Cities are bastions of opportunity. They are filled with vast numbers of people meeting friends and family, visiting restaurants, museums, concert halls and sporting events, and travelling to and from jobs. Yet many of us who live in cities have occasionally been overwhelmed by the activity. At other times, we might feel ‘alone in the crowd’. For decades, the conflicting experiences of city living have led urbanites and scholars to ask: are cities bad for mental health?

WOKE UP YESTERDAY morning thinking that it was Monday and thought about getting back on track after Christmas's excess of trifles and puddings and cava and far too much food and thought about Weekend Links and workouts. Of course, that was until I realised shortly after that it was actually Sunday, and then it was »

A grid has a matter-of-fact magic, as mundane as it is marvellous. From sidewalks to spreadsheets to after-hours skyscrapers projecting geometric light against a night sky, the grid creates both order and expanse. In 1979, the art critic and historian Rosalind Krauss wrote about the ubiquity of the grid in modern art, citing the even-panelled windowpanes of Caspar David Friedrich and the abstract paintings of Agnes Martin. “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion or fiction),” Krauss wrote. It was this paradox—the promise of control and transcendence—which first drew me to the prototypically modern grid: the crossword puzzle.

TO SAY THAT it has been a strange week is an understatement (more on that later). It has been a week spent nearly entirely indoors and we’re going a bit crazy. Christmas is now only five days away and the end of the year, a mere 11. It’s strange how a year where not much happened flew by so quickly. It’s a pensive, melancholic time, for many reasons, (one being that I hate endings), but especially since it feels like there hasn’t been a proper holiday season in a very long time …

In June 2020, I attended a Black Lives Matter demonstration in north London, not far from my house. My wife had found out about it from friends who’d found out about it on Facebook. We took the kids. Well over 1,000 people went; beyond my immediate circle, I only recognised a few there. The soundsystem was poor and I couldn’t hear what was being said from the stage. We took a knee like Colin Kaepernick while raising a fist like the Black Panthers and held the pose for eight minutes – the length of time Derek Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck. Then we clapped, chatted and made our way back to our locked-down homes. I have no idea who called the demonstration. It just happened and then it was gone.

THIS PAST WEEK, we were back in London, thinking it might be the last time in a long time again that we would be able to be out and about before another national lockdown. We were also there to celebrate the holidays and two anniversaries. When we were last here, it was May, and things were only tentatively opening up again. All the pubs and restaurants were outdoor seating only, which mean it was difficult to find a table without booking the good places in advance through an app. The weather was unseasonably rainy and cold and we wondered if it had been a good decision to come …