Aaron M. Renn

All Things Aaron

How to Keep From Getting a Cold

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Are you the kind of person who wants to stay healthy? Cold and flu season is upon us, so here's a post with some practical tips on how to keep from getting colds. I used to get a lot of colds, multiple per year.  The average adult apparently gets 2-4 of them every year. But with some changes to my behavior and lifestyle, I was able to dramatically reduce the number of colds I get. In fact, while I do still get sick sometimes, I almost never get an actual common cold. So while this is not medical advice - for that talk to your doctor … [Read more...]

Art Responding to Architecture in Columbus, Indiana

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I've written about the incredible small city of Columbus, Indiana before. It's arguably the most successful small industrial city in America that is neither a college town nor a state capital. It's also home to one of the world's great collections of modern architecture. One of the reasons that Columbus has done so well is that it hasn't rested on its laurels, and has looked for new ways to keep making the community better. One of their new efforts is an arts initiative called Exhibit Columbus. I talked by phone with Richard McCoy and Anne … [Read more...]

San Francisco Observations

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I made quite a few trips to San Francisco during the late 90s into the early 2000s, but hadn't been back in a very long time - probably close to 15 years. Last week I was there for a conference and a long weekend and got to spend some time exploring the city. I won't claim a comprehensive review, but I did have a few takeaways to share. 1. Fewer homeless than expected. Based on the rhetoric you read in the papers, I expected SF to be overrun with aggressive homeless people. This wasn't the case. There were visible homeless to be sure, but … [Read more...]

William H. Whyte’s Original Plan to Save Bryant Park

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William H. "Holly" Whyte, the former Fortune magazine editor best known in urban circles for his classic book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, famously did a report on Bryant Park in the 1970s that was ultimately used as a basis for transforming what was then known as "Needle Park." Andrew Manshel used to work for Bryant Park Corporation, the entity that actually did transform and still runs the park. (If you get a chance to see Bryant Park Corp. CEO Dan Biederman give a talk, be sure to take it). He now runs an excellent web site on … [Read more...]

The Places Where We Work

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Gary Hustwit is a New York based filmmaker known for his various documentaries on design, including Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, and a forthcoming documentary on legendary Braun designer Dieter Rams (a project I backed on Kickstarter). I really liked Helvetica, which told the story of typography through the lens of that ubiquitous font.  Objectified I have not seen, but I did see Urbanized and gave it a pretty tough review. Hustwit's current project is a film called Workplace  about  the design of the office. This is a bit of an … [Read more...]

The Economist on Jobs Returning to Downtown

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The Economist's Schumpeter column this week was a great feature on the return of jobs to downtown from suburban office parks.  I was delighted to be featured in it for my concept of the "executive headquarters" and the notion that these relocated HQs are often both different and smaller than in the past. (And what's more, the relocation itself often involves downsizing).I don't want to claim too much credit, but I did help pioneer this concept of executive HQs in downtown, starting with a 2008 piece on the move of HQs into downtown Chicago. The … [Read more...]

Philadelphia Transit Notes

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I was in Philadelphia this weekend. It's a great city whose downtown is booming. And I got to ride transit there for the first time in my various visits. The picture above is one of the rail corridors approaching 30th St. Station, the station  used by Amtrak. Because there's a rail yard next to the station, this is a pretty wide example, but it shows that it isn't just interstate highways that create barriers between neighborhoods in cities. Major rail corridors do the same thing. People might argue that there's a difference in that many … [Read more...]

A Window Into the World of Working Class Collapse

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Some time back my brother recommended I watch the documentary film Medora, about a high school basketball team from rural Southern Indiana. I finally got around to doing it. Someone described this film as an "inverse Hoosiers", which is an apt description. Hoosiers is a fictional retelling of the Milan Miracle, the legendary story of how tiny Milan High School (enrollment 161) won the state's then single-class basketball championship in 1954. There's no such happy ending in prospect in Medora (available on Netflix). The town's basketball … [Read more...]

Moving Beyond Resilience

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Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb I had never read any books by Nassim Taleb of "black swan" fame until some hilarious retweets from his Twitter account caused me to start following him. Taleb is a witty and opinionated fellow. He's lately been hating on what he labels the "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class. Here's a recent Facebook post of his on the topic that went viral. What's a IYI? Intellectual Yet Idiot: semi-erudite bureaucrat who thinks he is an erudite; pathologizes others for doing things he … [Read more...]

How Demographics Explain the World

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Demographics may not be destiny, but they do play a huge role in driving the fortunes of society and the economy. Sami Karam of Populyst joined me for a podcast on demographic trends around the world. The conversation ranged from the rise of China to the fall of Japan - and even why Occupy Wall Street failed to achieve lift-off. Topics include: 0:00 Introduction and overview of Sami Karam’s work 2:20 Why Occupy Wall Street didn't take off 3:15 Demographics on the problems of the Japanese economy 3:50 What does demographics tell … [Read more...]