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The Least Affordable Neighborhood in the U.S.? From the report: "In the Philadelphia region, moderate-income households are faced with average housing and transportation costs exceeding 90 percent of their income in some neighborhoods."

The Price of Density: Housing in Houston isn't so bad -- it's the 8th most affordable large city to own a home in. But the same thing that helps make it an affordable place to own a home (lots of space!) also raises its commuting costs. Factor in transportation, and it's the 8th least affordable large city to live.

dense expensive cities like San Francisco, Boston and New York are considerably more affordable when you add in transportation costs because of their superior public transit.

Nationwide, Housing Grew 2X as Fast as Income: Combined H&T expenses average $30,296 for a median-income household, according to the report. But they're growing much faster than median household income.

experience shows that even environmentally conscious people need prodding and incentives to change their behavior permanently.

most experts believe it will take a stiff stick to break a habit as ingrained as this one is in the United States. (In many European countries, like France and Italy, the plastic bag thing never fully caught on.)

All across the country, plastic bags are the bane of recycling programs. When carelessly placed into recycling bins for general plastic — which they often are — the bags jam and damage expensive sorting machines, which cost huge amounts to repair.

Where they exist, bans and charges or taxes (when set high enough) have been extremely successful and often raise revenue for other environmental projects. Unfortunately, these tactics are deeply unpopular in most of the nation.

an economist at University College, Dublin, who has studied the effects of Ireland’s 10-year-old bag tax — the first in the world — is skeptical: “As regards the plastic bag issue, whatever is done has to be mandatory,” he said. “The New York model is designed to fail.”

great gaming experiences speak to our inner desire for mastery, autonomy and purpose, Mr. Zichermann noted. The same can be said of travel. “Why do we travel?” he said. “It’s all about creating memories and discovering ourselves. Gamification is perfectly aligned with that.”

Gamification can engage people simply by making travel more playful and social, like Virgin America’s new seat-to-seat delivery feature that encourages fliers to “get lucky” by sending one another cocktails and messages through the entertainment system touchscreens on seatbacks

Even acquiring travel skills has become a game with language-learning Web sites like Duolingo and MindSnacks.

Despite gamification’s popularity, there are many poorly designed experiences. In fact, the technology research company Gartner is predicting that by next year 80 percent of gamification projects will fail to meet business objectives. When done right, however, gamification can garner brand loyalty while also helping travelers interact, learn, share opinions and explore the world.

companies that specialize in gamification say they are trying to design experiences that are emotional, that delight or surprise, unlike early loyalty programs

“Historically,” says Greg Blatt, the CEO of Match.com’s parent company, “relationships have been billed as ‘hard’ because, historically, commitment has been the goal. You could say online dating is simply changing people’s ideas about whether commitment itself is a life value.” Mate scarcity also plays an important role in people’s relationship decisions. “Look, if I lived in Iowa, I’d be married with four children by now,” says Blatt, a 40‑something bachelor in Manhattan. “That’s just how it is.”

“I think divorce rates will increase as life in general becomes more real-time,” says Niccolò Formai, the head of social-media marketing at Badoo, a meeting-and-dating app with about 25 million active users worldwide. “Think about the evolution of other kinds of content on the Web—stock quotes, news. The goal has always been to make it faster. The same thing will happen with meeting. It’s exhilarating to connect with new people, not to mention beneficial for reasons having nothing to do with romance. You network for a job. You find a flatmate. Over time you’ll expect that constant flow. People always said that the need for stability would keep commitment alive. But that thinking was based on a world in which you didn’t meet that many people.”

“You could say online dating allows people to get into relationships, learn things, and ultimately make a better selection,” says Gonzaga. “But you could also easily see a world in which online dating leads to people leaving relationships the moment they’re not working—an overall weakening of commitment.”

Explaining the mentality of a typical dating-site executive, Justin Parfitt, a dating entrepreneur based in San Francisco, puts the matter bluntly: “They’re thinking, Let’s keep this fucker coming back to the site as often as we can.” For instance, long after their accounts become inactive on Match.com and some other sites, lapsed users receive notifications informing them that wonderful people are browsing their profiles and are eager to chat. “Most of our users are return customers,” says Match.com’s Blatt.

