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Followers of this blog (see especially my 2017  Unicorn Cult  post) and innocent bystanders to my various rantings will know that I am more than a little dubious about the powers of markets to solve problems in the real world. I was therefore surprised by my own reaction to journalist Kara Miller's conversation with urban-planning professor Michael Manville, in which he offers a market-based approach to the pernicious problem of traffic. Related links are on the Innovation Hub's blog post for this story. The conversation begins with laments about traffic from person-on-the-street interviews in Chicago and Atlanta -- two cities in which I have spent hours stuck in their legendary traffic jams and in which it was easy to find ordinary people with extraordinarily strong feelings on the subject. Their discussion includes cogent description of the environmental, health, and economic costs of congestion. It then turns to things that have been tried -- adding capacity, improving publ

Who deserves to call a place home? This was a good day for Tanzina Vega to discuss the question with Jose Antonio Vargas and Julissa Arce, who have lived as undocumented Americans. Vargas, in fact, still does. I had the privilege of hearing him speak in Bridgewater a couple of years ago, and look forward to reading his new book. For those who suggest "getting in line" to claim their home country, they explain that there is no line. Deborah Berenice Vasquez-Barrios and her son Kenner after he delivered his remarks at the St. Paul & St. Andrew Methodist Church in New York (AP photo via The Takeaway)

Photo by way of PopGun I had not heard of the Puerto Rico-Brooklyn band until yesterday, when I caught this interview on the NPR program Studio 360 (which gave credit to Latino USA for the original story). The interview centers on the construction of the band's signature "dreambow" rhythms, particularly in the band's new song El Espanta . Angélica Negrón describes what she sees as the therapeutic value of this approach. I found it both enjoyable and instructive to listened to that song a few times before returning to the interview. The video of Balún's La Nueva Ciudad is an example of what the artists mean by dreambow, and is a perfect example of Negrón's expression "sleep while dancing." The lyrics describe a progressively more complicated metaphorical connection between the narrator and the stars, as her head, throat, and legs represent a telescope. The chorus laments a growing distance from a human subject. The longer video "Full Episode&q