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Fifteenth-century Florence had perhaps 60,000 people in it and produced a generation of artists whose names we still use as shorthand for genius. The usual explanation is patronage — the Medici money, the church commissions — and the money was certainly necessary. It doesn't explain the concentration, though, because plenty of wealthy cities produced nothing comparable. What Florence had was the bottega: the master's workshop, where apprentices ground pigment, prepared panels

Researchers have a favorite question for measuring social trust. They ask people to imagine losing a wallet in their own neighborhood, and then ask how likely it is to come back: if a neighbor found it, if a stranger found it, if the police found it. Nobody is really asking about wallets. They're asking whether you believe you live among people who would look out for you. The question underneath is: How often do you actually see your neighbors? In Happy City, Charles Montgome

There's a line early in Suz Murray's Kachonk about the morning commute and the existential crisis. The line hits differently if you once lived in New York. I looked around the room wondering what portion of the audience are creatives, or former creatives, who worked out a few years too late that the accumulation of capital in that city and the wealth disparity it produces make a genuinely hostile environment for making anything at all. I met Suz on a production set about a d

My girlfriend and I spent last Sunday assembling an IKEA unit for the kids. We built the frame from pieces meticulously organized on the floor while sipping our old fashioneds and listening to a playlist that included both Chopin and Drake. Yes, I'm aware of the cliché. I'd like it on record that we finished in under two hours and neither of us cried. I live in a small apartment. In the past two years, I've moved things around more times than I can count, because the space is

Before Reeshè was anything, it was nine months of conversations. We sat down with artists, service providers, and small business owners across Philadelphia, not with a survey, and not with anything to sell yet. Just conversations about what people were making and what was in the way. Almost everyone described the same two problems. The vocabulary changed. The shape remained the same. One: I don't have the systems. Two: even if I had the systems, I can't execute them alone. Th

There is a particular sentence you hear on a block after a place closes. I loved that place. Everyone says it. Everyone means it. And almost always the place that closed was good. The food was good, the work was good, the person behind the counter knew your name. It didn't close because it lacked talent. It closed because the distance between being good at something and running a business that survives is wider than most people are told, and almost nobody crosses it with help

On an early spring day, my daughter and I walked to the library. We took the long route on purpose because I needed bamboo sticks and gardening gloves from the hardware store. We had won a lottery for a tomato plot at our community garden, and there wasn't much time left to plant for the season. She is in the phase where every walk becomes a deep dive. A few blocks in, she wanted to know why sparrows have different patterns; specifically, whether the males are more striking t