The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.” “Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”

The public relationship between Rove and Boyce has been complicated, according to several sources familiar with the project. Rove has openly embraced Boyce’s work, touting it at an invitation-only conference that drew some of the GOP’s biggest names to a swanky Georgia resort in March. But Boyce has established distance from Rove, indicating to prospective donors that he’s not simply a front for the latest project from the Rove-conceived Crossroads groups, which sponsored one of Rove’s New York meetings this month.

Multiple sources said that Boyce’s effort has collided with Themis, adding to the rivalry between two of the deepest-pocketed factions in conservative politics — Crossroads and the Koch political operation

it turns out that the way we move largely determines the way we live.

gadgets cumulatively contribute only a fraction of what we save by living in a walkable neighborhood. It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.

“gizmo green”; the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.

study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts more than walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.

because it’s better than nothing, LEED — like the Prius — is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”

10 to 20 units per acre is the density at which drivable suburbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.

“We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to

The average New Yorker consumes roughly one-third the electricity of the average Dallas resident, and ultimately generates less than one-third the greenhouse gases of the average American.

New York is our densest big city and, not coincidentally, the one with the best transit service. All the other subway stations in America put together would not outnumber the 468 stops of the MTA. In terms of resource efficiency, it’s the best we’ve got.

New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half, as does Sydney — and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half, and you end up with Hong Kong

Paris is one place that has determined that its future depends on reducing its auto dependence. The city has recently decided to create 25 miles of dedicated busways, introduced 20,000 shared city bikes in 1,450 locations, and committed to removing 55,000 parking spaces from the city every year for the next 20 years. These changes sound pretty radical, but they are supported by 80 percent of the population.

increasing density from two units per acre to 20 units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from 20 to 200.

the American anti-urban ethos remained intact as everything else changed. The desire to be isolated in nature, adopted en masse, led to the quantities and qualities we now call “sprawl,” which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.

most communities with these densities are also organized as traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, the sort of accommodating environment that entices people out of their cars. Everything above that is icing on the cake.

unless we hit a national crisis of unprecedented severity, it is hard to imagine any argument framed in the language of sustainability causing many people to modify their behavior. So what will?

The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the 10 categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.

the top 10 cities always seem to include a bunch of places where they speak German (Vienna, Zurich, Dusseldorf, etc.), along with Vancouver, Auckland, and Sydney. These are all places with compact settlement patterns, good transit, and principally walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, there isn’t a single auto-oriented city in the top 50. The highest-rated American cities in 2010, which don’t appear until No. 31, are Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, and Seattle.

Our cities, which are twice as efficient as our suburbs, burn twice the fuel of these European, Canadian, and Aussie/Kiwi places. Yet the quality of life in these foreign cities is deemed higher than ours by a long shot.

if we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been done,

Half of the group’s entire worth consists of five buildings: Trump Tower and two other Manhattan buildings, and passive stakes in two offices in New York and San Francisco that are controlled by Vornado, a real-estate trust that is entirely separate.

Trump Inc is worth perhaps $4bn, with $490m of annual revenue. Were it listed it would be the 833rd-largest firm in America by market value and 1,925th by sales

If Trump family members are to make a second fortune in the next four years, they will have to reinvent a mediocre firm.

The Trump Organisation could now profit from the presidency in two ways. First, the profits of existing assets could rise

What has risen fast is the volume of rooms sold in the group’s hotels, which is up by an average of 40% in 2016.

Mr Trump owed over $120m to Deutsche Bank according to his 2015 filing. If new Trump projects are subject to claims of conflicts and cronyism, global banks that are exposed to litigation and congressional hearings in America may not stump up.

But it is less clear that his firm’s value will soar.

Trump Inc’s value could stagnate or fall.

The Bernie-or-Bust-ers tend to be young, male, and white; few describe themselves as Democrats, and many are new to voting. Women, people of color, and Democrats seem more open to Clinton.

They’re both challenging the system. We are people who don’t believe in the system! We want to make a new system where people take care of each other.”

