KunstlerCast in the News

Articles and notable blog posts about the KunstlerCast

My Parking Problem

One of the best points was raised by show host, Duncan Crary: when you build massive surface parking lots around box stores, the stores are so distant from one another people won’t walk between them and drive instead. You wind up with a situation where you have to double or triple your parking allotment because every shopper needs multiple spots just to get from store to store.

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Do New Technologies Hinder Sustainability?

As design becomes more individualized, with technologies such as rapid prototyping and CNC laser cutting gaining in popularity, a recent discussion with James Howard Kunstler made me question the sustainability of technological advances. In KunstlerCast #85, "The last major renovation of Manhattan," posted 10.22.09, he voices suspicion about what will happen to the new generation of buildings when they reach the end of their "design life." He claims that high-tech buildings are made of exotic, modular materials fabricated with soon-to-be outdated technology. In the future, components will either be hard to get, unavailable, no longer made, or too expensive to repair. Buildings of this generation will not be able to be subjected to adaptive re-use.

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Kunstler: LA Almost Completely Hopeless

James Kunstler came back, people. He came back to LA even though he thinks the city is hopeless and tragic and Kazakhstanish! In this week's KunstlerCast, the anxiety attack-generating urbanist discusses his recent trip to Los Angeles, and can you believe he had one nice thing to say?

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Can Prophets of Doom Awaken Us from Comfortable Lifestyles?

The person I have been reading and listening to lately is James Howard Kunstler. After reading his impressive fictional account of post-apocalyptic America called "A World Made by Hand," I have been drawn into some of his other nonfiction works such as "The Long Emergency," which discusses the history and dangers of our reliance upon peak oil; "The Geography of Nowhere," a social commentary and criticism of suburban sprawl; and more recently, his weekly podcast with host Duncan Crary.

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Technology and Planning

Recently, Jim and Duncan fused two of the best internet-based technologies together to create a truly unique product: a virtual walking tour of Paris. The two writers walk and talk listeners through Google’s Street View version of Paris.

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Programming for pod people

Kunstler and Crary are unlikely podcasters. Kunstler, for one, often warns of technology's dubious benefits and our overdependence on its pleasures. And Crary, a 30-year-old former newspaper reporter, doesn't own a television and still uses a rotary phone. He doesn't even own an iPod.

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The American Nightmare

Two weeks after the bailout heard round the world, and with three weeks to go until one of the most anticipated presidential elections in American history, journalist-turned-novelist James Howard Kunstler’s got a lot to say. He loves sermonizing about the cause-effect relationship between suburban sprawl and everything from obesity to American dependence on oil. And he’s saying it all via the Web, through a weekly podcast that offers some of the smartest, most honest urban commentary around—online or off.

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James Kunstler insists suburbs are done for

This spring, Kunstler, who is probably best known for his 1993 book, “The Geography of Nowhere," added a locally produced podcast to air his views. The KunstlerCast, as it’s been dubbed, lets him discuss everything from peak oil to “the end of suburbia."

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A funny tragedy

Author James Howard Kunstler is podcasting a funny weekly talk show about “the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.

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James Howard Kunstler Spares No One in New "KunstlerCast"

Billed as "a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl," the KunstlerCast delivers the goods, with inspired rants on a variety of subjects related to American places (and non-places) and the coming peak oil reality.

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