The New Yorker: The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelon

Park Güell’s shift from a shared public space into a cultural zone occupied almost exclusively by tourists is understood by some worried residents of Barcelona as a story about the prospective fate of the city itself. Albert Arias, a geographer with the local government, told me that he had publicly criticized the selling of tickets as “a very bad solution,” adding, “It is acknowledging a problem by fencing off public space.” [...]

Nearly half the Airbnb properties in Barcelona are entire houses or apartments. The conceit of friendly locals renting out spare rooms has been supplanted by a more mercenary model, in which centuries-old apartment buildings are hollowed out with ersatz hotel rooms. Many properties have been bought specifically as short-term-rental investments, managed by agencies that have dozens of such properties. Especially in coveted areas, Airbnb can drive up rents, as longtime residents sell their apartments to people eager to use them as profit engines. In some places, the transformation has been extreme: in the Gothic Quarter, the resident population has declined by forty-five per cent in the past dozen years. [...]

Properties used almost exclusively for Airbnb rentals are offered on the company’s Web site with photographs that might have come from a shelter magazine: carefully staged table settings, closeups of fruit bowls. The same neutral, vaguely Scandinavian design can be seen in listings from Bangor to Bangkok. (The critic Kyle Chayka has aptly characterized this aesthetic as “AirSpace.”) The Barcelona Airbnb I stayed in, in the Eixample, an elegant fin-de-siècle district, was typical: stylishly but minimally equipped, with ikea furnishings and a Nespresso machine in the kitchen. There were no signs of regular habitation, which wasn’t a surprise. According to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog site founded by Murray Cox, a Brooklyn-based housing activist, the Eixample apartment, which goes for about two hundred dollars a night, is available to rent three hundred and forty-three days a year. Its owner has five other properties in the city listed on Airbnb. [...]

By 2017, tourism had risen to the top of a list of Barcelona’s most pressing concerns. According to an annual survey taken by the city, sixty per cent of residents felt that Barcelona had reached or exceeded its capacity to host tourists. Three years earlier, only thirty-five per cent had felt this way. That summer, anti-tourism protesters lined the waterfront, standing knee-deep in the Mediterranean bearing banners reading “this is not a beach resort,” in English, in the face of bikini-clad visitors who were somnolently tanning themselves. Thousands of protesters marched along La Rambla and loudly informed tourists that they were not welcome. Pardo and other activists staged protests against illegal Airbnb apartments by renting them on the site, checking in while using a hidden camera, and then refusing to leave, with the media there as witnesses. They staged an action to expose a landlord who was illegally renting out thirteen apartments in the Ribera neighborhood. After obtaining access to one of the apartments, the activists were about to film themselves reading a manifesto when the manager suddenly came back—and they had to flee. “We forgot to lock the door!” Pardo said, with chagrin. It was the kind of rookie mistake a tourist would make.

read the article

The New Yorker: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus aesthetic always drew sophisticated detractors. In 1981, Tom Wolfe, whose own taste in interiors ran to damask and lacquer, published “From Bauhaus to Our House,” a polemical defense of “coziness & color” and an indictment of the “whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness” of austere modern design. What bothered Wolfe most was the style’s erasure of affect, pleasure, and chance, subtractions that made a house into something resembling “an insecticide refinery.” It had been this way since the early twenties at the Bauhaus—the school, in the city of Weimar, Germany, where the aesthetic originated. From the start, Wolfe writes, Gropius, “the Epicurus” of the place, had insisted on “a clean and pure future.” Wolfe identified with Alma Gropius, the architect’s first wife. When Alma, a voluptuous and refined woman, visited the Bauhaus from her native Vienna, she was especially repelled by its high-minded diet of “a mush of fresh vegetables.” Years later, she remarked that the Bauhaus was best defined not by clean lines and pure materials but by “garlic on the breath.” [...]

Gropius’s personal awakening was abetted by a global one. “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “human nature changed.” Individual artists were suddenly granted the freedom to design the arc of their own lives. Collectively, this freedom inspired the consistent period aesthetic that we call modernism. In 1911, Gropius returned to his architectural practice and, with a partner, designed an astonishing building: the Fagus orthopedic shoe-last factory, in Lower Saxony, one of the greatest buildings of early modernism. Its shimmering glass curtain wall, a feature that later became essential to Bauhaus design, brought together everything Gropius loved. It made a factory feel as dignified as a cathedral, expressing the near-holiness of modern work. Like the radically inventive poems and paintings of the era, it synthesized new materials and methods in ways that somehow felt classical, as though art had leapfrogged over the nineteenth century, the sentimental world of Gropius’s childhood. [...]

The rational domestic interiors we associate with the Bauhaus—white walls, a few perfect objects, chairs and tables distilled to their essence—make the very idea of personal conflict seem almost gauche. There is no way to reconcile Gropius’s emotional life in the early twenties with the idealized spaces he created. His marriage to Alma dissolved, and her visits to Weimar were fraught, though Gropius loved to spend time with their daughter. In MacCarthy’s book, the storms of his private life tend to be tallied on one side of the ledger, unconnected to the goings on in his professional world. Later in his life, bantering with Frank Lloyd Wright about the importance of collaboration, Gropius was asked by Wright, ever the solo operator, whether he would enlist a neighbor’s help in making a baby. Gropius, channelling both sides of his nature, answered that he might, if his neighbor was a woman. [...]

