Portlandia, Measles, Frank Gehry: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

Portlandia, Measles, Frank Gehry: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

All those fake feminist bookstores are spelling trouble for Portland’s real feminist bookstores, infectious diseases are threatening our public transit riders, and Frank Gehry keeps puking Fruit Loops all over our cultural institutions. It’s all this week in What’s Ruining Our Cities!

Measles could ruin Berkeley

An alarming message went out to Bay Area media this week. BART officials revealed that a person infected with a “contagious disease” traveled on its trains four times. Guess what? The disease is MEASLES! You know, the disease we virtually eradicated in 2000, the disease that is now making a comeback and saw outbreaks in three states last year, the disease that, according to the CDC, is “so contagious that if one person has it, 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected with the measles virus.” Apparently a Berkeley student who was never vaccinated likely picked up the disease while abroad. And then took public transit. [SFist]

Bill de Blasio ruined New York City students’ perfectly good snow day

Did you see those photos of kids across the Eastern Seaboard trudging to school in 10 feet of snow yesterday? No? That’s because most cities cancelled school — except for New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio not only kept schools open, he declared a state of emergency, too! The school district defended its decision by saying that schools provided shelter and hot meals for students, but that’s incredibly insulting to teachers, writes S. Mitra Kalita at Atlantic Cities. “To characterise schools as daycare centres demeans the important work teachers actually do.” When Michael Bloomberg was mayor it never snowed like this! [Atlantic Cities]

Frank Gehry is ruining cities everywhere

Is Frank Gehry actually the world’s worst living architect? “What’s particularly frustrating about Gehry’s career,” Gizmodo EIC Geoff Manaugh suggests, “is that he’s somehow meant to be cool, a kind of sci-fi architect for the Millennial generation, a Timothy Leary of CAD; but he’s Guy Fieri, his buildings hair-gelled monsters of advanced spatial douchebaggery.” Join the argument. [Gizmodo]


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