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in 2001, just about a third of Americans had a bicycle (~90 million bikes, for some 285 million people)

Later, after we end our call, it occurs to me that at 46 I have almost certainly touched the wall in my life, but have none of the eagerness to be finished that the expression suggests

There are 26 million refugees in the world and nearly 46 million internally displaced people. There is no patience left for this beautiful poem anymore, is what I think, shutting the book and replacing it on the shelf. Not in this burning, ravaged world.

I click a button, and now I am looking out the window of a moving train outside of Moscow. In Lausanne, under a blue sky, a boat arrives. A sea in Albania. A kangaroo doing not much in Tasmania. So much wind, so much laundry drying. So many open doors with the keys still in the lock. So many sleeping cats. So much waiting. I fall asleep with the window open, and when I wake, it is raining in Norway.

“Calvin teaches that you’re given stewardship over your money, that you have a responsibility to take care of it, which means giving lots of it away, being generous to others,”

“Work is a divine calling for which you will be held accountable. It’s considered bad for society and bad for your soul if you spend in ostentatious ways.”

“He doesn’t pay his taxes,” is a common refrain in this city, and it doesn’t mean that Mr. Bezos is considered a tax cheat. It means that he isn’t fighting inequality by sharing his money, an obligation that transcends the tax code.

An ethos endures that nobody is any better than anyone else, or deserves more, and it stems from an unignorable geographic fact. Roughly one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level and citizens for centuries have had little choice but to band together to create an infrastructure of dikes and drainage systems to remain alive.

“The Netherlands is built on cooperation,” said Paul van de Laar, a professor of history at Erasmus University. “There were constant threats of disaster from the 15th and 16th century. Protestants and Catholics knew that to survive, they could not quarrel too much.”

Chip in. Blend in. Help others. These are among the highest ideals of the Netherlands

The Dutch once ran one of the world’s largest empires but there’s a certain pride here that the prime minister of the country rides a bicycle to pay visits to the king — yes, the Netherlands has a royal family, which is also relatively low-key — and locks the bicycle outside the palace.

At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.” Choose one, went the thinking. You don’t need both.

explaining the anger that Mr. Bezos and Oceanco, the maker of the three-masted, $500 million schooner, inspired after making what may have sounded like a fairly benign request. The company asked the local government to briefly dismantle the elevated middle span of the Hef, which is 230 feet tall at its highest point, allowing the vessel to sail down the King’s Harbor channel and out to sea.

The whole process would have taken a day or two and Oceanco would have covered the costs.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

The bridge, a lattice of moss-green steel in the shape of a hulking “H,” is not actually used by anyone. It served as a railroad bridge for decades until it was replaced by a tunnel and decommissioned in the early 1990s. It’s been idle ever since.

In sum, the operation would have been fast, free and disrupted nothing. So why the fuss?

“What can you buy if you have unlimited cash? Can you bend every rule? Can you take apart monuments?”

“There’s a principle at stake,”

The first problem was the astounding wealth of Mr. Bezos.

“The Dutch like to say, ‘Acting normal is crazy enough,’

Gurrola was arrested for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon, Lowe said.

At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better

Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world.

In his twelve years as president, Stanford’s endowment has grown to nearly seventeen billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised more money than any other American university.

But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune.

A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent.

many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”

Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the mechanical-engineering department.

Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the situatio

his principal academic legacy may be the growth of what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business, medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff Koseff says. “John changed that.”

Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education.

Distance learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home, do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how yet.”

In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.

“The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really, really better.”

he was impressed by “the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post, “diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.

Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.

The United States has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.” Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to “its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Stanford, along with its peers, is now justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks draining more resources from liberal arts

students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming “slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual results,

We excel at making rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment, which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?”

“At most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,”

The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience.

Instead of erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting our potential.”

financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don’t have to spend the first five years of their career earning as much money as they can.

The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase efficiency without decreasing quality?”

online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education.

