Dispatches on the Tohoku Earthquake Part I: Rolling Blackouts

by Ryan Sayre It's been a hectic week. My adopted country has suffered an earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear disater, and is now knee deep in an energy crisis. This is to say nothing of the fact that my half-finished dissertation, an ethnographic account of none other than earthquake disaster preparedness in Japan, in the…

New York’s Empire State of Mind: The Colonization of ‘Up’ Part I

by Ryan Sayre Elisha Otis was a solver of problems—practical problems involving bread ovens, steam engines, bed frames, and the like. Faced with the problem of safely bringing debris down from the second floor of his workshop, in 1852 he repurposed a railroad brake into an emergency elevator brake that would stop the lift cold…

Reflections on the Density of City Life

I: Reflectvertising in Tokyo’s Liquid DesertThe white neon apple, visible all the way down Chuo Avenue, makes finding the Ginza Apple Store deceptively easy. I say ‘deceptively’ because it’s not until you’re about to enter that you realize you've been chasing after a reflection, a perfect double emblazoned on the frosted glass of the Matsuya…