When the UN’s flagship cities conference Habitat III meets in Ecuador on Oct. 17, the assembled mandarins and policy experts are set to make several calls to “prevent and contain urban sprawl.” On the surface, this should cheer the many urbanists who have long bemoaned sprawl’s damage to the environment, communities, and citizens’ wellbeing.
“Gated suburb” isn’t exactly what springs to mind when you think of New York and its hectic avenues, blinding lights, and incredible diversity. But Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto who was once branded the world’s most influential thinker by MIT, says the Big Apple is “tipping” in the direction of becoming one.
Legendary investor Warren Buffett hit back at Donald Trump today, after the Republican presidential candidate claimed during last night’s presidential debate that Buffett took a “massive deduction” on his tax returns.
In an apparent attempt to win over a chunk of the African American vote, Donald Trump has almost obsessively talked about fixing the country’s “inner cities”–which he has said are more dangerous than “war zones.” At last night’s debate, he brought them up in his very first answer–to a totally unrelated question about being a positive role model.
Hillary Clinton is fond of reminding people how Donald Trump has called women “pigs, dogs and slobs”–and that’s just what he says in public. But it’s just got even worse.
If you’re outraged by Donald Trump’s reported avoidance of federal taxes for 18 years, then make sure you’re sitting down.
Donald Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, came out with an oft-repeated line on US president Barack Obama’s economic record, during his Oct. 4 vice presidential debate against Tim Kaine.
You may have noticed the moment in the vice presidential debate when governor Mike Pence, fed up with senator Tim Kaine quoting Donald Trump’s slurs against Mexican immigrants, sighed “Senator, with that Mexican thing again.” Unfortunately for Pence, “that Mexican thing” quickly transformed into a hashtag, with Mexican Americans taking to Twitter to recount their families’ hard-working immigration stories.
Update: Shortly after publication, Quartz received the following statement from the Trump campaign: “While we remain very concerned about the political motives behind [New York Attorney General] Schneiderman’s investigation, the Trump Foundation nevertheless intends to cooperate fully with the investigation. Because this is an ongoing legal matter, the Trump Foundation will not comment further at this time.”
London mayor Sadiq Khan launched a sweeping investigation into property ownership in the UK capital this week, promising “the most thorough research on this matter ever undertaken.”
It’s not often you get called a saboteur, a potential radioactive bomber, and an American spy, and consider it a great day at the office. But exactly that happened to Reuters journalist Jack Stubbs—a Brit—this month when covering Russia’s parliamentary elections.
The destruction of the cherry orchard in the eponymous 1904 play written by Anton Chekhov was a melancholic symbol of the radical political change hitting Tsarist Russia at the time that culminated in the 1917 revolution. A century later, the winner of a US government-sponsored competition to re-imagine national memorials shows the same cherry trees slowly vanishing under our own era’s coming upheaval: rising sea levels provoked by climate change.
In the 1950s and 60s, newspaper readers around the world received many a story from the pen of global economics pundit Guy Sims Fitch.
American political interviewers have always seemed to me to be painfully deferential—as a Brit, I grew up watching long-time BBC host Jeremy Paxman snarl, scowl, and look generally incredulous at the nonsense coming out of politicians’ mouths.
Donald Trump just claimed that former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tactic of “stop and frisk” was the reason crime fell in the city during the 1990s and beyond.
Long considered one of the least sexy jobs in journalism, fact-checking is finally having its day in the sun.
It’s been available to super intelligent aliens, NASA, and Jimmy Carter for 39 years now—and the collection of three gold records sent out to space on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 i n 1977, could hit your doorstep in 2017.
I’ve seen Donald Trump run a country before—and it wasn’t pretty. Society was cheapened to its most base money-grabbing instincts, there was constant political turmoil, and superficiality ruled.
Say goodbye to book stacks and aching backs. The New York Public Library is reopening its stunning Rose Reading Room with a special addition: a whizzing book train that looks like something out of Wallace and Gromit.
Only Los Angeles, Paris, and Budapest are left as bidders to host the 2024 Olympics. Boston was the first to falter, followed swiftly by Hamburg—and now Rome’s new mayor has axed its bid for what would’ve been its first games since 1960.
The budding bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin has been one of this election’s most bizarre subplots. But take a closer look at the Russian media’s portrayal of Trump, plus the allegedly Kremlin-linked hacks that have hit both Trump and Clinton, and the Kremlin doesn’t seem all that fond of the Republican candidate. Moscow does, however, seem to be enjoying the damage Trump is doing to America’s image.
After 1,000 days in orbit, the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has come up with the most detailed map of space ever, showing 1.14 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, the agency says.
The Philippines’ firebrand president Rodrigo Duterte has had a headline-filled couple of weeks.
When it comes to the issues facing the modern world—climate change, international terrorism, a global refugee crises—large success stories are hard to come by. Nation states are embroiled in infighting and bureaucracy, and international organizations can’t find consensus on anything. Who’s left to dig us out of this quagmire?
