The New Yorker

In reviewing a handful of new books looking at cities and how they work, this piece from The New Yorker glosses over the current thinking behind the urban conversation and wonders if city celebration has gone too far.

Kazakhstan built a new capital city in 1997 in far-off Astana. This piece from The New Yorker takes a tour of the city, and finds a unique architectural development underway, but a city still in its early years of formation.

The New Yorker takes an informal survey of the Lower East Side with slow-driving proponent Rod King.

A new exhibit at the Cooper Union revisits architect Paul Rudolph's vision for a megadevelopment built around Robert Moses' expressway project that would have destroyed much of SoHo and Tribeca.

Paul Goldberger pays Las Vegas' CityCenter a visit, and wonders how much different it really is from a fake Paris and the Luxor Pyramid.

Traffic has become thick and widespread throughout Moscow, where long lines of cars harken back to the dying days of the Soviet era.

Goldman Sachs' new headquarters in New York is "modern but nowhere near the architectural cutting edge; neither cheap nor extravagant; and efficient without seeming merely functional." Paul Goldberger dissects the new Henry Cobb design.

Pres. Obama has come out in favor of developing more nuclear power plants, and the public is warming up to the idea because of the climate change benefits of switching from coal. Hendrik Hertzberg looks at the politics of atomic power.

The New Yorker offers a long profile of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and highlights his efforts to "undo" the work of Robert Moses.

James Surowiecki dispels the myth that banks are better off renegotiating mortgage then foreclosing.

James Surowiecki argues that state governments are sabotaging the economic recovery, and simultaneously sinking the creation of a smart energy grid.

A new exhibition of the sketches, designs and architectural models of Frank Lloyd Wright opens at one of his most famous creations, the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Paul Goldberger looks at the two new baseball stadia opening in New York this Spring.

What light is right? How much is too much? These questions don't typically get asked in cities, as they simply rely on what they've always done. But now the Municipal Art Society in New York is bringing these issues to the table.

$16.8 billion of Pres. Obama's stimulus package is allocated to energy efficiency and renewable energy. Steve Coll of the New Yorker explains where the funding is going, and what it means.

That's just one of the interesting tidbits in this celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Plan of Chicago and Daniel Burnham in The New Yorker.

The New Yorker profiles Van Jones, a leading environmental activist and the driving force behind the movement to create a green energy jobs policy in the United States.

Nick Paumgarten imagines a New York City landscape that would result from a present-day economic crisis.

The New Yorker traces the history of the American lawn from 1841, commenting on their unnatural origins, and finally analyzing the alternatives suggested by anti-lawn movements.

A new building by Rem Koolhaas in Beijing is part of a wave of modern construction that is changing the tightly-planned urban fabric of the Chinese capital.