Manhattan started extending its land mass back in the colonial era, using construction debris, sunken ships, ashes, ballast, and other waste to reclaim land and enlarge the island.

Pearl Street used to be the southern boundary; Greenwich Street was at the edge of the Hudson River. Manhattan continued to grow in the 19th century, but by the early 1900s—with almost all of Manhattan urbanized—civil engineers were considering new ways to create more real estate.

Enter a highly esteemed and successful engineer of bridges and skyscrapers named T. Kennard Thomson.

His proposal, popularized in a nationally syndicated newspaper article in June 1911, was to extend Manhattan four miles into New York Harbor, adding 4,100 acres to New York City’s most populated borough.

“The method of reclamation to be followed is extremely simple,” he told a reporter. “I would merely erect concrete seawalls from the Battery toward Staten Island for the desired length, and then fill them in.”

Thomson made his case by focusing on the taxes that could be collected on the additional land. But he was especially concerned with the journey ships took from the harbor to the docks in Manhattan.

Extending the island into the harbor while preserving a narrower ship canal above Staten Island would make it easier for ships to complete their voyage, he believed. The more ships that dock in Manhattan, the more enriched city coffers become.

Part of his proposal involved building a “six-track subway all around Manhattan Island, including the new extension. The subway would be built underneath the present dock line of the city.”

Visionary or pipe dreamer, Thomson was grounded enough to know that he needed city officials to get on board with his plan. The article states that his proposal was “under consideration, and other engineers who have looked into the matter regard it as entirely feasible.”

You can imagine what City Hall must have thought of this massive, likely quite expensive plan. But Thomson wasn’t finished coming up with new ideas for enlarging Manhattan.

In 1916, he published a proposal in Popular Science not only to build into New York Harbor but to fill in the entire East River (third image), which would reclaim 50 square miles and create “a really greater New York.”

You know the end of this story. Like so many other fantastical ideas that never came to pass, Thomson’s second proposal never came to fruition.

[Top image: The Atlanta Journal; Second image: Geographicus.com; third image: Popular Science; Fourth image: New York Tribune]

Looks like somebody else will have the CEO title at the “Washington Post” in its post-journalism phase:

Will Lewis, the embattled chief executive and publisher of The Washington Post, has stepped down, the company announced Saturday, days after the newspaper came under widespread criticism for laying off hundreds of its journalists.

Mr. Lewis said in a statement that he had made the decision “in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post.” His email, which was terse, thanked only Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post, and did not mention journalists at the newspaper.

Mr. Lewis left three days after the company, facing years of financial losses, undertook a significant round of layoffs that cut 30 percent of the staff — more than 300 journalists — decimating The Post’s local, international and sports coverage. Marty Baron, the celebrated former editor of The Post, called it one of the “darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

In a news release announcing Mr. Lewis’s departure, Mr. Bezos said that The Post has “an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity.” He added, “Each and every day our readers give us a road map to success.” He did not mention the cost-cutting in his statement.

Meanwhile, this story makes it clear that this has become a catch-and-kill operation for the owner:

Last month, just ahead of the devastating layoffs at The Washington Post, a group of wealthy D.C. locals approached Post publisher and chief executive Will Lewis with a proposal: Would the Jeff Bezos–owned paper consider spinning off its local and sports sections and selling to them? Perhaps some type of deal could have been worked out where the property was jointly branded and operated, such as when CNN partnered with Fortune and Money magazines on CNNMoney.

The interest was there, but the group never received a response, Status has learned. A spokesperson for The Post did not comment, but Bezos has repeatedly ignored interest from would-be buyers while the newspaper disintegrates under his watch. Most notably, as Status first reported in 2024, Kara Swisher expressed serious interest in leading a group of investors to purchase the paper as it continues to make deep cuts to its newsroom under the oversight of Lewis and Bezos.

The sweeping cuts this week that axed crucial reporting teams on the foreign, local and sports desks, eliminated all staff photographers and most of the video team, raised the prospect that The Post is on the brink of a death spiral as subscribers flee and advertisers walk away under Bezos’ ownership.

To be sure, Bezos’ own actions have led to the destruction of the great civic institution that once brought down a sitting U.S. president, exposed covert NSA surveillance programs, and revealed Donald Trump’s assault on democracy that led to the January 6 attack—earning dozens of Pulitzer Prizes along the way. But in recent years, the paper’s very survival has been stymied by Bezos’ clear conflicts of interest, and general disinterest, as an owner.

“The formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle,” as Josh Marshall puts it. The power to purchase a media outlet is the power to destroy it, to paraphrase another Marshall.

