Great news: Vélib’, the Parisian bicycle-sharing system I have previously described in detail and mapped, had a huge revamp of its website last spring. This coincided with a handful of new features that are of crucial importance to (especially) Anglopone/American tourists. First, the new website is entirely available in English. The old version seemed to [...]
After my maps of public transportation distribution in Chicago and Paris got a bit of publicity, people started asking for more. Here, I try to consider issues of population density as well as the role of buses.
Continue reading about On comparing Paris and Chicago public transit
When I made my Paris Métro map, the joke was that the next step would be the leap in order of magnitude between subway stations and Vélib’ stations. For those who don’t know what Vélib’ is, it’s the Parisian bike-sharing system that I’ve already described in great detail. But I knew there was no way [...]
The last time I rapped at you, I talked about Métro coverage in Paris. I felt like Paris was exceptionally well covered by the Métro, and I used math to prove that basically one is never more than 700m from a Métro station in the city. How, though, does that coverage compare with Chicago? Would [...]
Anecdotally, I have felt since moving to Paris that one is never, ever too far from a Métro station. This is in contrast with Chicago, where one can be literally over a mile from an El stop. But I had not, until now, measured it out. Similarly, last year, a friend, who was living in [...]
Aras recently wrote about his “month” of “not” eating meat and added a few questions throughout that I suppose were rhetorical. Well, for the next thousand words or so, I’ll pretend they’re not. At the outset he claims to have gone “all out” with not eating meat, like me. I would hardly consider myself “all [...]
Continue reading about The blasphemy of not eating meat in Vilnius
During coursework, I took a class co-offered both at my uni and at UIC. As a co-offered course, it was also co-taught, and one of the profs, Walter Benn Michaels, at one point, as is his wont, issued a seeming non sequitur of a command: “raise your hands if either of your parents is a [...]
I don’t have much to add about the above video, which probably every Humanities graduate student (or close family member thereof) has already seen, forwarded, groaned or giggled over, and so on. Over at Zunguzungu, we see how the situation is coded in a few ways at once, most notably as a conflict between realism [...]
This is a little bizarre, but, still, appropriate given the photo of mechanically separated chicken floating around. Either way, 4 October 2010 makes 20 years since I stopped eating meat. Talking about the fact that I don’t eat meat is astonishingly boring to me, and I hate answering questions of the “why did you start?” [...]
Continue reading about It was 20 years ago today (on ditching meat)…
I’ve written three things for Lithchat in the past few days that may be of interest to readers of this site, as well (it’s not 100% overlap, thank goodness!): On Mikutavičius, not singing “Trys milijonai,” and cultural patrimony discusses the mini-scandal that emerged when Marijonas Mikutavičius elected not to sing his sports anthem, “Trys milijonai,” [...]