China’s political sphere remains male-dominated: women are starkly underrepresented in China’s Parliament and the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In fact, many young Chinese women, disillusioned about their prospects in an economy many see as navigable only by those with money or connections, say the best hope for a woman is “to marry a rich man.” On a popular TV dating show, a model rebuffed an endearing but poor suitor by saying, “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back seat of a bicycle.” In a survey of more than 50,000 single women, as reported in China Daily, 80 percent agreed that “only men who make more than 4,000 yuan [$634] a month deserve to have a relationship with a woman.”

at least in business, women and men in China operate largely on a level playing field. “Sixty years of communism,” said Yu, “did one really good thing: bring true equality between the sexes. I think people in China are brought up believing that women are just as capable as men.”

the Mao era was a deviation for China: anti-intellectual, anti-Confucian, collectivist rather than family-oriented. Thus, as China sheds its communist mantle, it is not only Westernizing but also Sinicizing, rediscovering its traditional values.

These values, however, are mutating. The traditional Chinese family, for example, was a pyramid, with a few revered elders at the pinnacle and many younger generations below. In a typical Chinese family today, the pyramid has been inverted, with a “little emperor” only child at the bottom, doted on and catered to by parents and grandparents. At the same time, while the intense competitive pressures of Confucian China have returned, the countervailing Confucian values—selflessness, compassion, honor, and rectitude—have not. As a result, many worry that the China emerging from communism will know no values other than wealth and materialism.

“When we were growing up,” says Yang, “we wanted to be nurses, doctors, astronauts, teachers. Today people are suspicious of anything noble or grand. Kids just want to be rich or powerful.” In 2009, schoolchildren in Guangzhou City were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A viral Internet video—later blocked and deleted—showed an adorable 6-year-old giving her answer: “A corrupt official.”

the four women I interviewed are a new breed. Progressive, worldly, and open to the media, they are in many ways not representative of China, past or present. Perhaps they are merely the lucky winners of the 1990s free-for-all in China, a window that may already be closing. Or perhaps they are the forerunners of a China still to come, in which paths to success are far more open.

s a homeschooled teenager, without grades or teachers, I learned to love knowledge for its own sake, and, just as importantly to trust in my ability to attain it.

“Even students who are successful, getting straight A's, the highest accolades, by being students in school have fear and anxiety about maintaining these types of grades. You don't really get a sense of who you are, what your interests are, what your passions are [but are] being filled by other people's idea of what it means to be a human being.” As a typically neurotic straight-A student at a New York private school, I'd internalized the idea of education as a means to an end.

When I returned to traditional education as a high-school freshman at a New England boarding school known for its rigor and expectations of independence, I found myself surprisingly well-prepared for its demands. I knew how to manage my time effectively, how to approach the hours of homework as an opportunity to learn rather than a chore to be cleared away. I knew, too, how to defend my academic arguments, to not back down simply because another student disagreed with me about the causes of the American Civil War. In the absence of external signifiers of success, I had learned how to measure my own.

Saving Private Ryan offers not a single word about love of country. Generals may still talk like their Civil War counterparts, but soldiers in the field have ceased to cloak their duty in such sentiments.

The mission can't be justified on moral or patriotic grounds, and yet the toughest soldier in the squad, Sergeant Horvath, says saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing they "were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess."

Spielberg never suggests that we are any better than our enemy or, to put it more generously, that they are any worse than we are.

this is not a patriotic film; if anything, it argues that patriotism is beside the point in modern warfare. Even the mission itself has no heroic or patriotic aim; there is no hill to be taken, no redoubt to be stormed. Its goal, according to Captain Miller, is public relations.

there is no shortage of cruelty and brutality. Nazis move through battle-scarred streets indifferently finishing off wounded Americans, but, early in the film, we have witnessed callous GIs mowing down surrendering Germans with a laugh.

Schindler's List and Amistad are, in fact, about guilt and responsibility. They are not, as many imagine, noble memorials to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and slavery; rather, they are agonized meditations on all of those somehow implicated in those vast human tragedies.

How can the sentimental tableau of a weeping old man, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsentimental a film?

he described his father's own war stories: "I was supposed to wave the flag and be patriotic and say that without his efforts I wouldn't have the freedoms I had or even the freedom to have the bicycle I was riding." Only later did the director realize that it wasn't "a bunch of bunk he was telling me."

Private Ryan, a dazed kid surrounded by the bodies of men who were absurdly ordered to their deaths to save him, is given the equally absurd command by the dying hero, Captain Miller, to "earn this" and must now bear the terrible, impossible order until his own death.

at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as a grandfather and his son and grandchildren pay homage to those whose deaths we have just witnessed, the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of fallen heroes; the living are, in fact, the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan, we cannot help but ask what we've done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.