The evolution of a single design gives a sense of how the Bauhaus grew. For his Model B3 chair—also called the Wassily chair, in honor of Kandinsky, who expressed admiration for its prototype—Breuer took inspiration from the elegant handlebars of a milkman’s bicycle, made of seamless tubular steel, a new material. He created an industrial-age club chair that, reduced to its metal frame, seemed to levitate in space. You could see through it to other, equally beautiful Bauhaus objects in the background. Like all the furniture Breuer designed for the school, it was also a collaboration: the school’s textile workshop contributed the seats, woven from Eisengarn, a strong cotton thread. And, as with many great Bauhaus designs, it is an example of materialized reasoning. It solves the formal problem of creating a substantial piece of furniture that is both there and not there. It is interesting from every angle, and especially beautiful from the back.

read the article or listen to the podcast

The New York Review of Books: Indonesia’s Fragile Festival of Democracy

Jakarta, Indonesia—Democracy in Indonesia always seems to come at a high price. At least a hundred people died while keeping the polls open on Election Day last week, from causes such as heat-stroke and exhaustion. The Indonesian islands straddle the Equator and most of them are hot, at least eighty degrees, every day of the year. They are home to 264 million people and are the stage for world’s largest single-day election, which is deeply impressive in its logistics. Seven million citizens volunteered to keep the polls running last Wednesday across more than 800,000 polling stations. Ballots were distributed to the periphery via planes, canoes, and elephants. The voting booth volunteers who died have been dubbed locally as “martyrs of democracy.” [...]

Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and about 90 percent of its citizens are Sunni Muslims. It is not a secular state but has defined itself since its postcolonial independence in 1945 as pluralist and multi-faith. It was ruled for three decades, from 1965 to 1998, by the military strongman Suharto, whose dictatorship still casts a long, dark shadow on its contemporary politics. In the post-Suharto era, Indonesian democracy has developed hand in hand with a religious revival, particularly among Muslim groups that were suppressed during the dictatorship.

Although it is not new for politicians to bolster their credibility and standing by parading their Islamic faith and values, religion was unusually foregrounded in this last race. This was because the general elections took place in the wake of a vitriolic local contest in Jakarta in 2017, when Islamist zealots mobilized mass protests to agitate for the trial and prosecution of a popular ethnic-Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta for allegedly blaspheming against Islam—attacks that led to his defeat at the polls. The eruption of a populist, hardline Islam in 2016 and 2017 seemed to catch Jokowi by surprise, and he quickly caved to the demand to put the governor—his own former deputy and close ally—on trial. In an earlier show of conciliation, he even prayed alongside his Islamist critics during their second mass rally in December 2016. (Ma’ruf and the Ulama Council actively supported these rallies, too.) [...]

“I can see why many progressives were disappointed by Jokowi’s pick of Ma’ruf, given his human rights record,” said Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, a scholar of Islam who used to run the Liberal Islam Network. “In my opinion, it has been the most polarizing election ever—like the Jakarta election but national.” On the other hand, he said, it is not inherently negative that religion continues to play a large part in the country’s politics. “Democracy will develop in a different way here than it did in the West,” he said, noting also that many conservative movements, such as Salafism and the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, have moderated over time as they’ve taken their places under the figurative big tent of Indonesian Islam. [...]

Sri Vira’s conception of family values includes actively campaigning to criminalize homosexuality, which has been painted by its opponents as a foreign imposition. Her politics do not fit into easy categories: she is Islamist but also nationalist, a family-focused activist but not a feminist. She ran for office partly because she didn’t see enough women like her represented; at the same time, she is skeptical of the quota system whereby all political parties must have at least 30 percent female candidates. “According to me, it depends on the women,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find women [candidates] who are credible, they may not have the background or experience.”

read the article

The Atlantic: A Tremor on Mars Confirms a Lasting Suspicion

Scientists know this because they sent a seismometer to our planetary neighbor. The instrument arrived last year, on board a NASA lander called InSight. The seismometer, small and dome-shaped, has sat on the brick-colored surface since, waiting for hints of movement below the surface. On April 6, it caught something, a “quiet but distinct” signal, scientists said. A rumble from the depths. [...]

Scientists have suspected for decades that they’d find this phenomenon if they had the right tools to look. Unlike Earth, Mars lacks tectonic plates that glide over its mantle, jostling the ground when they touch. But like Earth, Mars has three distinct layers—a rocky crust, a mantle, and a metal core—and it’s still cooling from its fiery formation out of a primordial cloud of cosmic dust. Even now, billions of years later, heat radiates from its center and can be strong enough to crack the surface and escape. The fracturing sends seismic waves streaming in all directions. [...]

While scientists are thrilled about the detection, they wish the rumble were stronger. The quake measured about 2.5 on the Richter scale, too weak to draw a path within the depths. If a tremor like that happened on Earth, you wouldn’t feel it. If you were standing next to the InSight lander at the moment of detection, you wouldn’t know either. “We are waiting for the big, big one,” says David Mimoun, a scientist at France’s Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space and a member of the seismometer team. Researchers expect to detect dozens more, some as powerful as 5.5 magnitude.

read the article

The Atlantic: World War I in Photos: Soldiers and Civilians (APR 27, 2014)

When looking through thousands of images of World War I, some of the more striking photos are not of technological wonders or battle-scarred landscapes, but of the human beings caught up in the chaos. The soldiers were men, young and old, and the opportunity to look into their faces and see the emotion, their humanity, instead of a uniform or nationality, is a gift—a real window into the world a century ago. While soldiers bore the brunt of the war, civilians were involved on a massive scale as well. From the millions of refugees forced from their homes, to the volunteer ambulance drivers, cooks, and nurses, to the civilian support groups used by all major armies, ordinary people found themselves at war. This entry is a glimpse into the lives of these people, in battle, at play, at rest, and at work, during the war. I've gathered photographs of the Great War from dozens of collections, some digitized for the first time, to try to tell the story of the conflict, those caught up in it, and how much it affected the world. This entry is part 6 of a 10-part series on World War I.

see the photos