The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: “Bernie Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ is political only inasmuch as thought is political,” a self-described “metamodernist creative writer”

Sanders has repeatedly said he will not play the spoiler—by running as an independent or backing a third-party candidate such as Stein. He says he will do everything in his power to defeat Trump.

A spate of recent polls have shown Clinton tied with or slightly trailing Trump in November matchups, the apparent effect of a Republican Party that has unified and a Democratic Party that remains fractured.

Many Sanders supporters told me they had once liked Clinton, but over the course of the primary they have come to dislike and distrust her.

It seems fitting that this potentially final battle royale should take place in California, a big, liberal state populated by all the various Democratic tribes: the kombucha-sipping hipsters of San Francisco; the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; the limousine liberals of Hollywood; the large black and Latino populations.

A poll of the state conducted earlier this month gave Clinton an 18-point lead over Sanders, but in a new poll released Thursday, that had narrowed to just two points.

This week, he was given five slots on the Democratic platform committee, which will allow him to influence what the party stands for—presumably an important goal.

“I was very loving toward Bernie Sanders until about a week ago, but now he’s working to elect Trump,” said Kathy Katz, 73, of Temecula. “We’re all way more liberal than the Democratic Party, but some of us realize you can’t win an election that way!”

Clinton, for her part, has taken to pretending Sanders does not exist. In her speech, she referred only to Trump, whose candidacy, she said, “may have started out as entertaining, but now it’s really, really concerning.” She added, “We have a bully pulpit in the White House—that doesn’t mean we want a bully in the White House!”

Sanders was introduced by a blind Filipino delegate and a gay actress who spoke passionately in favor of transgender rights and compared Sanders to a unicorn, because “he seems too good to be true.”

The Republican coalition of 2016, in fact, will look increasingly like the Democratic Party of the 1930s.

A Trump versus Clinton contest will deepen the partisan divisions that for the past five decades have set those who support the social and cultural revolutions of the past five decades on race, immigration, women’s rights, gender equality and gay rights — as well as the broader right to sexual privacy — against those who remain in opposition.

Tesler’s findings are illustrated in the accompanying chart. There was a dose effect: the higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump.

Tesler and Sides ranked white respondents by their level of “white racial identity” — determined by asking white respondents questions like “How Important is being white to your identity?”; “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?”; and “How likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead?”

In each case, Trump’s level of support in the survey rose in direct proportion to your level of agreement with each of these statements.

“The Second Demographic Transition: A concise overview of its development,” by Lesthaeghe, summarizes this concept:The SDT starts in the 1960s with a series of multifaceted revolutions. First, there was the contraceptive revolution, with the introduction of hormonal contraception and far more efficient IUDs; second, there was the sexual revolution, with declining ages at first sexual intercourse; and third, there was the gender revolution, questioning the sole breadwinner household model and the gendered division of labor that accompanied it.

These revolutions have reordered much of society. Lesthaeghe continues:These three "revolutions” fit within the framework of an overall rejection of authority, the assertion of individual freedom of choice (autonomy), and an overhaul of the normative structure. The overall outcome of these shifts with respect to fertility was the postponement of childbearing: mean ages at first parenthood rise again, opportunities for childbearing are lost due to higher divorce rates, the share of childless ever-partnered women increases, and higher parity births (four or more) become rare.

Measured by these criteria, the top-ranked counties were cosmopolitan centers, with a larger percentage of affluent, highly educated residents: New York City, the District of Columbia, Pitkin County, Colo. (where Aspen is), San Francisco and Marin County, Calif

The counties at the bottom tended to be small, white, rural, poor and less educated and they were located in the South and the mountain West:

the lower the S.D.T. ranking, the higher Trump’s votes compared to his statewide average; the higher the S.D.T. level, the lower Trump’s vote

The nomination of Donald Trump will sharpen and deepen the Republican Party’s core problems. Trump gains the party ground among declining segments of the population — less well educated, less well off whites — and loses ground with the growing constituencies: single women, well-educated men and women, minorities, the affluent and professionals.

Not only are more and more Americans adopting the practices and values described by Lesthaeghe and Neidert — self-expressiveness, gender equality, cohabitation, same-sex couples, postponed marriage and childbearing — but so too is much of the developed world.

