The Way We Live Now

Robert Yaro, cofounder of North Atlantic Rail, a project he started after retiring from the Regional Plan Association. Bob is especially well known for his work on urban development, but I was pleased to learn that earlier in his career he founded the Center for Rural Massachusetts at UMass. (We often talk on Train time about the way rail can help solve the problems created by the rural-urban divide.)

For many years Bob was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has also taught at Columbia and Harvard. As you'll hear, he has a broad knowledge of issues related to passenger rail.

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Show notes

Read more about Bob Yaro.

Read about North Atlantic Rail (check out the maps!).

When I was invited to talk about third places at the WRLDCTY Conference in Spain, I first said that I couldn’t travel this autumn and that I wasn’t willing to speak by Zoom, after the awful experience I had with a Zoom panel for the New Jersey Futures conference. Talking about third places should be face to face, I said. The organizers of WRLDCTY were amazing: they found a colleague with a home in Great Barrington who would interview me, and then arranged for a videographer to meet us at Lake Mansfield. That film is in their hands now. I made this short recording on my own computer, using Zoom, after walking home from the interview, to capture the points I’d just explained to Steven Pedigo when we were sitting up by Lake Mansfield.

"Beto O'Rourke: Air of Authenticity" from The Bulwark

Beto's Texas voter registration group, "Powered by People"

Beto wrote about visiting Ulysses, Kansas in 2018

This conversation with Joe Keohane, author of The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World, takes us beyond the usual question about social skills and anxiety management. His book is about the joy of talking to strangers. Joe offers his own stories about talking to strangers as he explains some of the research that has been done on social interaction and recounts efforts to encourage people to talk across political or regional divides.

If you have the idea that third places have disappeared, this conversation with Kathy Giuffre, an American sociologist now settled in an Italian village, will be inspiring. Guiffre used Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place in her teaching for many years, and this podcast focuses on how third places are able to survive and thrive. She talks about the "pub" that is the center of village life, a place where people hang out and talk as well as drinking and dining - and dining well, of course, even when ordering the basic 2-course meal. The conversation here ranges from the loneliness of Giuffre's US students to the cultural values and government support that make this vibrant village pub possible. We also venture into some of the more complex aspects of third-place life: comfort with debate and disagreement, and the skills needed to make new friends.

Links

Kathy Giuffre's website with links to her writings and talks on how communities foster creativity

Kathy's blog, where you can read about life in the village and life in Italy

The Great Good Place: original edition and in-progress sequel by Karen Christensen

With the 2024 Olympic Games about to open in Paris, Karen Christensen talks with Professor Carlos Moreno of the Sorbonne about his work to encourage 15-minute cities, 30-minute regions, and other innovative, future-focused design strategies. We hear about a wide range of projects, from Utrecht in the Netherlands to Portland, Oregon and New Orleans in the United States as well as Cleveland, the Midwestern industrial city.

Carlos Moreno is a scientist at the Sorbonne in Paris, known internationally for pioneering approaches to urban issues such as the Human Smart City, the 15-Minute City, and the 30-Minute Territory.

Karen Christensen is the senior editor of the Encyclopedia of Community, publisher of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability, and coauthor of the forthcoming sequel to The Great Good Place.

The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (Wiley, May 2024)

January 2026: I’m sorry to report that the Star of Greenwich closed late in 2025, not long before I was in London with high hopes of joining James for a drink and talk in real life. He wrote about the closure here.

Today we hear from James Gadsby-Peet about a very special pub, the Star of Greenwich, in south London. James explains how he and his partners found a way to save a historical British "local" and make it a third place for the 21st century - a new-style public house (pub is short for public house). He says "the superpower of third places is to help you meet people you wouldn't normally spend time with and to build your view of the world and your experience and your empathy for those people."

Links:

* The Star of Greenwich website

* Instagram @starofgreenwich

* LA Times article

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Coming soon! Visit https://greatgoodplace.org/ for details.

Have you ever struggled – or fought with your publisher – over a book title? Well, this episode is going to help!

One good thing that happened to me during the pandemic was getting to know Peter Hildick-Smith of Codex Group. We first connected online through an email group for publishing professionals. Fortunately, Peter was making his way to Vermont from New York City. Our first meeting was, like all meetings in 2020, outdoors and socially distanced.

We’ve been talking ever since. Peter has loads of experience working with big publishers and industry leaders, and conversations with him have opened my eyes to more precise ways to think about marketing and promotion.

I’m delighted to share this conversation about finding the right title and subtitle for your book, using my forthcoming book (title, of course, to be determined) as a case study. The lessons here can be applied to any book, but we focused here on nonfiction.

What do you want to know about publishing? Please do send me your questions. Your horror stories are welcome, too! And if you’d prefer to watch and listen, the podcast is also available on YouTube (without ads).

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Karen Christensen, publisher and writer, in conversation with novelist and poet Qiu Xiaolong, talking about the poetic impulse and the differences between poetry in English and Chinese. Towards the end, Qiu reads this poem:

Lines on the South Village* --Cui Hu (Around 790)

* The poem is said to be autobiographical. On Cui’s way to the civil service examination in the capital, the poet met a beautiful girl in the village. The following year, he traveled by the same route, but he failed to see the girl there. So he wrote the lines on the deserted house in the village.

Here’s the video version:

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Antoine and I started talking last summer while he was in final months of work on Nos Tiers-Lieux (Our Third Places), the first book on the subject to be written and published in France. Here we pick up our conversation, discussing what he considers the romanticized view of French bistros (Emily in Paris), how the French use of the term third place, and whether hackerspaces should be called third places.

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