You're an architect who comes from a family of builders. Those two professions don't always get along. Did having a foot in both camps help you? My father told me, "Why ever would you want to be an architect? You can be a builder!" A builder is like a little god, somebody who does things, doesn't just draw things. Since then, I've never betrayed the idea that architecture starts with construction. Architecture is the art of making good, solid, safe ...

Like other ethnic groups before them, American blacks are steadily climbing the political ladder, winning more state, local and national offices each election. Some 90 black mayors are now serving in U.S. cities and towns, including Newark and Gary. That is not surprising, because those cities have black majorities. But last week brought the most dramatic evidence yet of black political progress. Los Angeles, the nation's third largest city, elected its first black mayor, although the Negro population is a ...

With the exception of Madame Defarge, the vengeful knitter of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, needlework has never been the most revolutionary of pursuits. Slow, laborious and meditative, it's everything contemporary culture is not. But recently knitting — and its even squarer cousin, crocheting — has gotten something of a rebellious name around town. That name is yarn bombing. Yarn bombers take their craft to the streets, stitching cozies for bike racks, stop signs and sculptures. They knit ...

At first glance, the election of Nigeria's incumbent President, Goodluck Jonathan, who took nearly 60% of the votes cast, signals more of the same. Jonathan's victory means another term for the country's dominant People's Democratic Party , giving it an unbroken four-term hold on power since the return of democracy in 1999. Since Jonathan is a Christian southerner, his win will rankle northern Muslims, so the Muslim-Christian violence that plagues Nigeria will continue. In fact, the latest bouts, ...

Syria could very well learn its fate this Friday. According to a source from the country with close ties to the regime, if large-scale demonstrations break out after midday prayer in Syria's two largest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, the regime will be faced with a stark choice: either crack down with unlimited violence, or meet the demonstrators' demands. In either case, Syria is looking into an abyss. The regime is in uncharted waters. In 1982 President Hafez Assad, ...

The world got the shock it had been waiting for. But to the U.S. the shock was cushioned by the dead of night; the news came in the hours when the soberest of men are drunken with sleep. Perhaps never was such big news heard by so few. When the nation woke up, the great fact was hours old. Over the quiet American cities and the somnolent farms a bombers' moon shone through the cool June night. At 12:37 a.m. ...

Just before noon on the morning of Sept. 1, 1923, a massive earthquake shook Japan's Kanto Plain, hitting the busy industrial cities of Tokyo and Yokohama. The quake leveled buildings and sent cooking stoves tumbling to the ground. Fanned by typhoon winds off Tokyo Bay, the flames spread across the flattened landscape, raining ash on evacuees. Rumors spread that Koreans were looting and thousands were massacred in retribution. By the time the Kanto Plain stopped seething, at ...

India and Pakistan blame each other's spies for just about everything that goes wrong. If there's an outbreak of plague or a riot, it's the work of the sinister "foreign hand." Indians are certain, for instance, that Pakistan's secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, masterminded the December attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. Do they have any concrete evidence? "Zilch," concedes an Indian official. "Quite honestly, we only know they are involved by implication." Equally, the Pakistanis ...

Hundreds of residents of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou took to the streets on Monday to protest plans to build a trash incinerator in their neighborhood. In front of the municipal headquarters for one of China's largest cities, it was an unusually prominent place for a civic demonstration. And rarely has a local Chinese demonstration been so conspicuous online, where activists posted photos and comments about events as they unfolded. Those messages were then relayed to a broader audience on social networking sites like ...

The shutdown of a major artery linking the California cities of San Francisco and Oakland sent area officials scrambling overnight to develop plans to ease congestion for Wednesday morning's rush hour.