Brian Gongol
Sioux City considers its water future
New Yorkers try to figure out how to get traffic to slow down
In a way, it's ironic, considering that the goal of transportation engineering is often to get people from one place to another as swiftly as possible. But inasmuch as they're talking about trying to find ways to reduce congestion and humanize the city in the process, it's worth paying attention to. Los Angeles, by comparison, may be hopelessly addicted to sprawl thanks to laws requiring generous parking availability.
Give science a chance
Does the entertainment industry screw up politics?
Politicians of all stripes are regular targets for attack, whether on late-night TV shows or on talk radio. The effects of that are a bit murky. On one hand, we have Teddy Roosevelt's observation that if the people start to assume that all politicians are corrupt, then democracy is lost. But on the other hand, we have a First Amendment in place specifically to guarantee that those outside of politics have sufficient power to keep a check on those who are in politics, and parody and satire have been used for that purpose for centuries. The important question is probably whether there is something fundamentally different about today's lampooning that makes it harmful in a way the old type was not.