This transition has effectively become the norm in much of Europe, and, as Lesthaeghe points out, it is gaining ground in regions as diverse as East Asia and Latin America.

For decades now, the Republican Party has been conducting a racial and cultural counterrevolution. It proved a successful strategy from 1966 to 1992.

Since then, as the percentage of Americans on the liberal side of the culture wars has grown steadily, the counterrevolutionary approach has become more and more divisive.

In this respect, Trump is not, as many charge, violating core Republican tenets. Instead, he represents the culmination of the rear-guard action that has characterized the party for decades

There is a chance that Trump will bring new blood into a revitalized Republican coalition. It’s also possible that he will accelerate the Republican Party’s downward spiral into irrelevance.

“A lot of libraries are doing pretty drastic weeding,” said Judith Russell, the University of Florida’s dean of libraries who is sending the archive duplicate scholarly volumes. “It’s very much more palatable to us and our faculty that books are being sent out to a useful purpose rather than just recycled.”

“Microfilm and microfiche were once a utopian vision of access to all information,” Mr. Kahle noted, “but it turned out we were very glad we kept the books.”

If serious “1984”-style trouble does arrive, Mr. Lesk said, it might come as “all Internet information falls under the control of either governments or copyright owners.” But he made clear he thought that was unlikely.

Before the books make it the 150 feet to the shipping containers for storage, some will have to travel 12,000 miles to China. The Chinese, who are keen to build a digital library, will scan the books for themselves and the archive and then send them back. The digital texts will be available for the visually impaired and other legal purposes.

Intel, founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, both physicists, began by building memory chips that were twice as fast as old ones. Sun Microsystems introduced a new kind of modular computer system, built by one of its founders, Andy Bechtolsheim. Their “big ideas” were expressed in physical products and grew out of their own technical expertise. In that light, Meraki, which came from Biswas’s work at M.I.T., can be seen as having its origins in the old guard. And it followed what was for decades the highway that connected academia to industry: Grad students researched technology, powerful advisers brokered deals, students dropped out to parlay their technologies into proprietary solutions, everyone reaped the profits. That implicit guarantee of academia’s place in entrepreneurship has since disappeared. Graduate students still drop out, but to start bike-sharing apps and become data scientists. That is, if they even make it to graduate school. The success of self-educated savants like Sean Parker, who founded Napster and became Facebook’s first president with no college education to speak of, set the template. Enstitute, a two-year apprenticeship, embeds high-school graduates in plum tech positions. Thiel Fellowships, financed by the PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, give $100,000 to people under 20 to forgo college and work on projects of their choosing.

Much of this precocity — or dilettantism, depending on your point of view — has been enabled by web technologies, by easy-to-use programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Node.js and by the explosion of application programming interfaces (A.P.I.s) that supply off-the-shelf solutions to entrepreneurs who used to have to write all their own code for features like a login system or an embedded map. Now anyone can do it, thanks to the Facebook login A.P.I. or the Google Maps A.P.I.

One of the more enterprising examples of these kinds of interfaces is the start-up Stripe, which sells A.P.I.s that enable businesses to process online payments. When Meraki first looked into taking credit cards online, according to Biswas, it was a monthslong project fraught with decisions about security and cryptography. “Now, with Stripe, it takes five minutes,” he said. “When you combine that with the ability to get a server in five minutes, with Rails and Twitter Bootstrap, you see that it has become infinitely easier for four people to get a start-up off the ground.”

The sense that it is no longer necessary to have particularly deep domain knowledge before founding your own start-up is real; that and the willingness of venture capitalists to finance Mark Zuckerberg look-alikes are changing the landscape of tech products. There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems

There’s a glass-half-full way of looking at this, of course: Tech hasn’t been pedestrianized — it’s been democratized. The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared

many of the hottest web start-ups are not novel, at least not in the sense that Apple’s Macintosh or Intel’s 4004 microprocessor were. The arc of tech parallels the arc from manufacturing to services. The Macintosh and the microprocessor were manufactured products. Some of the most celebrated innovations in technology have been manufactured products — the router, the graphics card, the floppy disk

One of Stripe’s founders rowed five seat in the boat I coxed freshman year in college; the other is his older brother. Among the employee profiles posted on its website, I count three of my former teaching fellows, a hiking leader, two crushes. Silicon Valley is an order of magnitude bigger than it was 30 years ago, but still, the start-up world is intimate and clubby, with top talent marshaled at elite universities and behemoths like Facebook and Google.