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Most in-garage bicycle storage solutions are fixed: You have a hook you hang it from, or maybe a pulley system to get the bike out of the way. Installing one of these requires commitment, with you effectively dedicating the space, which may be in short supply, to the bike.

In contrast this Flip object, by British industrial designer George Laight, offers the convenience of a rack with the added benefit of portability.

The bike can be stored vertically, saving space, and the entire thing can be wheeled around, making garage clean-ups and reorganizing sessions easy.

Additionally, the units can be folded flat.

The $175 units are in production by Laight's company, BikeStow.

The Atlantic is announcing that David Brooks, who for years has contributed memorable Atlantic cover stories and essays on political and societal issues, is joining the magazine as a staff writer beginning next month. The Atlantic will be the home for all of David’s writing, and he will also host a new weekly video podcast that will launch later this spring. David worked as an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 22 years.

In a note to staff, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: “David’s work––his columns, his stories for us, and his many books––have made him known and acclaimed around the world. He is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace. He is an unparalleled diagnostician of the faults and weaknesses of governments, institutions, and social structures, as our readers know from such stories as “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” “Confessions of a Republican Exile,” and “How the Ivy League Broke America.”

The forthcoming podcast will explore the moral, social, and philosophical underpinnings of human decency—with a particular focus on the role that institutions play in shaping communities and ideologies. The podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University, which is also announcing today that David will be a presidential senior fellow at Yale University’s School of Global Affairs.

The Atlantic has been rapidly growing its podcast network, and this new video podcast will be the fourth to launch in the past 12 months. Last year, The Atlantic launched Galaxy Brain with Charlie Warzel and The David Frum Show, and is developing a new show with Adam Harris. The third season of Autocracy in America with Anne Applebaum is out now; The Atlantic’s flagship show is Radio Atlantic, hosted by Hanna Rosin.

Press Contact: Anna Bross | press@theatlantic.com

Late last year, industrial designer Adam Miklosi embarked on a self-directed project, creating primitive cars out of aluminum extrusions.

Here in the new year, he's seeking a role for the leftover extrusions. After spying DesignWanted's Rethink the Coat Rack competition, Miklosi came up with an idea:

"After the first ideation rounds, I made some early 3D-printed prototypes before diving deeper into render visualizations. Testing proportions, attachment logic, and the character of the hooks on real aluminium profiles."

"I'm genuinely happy with how these turned out. A bit rough, very early-stage, but already showing the balance I'm aiming for: industrial structure + playful, customizable elements. Also couldn't resist arranging them into a small, fun composition."

Competition aside, I think Miklosi could easily get a side hustle going by selling these. They remind me of something you'd see from Alessi in the '90s, back when design was fun!

The Guardian has an unpaywalled timeline of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and I find their coverage to be uniformly better than what is offered by the self-styled “paper of record.”

For people wondering whether the tRump administration will be content with the kidnapping and trial but otherwise not put troops in the country, signs are pointing toward Nope.

The United States is going to be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry after the operation to capture Maduro, Trump told Fox News on Saturday. He said: “We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.”

I’m merely an observer of history and certainly not the most astute one. But it seems that the last time the US was “very strongly involved” in a foreign nation’s resources following open hostilities, people got their hair mussed. And there’s no point speculating about what sort of fair or favorable deal this administration will try to strike with whoever winds up leading Venezuela because we know that’s not going to happen. Especially with the admin saying stuff like this.

 the stolen oil must be returned to the United States.

See also.

In a Dec. 17 social media post – around the same time sources say Trump was making a decision to greenlight the Jan. 3 military operation — Trump said the U.S. military threat to Venezuela will “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Trump aide Stephen Miller made a similar claim.

“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property,” Miller wrote on X.

Claims that “we” (white people) taught the “ignorant savages” (brown people in countries with oil including the ones that gave us advanced math and science) how to extract that oil. Therefore the brown people owe the white people money/oil is collection of words I last heard during Bush the Sequel’s America’s Excellent Iraq Adventure, II.

I can’t recall whether it was an official position, but it was certainly held by the sort of thugs who might have oozed their way into power.

At any rate, calling the nation’s decades-old decision to nationalize its oil reserves “theft” from the US sounds like a justification for taking it without compensation. I suppose the new leader might agree to whatever President Greed wants, which will be everything. But I think it unlikely that the people of Venezuela will think getting rid of Maduro is worth what that does to the economy. Which means someone will have to protect “American Property.”

As an aside, on the international stage no one is amused, including Russia.

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