PopularAll TimeAll TimeLast WeekLast MonthLast Year
Culture
Can Youth Baseball Save a Remote Chinese Town from Segregation?
Anyone writing about ethnic strife in China’s remote Xinjiang province has an obvious opening anecdote: Han Chinese in the region run their...
Culture
Crowdrise: The Social Network with a Purpose
Like most successful fundraising ideas, the social networking site Crowdrise started with Maasai warriors and Edward Norton. “Edward was running...
Culture
Starbox: Where Our Obsession with Fame Meets Mysterious Public Art
Good science is all about cutting out variables—so what happens if that approach is applied to celebrity? The playwright Mattie Brickman and the...
Business
SocialVest: Philanthropy, Without the Fuss
Adam Ross sees donating to nonprofits as a slippery slope: Dabble just a bit, and if you’re not careful, you might find yourself actively...
Culture
A Girl Story: The Ending Is Up to You
When an organization asks for a donation, it’s basically making a claim about storytelling: Your help can change a bad ending. What if a...
Cities
Not Your Grandma's Bounce House
A common refrain among preservationists is that a repurposed building should reflect that structure’s original use. A newly conceived space in...
Environment
Pollinator Pathway: Vital Ecology in the Emerald City
The problem really comes down to color. Conscientious urban planning focuses so much on adding green space that...
News
Elevating the Electric Car
There are many bad reasons a good idea—the electric car—still hasn't gained traction. Among the thornier issues has been The Charge Problem—or...
Education
Hlokomela: A Soccer Tournament South Africans Can Actually Afford
The basic contradiction of a World Cup is plain. All that heady populism—Davids taking on Goliaths in the sport everyone can afford to play—is...
Design
Alpha One Labs: Where Creativity Mothers Inventions
One disadvantage of being an adult is you have fewer chances to sit around in rooms inventing strange gadgets. One advantage is that, should you...
Culture
Poets Plaza: An Outdoor Living Room for Writers
Plenty of bookish neighborhoods yap about their literary history, but few have written literature into their physical landscape like San...
Cities
Make Believe: Renovating Storefronts and Re-imagining a City
Step back from the cliché, and you can hear multiple meanings in the phrase "make believe." There's our familiar sense of something imaginary, but...
Culture
Paper-Feet: Sustainable Sandals that Don't Cost an Arm or a Leg
The trend of barely-more-than-barefoot shoes has involved some cognitive dissonance: They haven't tended to be priced that way. For Jimmy Tomczak,...
Cities
I Am Here: Billboards Against Homelessness
Panhandling's major deficiency is that it rarely supplies passersby with enough information to want to give money. A person is suffering, but who...
Cities
Shop Globally, Bank Locally
For most of us, choosing a bank usually comes down to two things: who has the most ATMs and how close is the nearest branch. We might consider...
Business
WomenCraft: Helping Tanzanians and Refugees Find Fair Trade
Tucked into the remote northwest corner of Tanzania, along the country's borders with Rwanda and Burundi, the rural Ngara region has spent much of...
Design
LOOK: Shopping Cart Becomes Housing Start
Los Angeles has the largest homeless population in the country. In a city where people spend so much time in their cars, it’s a population that...
Environment
Green Light New Orleans: The Big Efficient
For the New Orleans musician Andreas Hoffmann, a Louisiana transplant originally from Switzerland, Hurricane Katrina sparked a twin call to...