A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and skilled that you may never catch up.

The latter source of frustration is the phenomenon of “the 10X engineer,” an engineer who is 10 times more productive than average. It’s a term that in its cockiness captures much of what’s good, bad and impossible about the valley. At the start-ups I visit, Friday afternoons devolve into bouts of boozing and Nerf-gun wars. Signing bonuses at Facebook are rumored to reach the six digits. In a landscape where a product may morph several times over the course of a funding round, talent — and the ability to attract it — has become one of the few stable metrics.

there is a surprising amount of angst in Silicon Valley. Which is probably inevitable when you put thousands of ambitious, talented young people together and tell them they’re god’s gift to technology. It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

San Francisco, which is steadily stealing the South Bay’s thunder. (“Sometime in the last two years, the epicenter of consumer technology in Silicon Valley has moved from University Ave. to SoMa,” Terrence Rohan, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures, told me

Both the geographic shift north and the increasingly short product cycles are things Jim attributes to the rise of Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.), a collection of servers owned and managed by Amazon that hosts data for nearly every start-up in the latest web ecosystem.Continue reading the main story

now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.”

This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures. There are no longer hectic six-week stretches that culminate in a release day followed by a lull. Every day is release day. You roll out new code continuously, and it’s this cycle that enables companies like Facebook, as its motto goes, to “move fast and break things.”

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the excitement I’ve been hinting at. Another part is prestige. Smart kids want to work for a sexting app because other smart kids want to work for the same sexting app. “Highly concentrated pools of top talent are one of the rarest things you can find,” Biswas told me, “and I think people are really attracted to those environments.

These days, a new college graduate arriving in the valley is merely stepping into his existing network. He will have friends from summer internships, friends from school, friends from the ever-increasing collection of incubators and fellowships.

As tech valuations rise to truly crazy levels, the ramifications, financial and otherwise, of a job at a pre-I.P.O. company like Dropbox or even post-I.P.O. companies like Twitter are frequently life-changing. Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code.

Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks, which older engineers may have not laid eyes on for years.

These articles are submitted to a group from Translators Without Borders that produces medical articles for Wikipedias in languages spoken in countries that often lack high-quality medical information. Examples include an article in Javanese on dengue fever and one in Hindi on urinary tract infection. Creating these high-quality medical articles fits neatly with efforts by the Wikimedia Foundation to make deals with cellphone carriers to provide Wikipedia content free of data charges, especially in the developing world

“If we want to get high-quality information to all the world’s population, Wikipedia is not just a viable option, but the only viable option,” Dr. Azzam said.

They will expand the presence of low- and no-calorie drinks, as well as drinks sold in smaller portions, and use their promotional skills to educate consumers and encourage them to reduce the calories they are drinking.

The program will cover company-owned vending machines and coolers in convenience stores, as well as fountain soda dispensers like those found in fast-food restaurants and movie theaters. The companies control almost all of those machines, in addition to about one-third of vending machines and 80 percent of coolers.

It also will spill into grocery stores in end-of-aisle promotions and other marketing. “We’ll use the most critical levers we have at our disposal, and the focus really will be on transforming the beverage landscape in the U.S. over the next 10 years,”

“While they’re making this pledge, they are totally dug in, fighting soda tax initiatives in places like Berkeley and San Francisco that have exactly the same goal,” said Professor Nestle, who has just finished a book about the industry.

From 2000 to 2013, calories consumed through sugary drinks fell 12 percent, according to Beverage Digest, attributed to declining soda sales and increased consumption of water and low-calorie drinks.

“I suspect they’re promising what’s going to happen anyway,” said Kelly Brownell, an expert on obesity and dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “All the trends are showing decreased consumption of high-calorie beverages, and so what better way to get a public relations boost than to promise to do what’s happening anyway?”