I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a screen. I have a mentally taxing 50+ hour-a-week slide-making job that also requires me to travel three weeks out of the month (on average). In my scarce free time on the weekends, when I’m grounded in St. Louis, I’m often anxious to get out of the house and away from computers and TVs. As we’re increasingly atomized into our comfortable homes, big cars, and zany online personas, it feels important to habitually disconnect and see the world for what it is—in other words, to touch grass.

My wife and I spent a week in London in May. Of all the international destinations we could’ve picked for a weeklong vacation, it’s not the most exotic or adventurous—transatlantic flights are as comfortable as they’ve ever been, and few cities are better at accommodating American tourists. But still, having traveled little since 2020, it was exciting to be somewhere other than the US.

On Tuesday, April 4th, St. Louis has completed a long-overdue right-sizing of the wards that comprise the Board of Aldermen, shrinking the city’s legislative branch from 28 members to 14. This week’s election was “Aldergeddon”—an unforgiving set of showdowns between groups of incumbent aldermen who were redrawn into the same ward, in addition to the usual contests between incumbents and prospective newcomers. Few had the fortune to avoid a challenge in the most consequential aldermanic election in the city’s modern history.

In Houston, there are only three topographic features: the bayous, the freeways, and the skyscrapers. The concept of a natural vantage point from which you can view the city—like the infamous view of Los Angeles from the Santa Monica Mountains—was largely foreign to me as a kid. I’d only catch brief glimpses of the broader cityscape when ascending one of the region’s stacked interchanges.