Thomas Jefferson spent decades trying to grow French wine grapes at Monticello and never quite succeeded. The Virginia humidity defeated him, the phylloxera finished the job, and the project was quietly shelved as an admirable failure by one of history's most ambitious tinkerers. What is remarkable, standing in
In 1898, the great cities of the Western world sent their best urban planners to London for the first international planning conference in history. The crisis on the agenda was horse manure. New York City alone was producing 2.5 million pounds of it a day. The delegates were not
Sabermetrics rescued baseball from a culture of bad information. Then it went overboard, and today fans can't follow it. I was a sabermetrics evangelist before most people knew what sabermetrics was. 25 years ago I was reading old copies of Bill James's Baseball Abstracts, the self-
In the Exumas, one of the most pristine island chains on earth, developers bulldoze roads into paradise and walk away when the money runs out. There is a moment, if you're lucky enough to be on a boat working slowly up the Exumas chain in the Bahamas, when
While it now appears that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, the impact from its closure will ripple across the world for years to come. One positive consequence of the United States' war in Iran is that the world is finally building its way out of one of the
The Chicago Bears are leaving one of the great urban sports settings in America for a dome in Indiana. They issued a statement calling it regional connectivity. It isn't. On June 5, 2026, the Chicago Bears voted to move to Hammond, Indiana. Then they issued a statement. It
See our accompanying feature on Al Duqm at New Cities Atlas. Fifteen years ago, Al Duqm was a fishing settlement on Oman's southeastern Arabian Sea coast with a population of around 6,000 people, a stretch of coastline and a geography that strategists had been quietly noting for
Ninety percent of everything you own arrived by sea. The phone in your pocket, the coffee in your cup, the fuel in your car, the clothes on your back: almost all of it crossed an ocean in a steel hull before it reached you. Maritime trade is the circulatory system
Capital Frontiers has been conducting an ongoing research project on wine from around the world. We recently wrote about speculative investments in red wine production in China, among other topics. With wine now eclipsing beer as the most popular alcoholic beverage in the United States, our goal is to provide
Part One: The Corporate Game Although it is no longer America’s highest-revenue sport, baseball is still known around the world as America’s “national pastime”. Because of its long season, it attracts more viewers than any other American sport. Because of the way it is played, it is
Nearly two decades removed from the Great Recession and five years on from the global pandemic, America is gaining perspective on the impacts. Nowhere is this truer than within the urban planning profession, where we’ve gotten a reality check about rhetoric which once predicted the birth of a new
Perhaps no better player captures the indignities of our world than the long baseball career of Shin-Soo Choo. While he is but one of hundreds of players who can claim similar or better stat lines to Derek Jeter despite nowhere near the fanfare or recognition – Edwin Encarnacion, anyone? – Choo’