resilience Force and the National Immigration Law Center.
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?
The war propaganda function in the United States is finely tuned. It’s sophisticated and most of all it blends into the media terrain. While the names of the countries changed, and of course each circumstance was different, there were some parallels that cried out for examination.
A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided.
The fight over preserving public land during the Trump era is taking a strange, angry twist in Montana’s Crazy Mountains. Both sides are armed.
The U.S. high court’s continual refinement of an obscure legal doctrine has made it harder to hold police accountable when accused of using excessive force. Sick with pneumonia, agitated and confused, Johnny Leija refused to return to his hospital room. Moments later, Leija was dead at age 34.
Too many Americans don’t have access to sufficient mental health support. A large reason for this disparity is that physicians aren’t moving to rural areas, but innovative partnerships are helping bridge the gap for some patients.
Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. The Confederados in Americana, Brazil, are one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.
It isn’t every day that a street criminal—a high-school dropout with two felony convictions—is accused of stealing a centuries-old violin worth as much as $6 million. But nothing about the heist of the Lipinski Stradivarius, which galvanized the music world last winter, was normal, or even logical.
It is the afternoon of Sunday, May 3, 2020, and Jordan Goudreau is confirming that a botched attempt to infiltrate Venezuela with a team of expatriate soldiers (and later, two U.S. citizens) on a hopeless mission to topple the government of President Nicolas Maduro is his doing.
The not very widely known aerial fighting and bombing that occurred between the United States and Switzerland during World War II.
The food at McDonald’s has always sold like hotcakes but once the restaurant started franchising, the world began eating up the brand. But being a franchise owner isn’t as easy, or profitable, as you might think. Buying into a McDonald’s franchise is expensive, between $1 million and $2.2 million.
In the mid 1990’s, two entertainment moguls along with plenty of huge celebrities like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger came together to create a restaurant business unlike any other. But as quick as this idea grew, the sooner everything came crashing down. This is the story of Planet Hollywood.
For all his criticisms, America’s most celebrated architect wasn’t intrinsically opposed to cities. Instead, Frank Lloyd Wright urged us to examine what they had become and recognize that none of their failures were inevitable.
Map-makers insert fake towns or trap-streets to catch out plagiarists. The most notable cartographic curiosity is Agloe, immortalized in John Green’s 2008 novel, Paper Towns. When its protagonist Margo disappears, she leaves oblique clues as to her whereabouts. The trail leads to somewhere and nowhere – Agloe.
Richard Phillips survived the longest wrongful prison sentence in American history by writing poetry and painting with watercolors. But on a cold day in the prison yard, he carried a knife and thought about revenge.
On its most basic level, “This Land Is Your Land” is a song about inclusion and equality—the American ideal broken down into simple, eloquent language and set to a melody you memorize on first listen. But there’s more to “This Land Is Your Land” than many people realize.
While the rest of the world has evolved to a place where we can track anything at all times and order anything from anywhere, government has been hopelessly stranded on an island in 1993.
When the Great Depression put Plennie Wingo’s bustling Abilene, Texas, cafe out of business, he tried to find fame, fortune, and a sense of meaning the only way he knew how: by embarking on an audacious trip around the world on foot. In reverse.
George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went.
For almost a decade, photographer Akasha Rabut has been delving into the lives of her fellow New Orleanians, creating images that pay homage to the city’s vitality. The results of that effort have come together in her first book, “Death Magick Abundance”.
In Pakistan, China and the U.S. are clashing over China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. To understand what’s at stake, it helps to take a look at why China is in Pakistan in the first place.
A lottery loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling.
For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real.
Across America, many malls have emptied out and thousands of abandoned big box stores sit empty, including hundreds of former Walmarts. Some, though, are getting creative new leases on life, becoming community markets, indoor tracks, gaming spaces, museums and more.
In 1940, a stunning and iconic vessel was launched called the S.S America. A ship of pride for the United States and after a long career in her golden years, the vessel ended up in a state of limbo for a while. She was left abandoned floating aimlessly until she was bought out and renamed to the SS American Star.
For New Orleans entrepreneur Jesseca Dupart, social media isn’t just a tool for building her business—it’s a platform for inspiring other black women to do the same. She started as a simple hair salon in 2012, now her beauty products are available in stores in every state, as well as Canada, the Caribbean, and the UK.