Saving Private Ryan is not about those who suffered; it is about those who have been spared suffering. Spielberg's subject, in the end, is not the courage of the soldiers who fought at Normandy; his subject is the debt owed them by their children and their children's children.

In today’s economy, the risks of weak demand, left-behind people and places, and stagnant low- and mid-level wages and incomes are greater than those of higher inflation

This is a symptom of structurally weak underlying demand and a rationale for stimulative policies.

Second, the U.S. economy is probably significantly slowing as we speak because of fading fiscal stimulus.

These dynamics imply that a fiscal policy twofer is on offer. Increased investment in public goods, including education, infrastructure and the Green New Deal can help push back both on structural inequality and slower growth

We’re a bit like a bicycle that cruises along at a decent clip until it hits the slightest hill, and then, without a push, starts to shake

Third, even as the heretofore stimulated U.S. economy was closing in on full employment, interest rates and inflation stayed very low and lots of people were/are still struggling to make ends meet

Larry Summers discusses this phenomenon under the rubric of “secular stagnation,” meaning that even late in an expansion, economies underperform without an extra push

It is also a coherent and essential response to underlying stagnation that has grown to plague advanced economies.

we needn’t wait for a thorough diagnosis of causes if we know what will reverse them.

So what technologies make sense in public transit? Efficient transit networks are made of many technologies, each the right one for its own situation. Rail is for high-capacity markets, where you need to move hundreds of people per vehicle. Ferries and aerial gondolas overcome certain obstacles. But everywhere else, the bus is the thing that’s easiest to make abundant. Because labor is the main limit on their quantity, they can be much more abundant after full automation.

And walking is key to it. Out in low-density suburbs, residents can also drive to fixed-transit stops. But in the dense city, there’s no room for that. The microtransit promise of “service to your door” is a promise to abolish walking, and yet walking is the essence of how people share precious space.

Fixed public transit deploys large vehicles flowing along a set path, and riders gathering at stops to use them. That way, the vehicles can follow a fairly straight line, and they don’t need to stop once for every customer. That is what makes them worth walking to get to. It is one of the best ideas in the history of transportation

If the buses are terrible in your city, you may think that buses are terrible in general. In truth, a city’s bus service is as good as its leaders and voters want it to be. Where voters have funded better bus services and cities have worked to give them priority, as in Seattle, ridership has soared.

The starvation of high-ridership public transit in America is a choice, one that Americans don’t have to make. I work in cities all over the developed world, but my U.S. clients always have the poorest transit budgets, requiring the most painful trade-offs. They can’t afford to run the frequent and reliable fixed-route services that would do well, so they are forced to run poor service, yielding low ridership, feeding the impression that transit is pointless

We came back to our office and started working, fueled by adrenaline. Our first few attempts didn’t succeed, but eventually we made four copies of the prototype on a small 3-D printing machine that we have in our office.

The day after, we returned to the hospital and gave our valves to a doctor who tested them. They worked and he asked for 100 more. So we went back to the office, and returned to the hospital with 100 more. We hoped that this would last them for a few days. Still, the coronavirus rages on. A few hospitals in northern Italy asked us to make copies of the same piece. We are printing them now.

This sparked a second idea: to modify a snorkeling mask already on the market to create a ventilation-assisted mask for hospitals in need of additional equipment, which was successful when the hospital tested it on a patient in need.

We don’t say this to brag, but to show what is possible. In a moment of crisis, and in a moment when commerce globally is shutting down, there are still many do-it-yourself ways of helping the people around you.

On July 8, 1972, Hanson borrowed her brother's bicycle to go to a baseball game and never returned home, said Marshall during a news conference. She was reported missing to the Naperville police and her body was discovered later that day in a field with multiple stab wounds.

A suspect in the case was not immediately identified. But after 49 years of continued investigation, authorities were led to an arrest through technological advancements in DNA and genetic genealogy analysis,

At the time of the Hanson's killing, Whelpley was 27 years old and lived within one mile of Hanson's home, police said.

The Will County State's Attorney Office has charged Whelpley with three counts of first-degree murder with a bond set at $10 million.

The Hanson family said in a statement that they are grateful to all who have worked on the case throughout the years, according to police.

This meant appealing to their economic interest. If they refused to pay a tax for good roads, reformers warned, farmers would continue to pay a “mud tax” in more expensive transportation costs. Reformers also touted the social benefits of good roads: more visits with friends, consolidated schools, higher church attendance, and a social life for young people, one that might keep them from leaving home for the cities.

