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“ The Infuriating History of How Metro Got So Bad,” Luke Mullins and Michael Gaynor, Washingtonian

On January 8, Richard Sarles walked into his final board meeting as Metro’s general manager. It was a triumphant afternoon. During the hourlong sendoff, ten different board members extolled Sarles. One person played a video tribute to baseball star Derek Jeter and compared him to the retiring director. “You were both at your best,” the staffer said, “when times were tough and you were surrounded by those who doubted that the job could be done.” Sarles arrived at Metro in the aftermath of the 2009 Fort Totten crash, the deadliest in its history, which exposed Metro’s negligent safety practices to the world. He’d closed out most of the National Transportation Safety Board’s post-crash recommendations and launched a $5-billion capital improvement plan to fix the aging infrastructure responsible for the disaster. In a unanimous commendation, the board cited the GM for “rebuilding credibility and the region’s confidence in WMATA.” Sarles was touched. “It brought a tear to my eye,” he said at the meeting, after crediting the 2,000-year-old Athenian code of civic responsibility for guiding his work. “When you enter public service, you find things the way they are,” he said. “And when you leave it, hopefully you’ve made an improvement while you were there.” The meeting’s tone would probably have surprised a lot of ordinary Metro riders. Washingtonians used to celebrate Metro with a boosterish pride. But over the past decade, griping about rush-hour meltdowns had become a staple of office water-cooler conversations. Compared with the safety improvements that board members were touting, the question on many riders’ minds was more prosaic—but possibly more crucial to the system’s survival: Could Metro even be trusted to get people to work on time?

“ Hacking the City,” Greg Lindsay, New Republic

On a sunny morning in March, Marcus Westbury brandished his iPad as if it were a window into another world. The screen depicted the street we were standing on in downtown Newcastle, Australia, circa 2008. Decades of suburban flight, a devastating 1989 earthquake, and the implosion of the city’s steel mills had left the center a ghost town. More than a hundred empty storefronts lined the commercial strip. The neoclassical post office and the Victoria—Australia’s second-oldest theater—both sat vacant. The street could have doubled as a set for The Walking Dead. Now the sidewalks were bustling. The windows of the David Jones department store, another recent casualty, were filled with sculptors, milliners, jewelers, and stonemasons publicly plying their trades. Families sipped flat whites and leisurely ate breakfast at outdoor cafés. Compared to the desolate scenes of just a few years ago, the transformationwas startling, especially considering it all stemmed from a bit of legal sleight-of-hand. To demonstrate, Westbury ducked inside the store, whose yawning interior had been subdivided by plywood. A false wall rested on dusty display cases and was supported by sandbags. “This is not architecture,” he said, because the building’s historic status prevented any changes to the interior. And besides, according to the rules of the arrangement, Newcastle’s artisans could use vacant properties like this for free as long as they promised not to alter their interiors (and thus their tax statuses). Newcastle wasn’t saved by an influx of hipsters or developers, but through exploiting the right loopholes.

A view of Newcastle, Australia. Flickr/Tim J Keegan

“ The Man Who Taught Your Cab Driver How to Navigate NYC,” Daniel Kolitz, Hopes and Fears

It's a few minutes before class time at AJ Yellow Taxi Tutors, and the late arrivals are straggling in. The shabby basement decor and the dozen or so people in their thirties and forties squeezed into grade school-style desk-chairs suggest a mid-day AA meeting, or a state-mandated road rage course. Yellowing posters of the five boroughs are stapled to the right wall, near a cloth-encircled photograph of the Dalai Lama. The men—and, with one exception, they are all men—sit quietly in the classroom's first four rows, scanning notes and checking phones. Shortly after 11:30 am AJ Gogia bounds out of his doorless back office, clad on this fall Friday in a long-sleeved black t-shirt and blue jeans. Without any formal introduction, he starts redistricting. "You speak Nepali, right?" he asks a student. "Come with me—we're going to put the Nepali brothers together." Three minutes and much chair-scuffling later, the class has been divided into about a half-dozen pairs—Nepali speakers with Nepali speakers, Tibetan with Tibetan, Arabic with Arabic—at which point Gogia retreats back into his office. Small talk erupts in multiple tongues, and cuts off the instant Gogia re-enters the room. Really: it doesn't taper, doesn't dwindle—it just stops.

“ Seven Months After Freddie Gray's Death, 'Ain't Nothing Changed out Here',” Paul Duggan, The Washington Post

BALTIMORE — Ground zero of the April 27 rioting in this city, at least symbolically, was the hard-knocks intersection of Pennsylvania and West North avenues. It’s where James Carter, a hood-savvy ex-crack peddler gone straight years ago, runs a cellphone store, and where Murshaun Young, bereft of prospects yet stubbornly hopeful, lingers on stoops, mulling how to escape his circumstances. Each man dreams. Young’s dream: “This house right here,” he says, chin-gesturing to a shabby, three-story tenement on West North. “There was an auction the other day. The house was going for, like, $5,000 initially.” Young, 27, says he pestered some of his pals in the corner drug trade, begging them to chip in cash with him. “I’m like, ‘Hey, we can get together $5,000. Buy it! Five bedrooms! And the first floor’s zoned for business!’ ”

“ The Park Built on Forgotten Ghost Towns,” Matthew Steven Bruen and Rebecca Cheong, Narratively

On a cold yet sunny November morning, Gregory Miller and his son Michael travel to the land where their family’s farm once stood. Both are big men, in size and in spirit. Like many people from America’s Appalachian Mountain region, they are reserved and fiercely independent. During this trip, they carry with them the quiet fury of righteous indignation. Greg hasn’t been back to the farmstead in several years, but chose to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his forced removal from this place by bringing his thirty-year-old son here for the first time. It’s a solemn occasion, with long periods of silent recollection punctuated by the piercing shotgun blasts of nearby pheasant hunters. “Those rocks over there, near the edge of the dirt road,” Greg says, “they’re all that remains of the farmstead. That’s it. Just the foundation of the barn and the hole where the silo used to be. I haven’t ever been able to find exactly where the house was.” He speaks with a thick Pennsylvanian accent. A heavyset man with a deep voice, Greg drives a red truck and when he laughs, his voice cascades, sometimes erupting into mirthful cackles. His son, Mike, is a gentle, taciturn man. He wears glasses and sports a pale complexion. His voice is soft and smooth, never rising above a few decibels.

The monument in Minisink Valley is dedicated to the soldiers who fought the Battle of Minisink during the American Revolution. Flickr/Charles Fulton