[Flo Crivello, @Altimor] Americans severely underestimate how dirt poor most Europeans are. They go spend their American wages there and are amazed at the "quality of life," not realizing that they're taking the equivalent of a trip to Disneyland, and everyone around them is the staff.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome] Median size of a dwelling in every US state vs the same thing in Europe. [presumably a map or chart]

“As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This … is what we have in common. Oddly enough, many of our subjects seem to realize this more clearly than we anthropologists ourselves. In Java, for example, the people quite flatly say, “To be human is to be Javanese.”

Don't necessarily disagree with this framing (would say it differently), but I believe a large percentage of Europeans would swap their tiny apartment three miles from downtown Brussels, or Marseille, their tiny car, for a ranch house in Jacksonville beach with three cars & a yard for the kids to play in. Not sure many Americans would take up the opposite offer, other than grad students wanting a quaint experience Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my sense.

Phoenix is a large grid, of mile-long four-lane sides, with shopping plazas at the corners, and an inside of twisting single-lane roads and simple ranch homes on half-acre plots. Those residential insides are the nice parts, and showing that they’re nice is partly why I’d come to Phoenix: to highlight a version of the American Dream, which, while I might not love and isn’t necessarily “walkable,” is still very appealing to lots of people. It’s what I wrote about last week, when I cautioned that walkability doesn’t necessarily translate into livibility. [https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/so-what-makes-a-city-more-walkable ]