Status Updates From Home from Nowhere: Remaking...

"What happened during the crucial twenty-five year spanning 1893 to 1918, it seems to me, is clear: Americans, given the choice between civilizing their cities through public works, and using the car to escape the demands of civility, chose the car."

"One inhabits the commercial highway strip isolated within the steel walls of a motor vehicle, cut off from other people. Such places are there profoundly uncivil. They impoverish and diminish us socially, and the community pays an enormous price for this incivility in terms of social dysfunction, ruined institutions, and misbehavior. Civilization becomes impossible under these conditions."

"The United States... sustained on a clown diet, rich and sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clown mobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns. We perceive God to be an elderly comedian."

"Suburbia fails us in large part because it is so abstract. It's an idea of a place rather than a place. The way you can tell is because so many places in this country seem like no place in particular and a lack of particularity is the earmark of of distraction."