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Articles by Christopher Mims

Christopher Mims's dystopian non-fiction is sought after by an ever-growing roster of publications.

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  • Has dense living gotten too dense?

    Thinkers like Ed Glaeser, whose ideas have been discussed frequently on Grist, assert that density is an unalloyed good, and even Manhattan isn't dense enough. But there is another strand of thought about cities, which is that they are neither green nor sustainable, and it's exemplified by everyone's favorite foul-mouthed catastrophist, James Howard Kunstler. In […]

  • Adorable video defends public transportation

    Here's a sweet 30-second plea for the improvement of the public transportation used by 35 million Americans every day. Because there should be many tens or hundreds of millions more of them, but at the rate we’re going now, that’s not looking likely. Eighty-four percent of transit systems have raised rates or cut service. Is […]

  • Airport to increase safety by gassing birds

    Last year, a Royal Air Maroc plane made an emergency landing at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport after it was hit by a flock of geese. They've been trying everything to get rid of the birds, they say, including "luring them away" (presumably with irresistible offers from Groupon). Incidents like these have been increasing at the airport, […]

  • Electric car ad from 1912

    Matt Novak of the always worthwhile blog PaleoFuture just stumbled across this ad for an electric car — from 1912. The Columbus Buggy Company once employed 1,000 people in a factory that produced horse-drawn carriages, and at the dawn of the automobile it attempted to make the leap to motorized versions. At the time, there was nothing odd about […]