To many rural people, cyclists lured by the song of the open road were deeply annoying. They spooked horses, scared pedestrians, and often came across as entitled jerks. “Farmers resented cyclists who picnicked in their fields, helped themselves to fruit and flowers on private property, and wrote about farmers in patronizing dialect stories,” Wells writes.

as a “bicycle craze” began to take off in the 1880s, urban cyclists began demanding roads that would make it pleasant for them to explore the countryside.

These campaigns worked—kind of. By the first years of the 1900s, many rural people supported the idea of good roads.

By the time automobiles became popular, the idea of good roads as an important government function had taken hold, helping to turn rural America into the car-centered place it is today.

“Since TfL was formed in 2000, when just over half of all journeys were by sustainable modes, billions of pounds have been invested into London’s public transport

An excellent investigation by the New York Times in 2017 pointed to two key factors. First, in the 1990s, elected officials began a pattern of diverting maintenance funds to other political priorities. Second, too much has since been spent on vanity projects and consulting fees, leaving the system starved for cash. In 2019, only two of New York’s 27 lines have modern signal systems; in London, half of the system is online, with the rest expected by 2023.

it’s also an issue of governance. The two systems governing the respecting metros are very different. Unlike TfL, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is a holding entity for separate operating companies (including the Long Island Railroad and Metro-North); unlike TfL, it doesn’t control street operations; and unlike TfL, it doesn’t answer to the city but to the governor of New York state, which many critics say leaves it too vulnerable to politics

“Mass transit is not a priority for the federal government,” Moss says. “The federal government is very involved in airport construction and highway finance, but not mass transit. And that’s a key point.”

In the US context, New York’s transit problem is New York’s to fight alone.

"Our acquisition of JUMP was a direct investment in the idea that the best way to get around a city is sometimes not in a car at all," Khosrowshahi said in a Sept. 2018 blog post. By 2019, Uber users were taking six times as many trips on Jump's vehicles compared with the year before.

Shared bikes like Jump's are generally made with proprietary parts, which better protects them from theft and vandalism, but makes it all but impossible for a local bike shop to perform maintenance.

Bikeshare companies have donated bikes in the past, and some groups told CNN Business they would have been interested in such an offer.

Unlike Spin and Ofo bicycles, Jump's bikes have the additional wrinkle of an electric battery, which wasn't designed to be charged in someone's home. The battery could be removed, but the bikes weigh about 75 pounds, making them difficult to pedal.

Cris Moffitt, who posted online videos of Jump bikes being scrapped, said he hoped to spur the company to donate any remaining bikes to a non-profit. Moffitt said he depended on a bike in college to get to work and school after he wrecked his car.

Americans have since ramped up spending on everything from home improvements to bicycles with the help of stimulus checks sent to millions, though overall expenditures remain below pre-pandemic levels.

A nationwide decline in combined state revenue has happened after only two events in 90 years: following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The U.S. economy has steadily recovered since the spring, and more than 11 million jobs of the 22 million lost earlier in the year have come back. Still, the unemployment rate recently hovered at 7.9%, and there has been an uptick in permanent layoffs.

Economists warn a two-track recovery is emerging, with well-educated and well-off people and some businesses prospering, at the same time lower-wage workers with fewer credentials, old-line businesses and regions tied to tourism are mired in a deep decline.

After 2008, some states implemented or added to rainy day funds—cash reserves that can be used to fill revenue gaps caused by a potential shock

School systems also usually receive local funds through property taxes.

Schools received federal aid from the pandemic-stimulus packages passed by Congress earlier this year.

The money was quickly spent

The Ohio Education Association, a teachers union, said the state’s school districts could face budget shortfalls for the 2022 and 2023 budget years of between 20% and 25%.

Many states are pleading for more aid from Congress, which has so far sent money in its coronavirus relief packages to deal with the health crisis but not to offset revenue losses.

Congress has doled out about $150 billion in Covid-19 response dollars to state and local governments, plus some additional money to cover elevated Medicaid costs.

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said they don’t want Covid-19 aid used to address longstanding financial problems.

Community Health Resources, which offers mental-health and addiction services to 27,000 children and adults, is concerned it won’t receive its expected more than $40 million in state funding—62% of the organization’s annual budget—in the next fiscal year, which begins in July.