I write to finish thinking about something, which is why these take months and arrive out of order. The transport pieces come from work I could not put in a report. The rest come from reading.
Writing
Essays
Longer pieces, written slowly. Some are about transport and cities, some about the documents a country is founded on, some about neither.
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All essays Newest first
- Reading the preamble twice What the opening of the Declaration of Independence asks of the person reading it, two and a half centuries and one emigration later.
- The payment file is the real document Every transport system has an official story and a set of records underneath it. They rarely agree, and the records are the ones that move money.
- Qué compra realmente un subsidio Sobre el perímetro de exclusión, lo que el Estado cree estar comprando y lo que efectivamente recibe cuando el bus sale a la calle.
- On waiting Headway, reliability and the particular indignity of not knowing whether the bus is late or simply never coming.
- Notas desde Peñalolén Un barrio leído a pie: la cota mil, las líneas que suben y las que nunca lo hicieron.
- Freight accounts from Ur Four thousand year old administrative tablets record commodity flows between places and people. The format is familiar to anyone who has audited a subsidy claim.
Elsewhere
Shorter notes and working material end up in the case studies, and photographs of the places these essays describe are in the gallery.