Apartment Look

When our children were 11 and 9, young enough to still be entirely inside the family circle but old enough to remember, we splurged on a “once in a lifetime vacation ” and rented a small farmhouse in Southwestern France outside the village of Saint-Cyprien. Each day, our son and daughter would say goodbye to the donkey that hung around our patio and we’d climb in the tiny rented Renault and drive somewhere in the fairy- tale beautiful Dordogne River region . On one of these excursions, we stumbled on the provincial city of Sarlat. An accident of history and several centuries of stagnant economy had left Sarlat’s center virtually unchanged architecturally since the days of siege engines and knights galloping over drawbridges. City fathers had wakened one morning in the late 1950s to realize that, leaning above narrow and winding cobblestone streets and alleys, they had one of the largest collections of intact medieval architecture in Europe. The French government subsidized restor...

Kelci Holman and Nicholas Beardsley July 29, 2017, in Philadelphia Hello there Every day after work at the Fox Chase Cancer Center lab , Kelci took the train to see Nic, the guy she had met as they both learned how to mentor incoming freshman honors students two weeks before. Between Fox Chase and University City, the Roslyn native came up with what she hoped were reasonable excuses for her to be on campus, because Nic was interesting, and cute, and so funny. “She’d say something like, ‘Oh, I’m in town to do something with a friend, but if you’re going to be around later, we could hang out,’ ” Nic, who was then a rising sophomore architecture major , remembered. There were group outings, such as seeing Batman in IMAX. But sometimes, it was just the two of them. “We both love watching the Olympics, and so I’d be like, ‘Oh! Let’s go watch swimming!’ or something,” said Kelci, who...

The city of East Palo Alto , a wedge of modest houses and light industrial sites in the heart of Silicon Valley , has been passed by in the great tech boom . A historically black area , it has seen a big Hispanic influx in the past two decades, with more than three out of four residents now coming from one of those two groups. It is still living down its reputation, gained a quarter of a century ago, as the murder capital of the US: one out of every 571 of its residents was the victim of a homicide in a single year. Things have improved since then. But over the same period, it has become the poor neighbour to some of the world's richest companies. In one of the ultimate signs of the divide between the haves and have-nots of the western US, the municipal government of East Palo Alto didn 't own the rights to draw more from the state's water reserves, which it would need in order to grow. In June this year, it took a gift of cash, from the private foundation set up by Mar...