Lewis McCrary

[Landon @landon20s]

Data centers should look cool

The beautiful Lakeside Technology Center in Chicago’s South Loop is the largest data center in the city

Once an active printing plant, this historic building has found new life

Quite poetic

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@GoodRichesBooks @EconTalker The World of Yesterday is such an amazing, underrated, and somewhat forgotten book.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@aaron_renn Totally underrated for sure.

[John Hudson @John_Hudson]

Asked why reporters had been instructed to lower the window shades on the plane, Trump said that it was “because you’re probably on a dangerous flight."

“But if I go, you go. Right?" Trump added. “Perhaps someday you want to change professions”

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@bobbyfijan @Cobylefko @AustinTunnell @mspringut The brickwork is really stunning for a new building.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@StatisticUrban Of course it makes sense Manhattan would be so much narrower by comparison, but for some reason I'm surprised. Must be all the manmade canyons in Manhattan changing one's perception. (Though when one runs Bay to Breakers, you never forget all the terrain of the peninsula.)

[Lynn Becker @LynnBecker]

Hearing sirens throughout the city (the usual first Tuesday of the month 10:00 am test) reminded me that today, August 4th, 2026, is the day Ray Bradbury wrote we were all going to die,

https://t.co/rSVpUgOVpD

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@boys_nicholas @Telegraph For one year we resided about a two-minute walk from Newington Green, Islington. I doubt we will ever live again in such a perfect communal space.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@binarybits @adamconner You probably need more divisions of NJ here. Alexandria=Hoboken. Arlington=Jersey City. And while I initially thought of Hoboken for the Hill, I'd probably put UWS there. Or the Village?

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@bobbyfijan It changes your life.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@aaron_renn North Carolina colleges apparently set to weather the storm of enrollment decline.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@mnolangray Their management really is amazing. Chick-fil-a is similar -- interestingly both wear their Christianity on their sleeve.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

You win a Pulitzer and are feted by the president at the White House. But you still take time to answer unexpected phone calls from non-academic, unknown Americans with questions about the Constitution.

What a guy, Gordon Wood.

[Bob Elder @southernphd]

I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him.

In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over.

Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed.

When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye.

She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession.

As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him.

Rest in peace, professor.

[Joshua Claybourn @JoshuaClaybourn]

On Sunday, my friend Gordon Wood was struck and killed in a car accident. Gordon taught history at Brown Univ. and was among the most accomplished historians America has produced. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and his earlier book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 took the 1970 Bancroft Prize. He also received the National Humanities Medal.

He was, in my view, the finest historian of America's founding—which makes it all the sadder that he did not live to see the nation's 250th birthday. His reputation reached popular culture, too. Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting invokes him by name in the famous bar scene, accusing a Harvard student of simply "regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about [...] the pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization."

I feel fortunate to have collaborated with Gordon on several projects. In a 2019 anthology I compiled, he wrote an essay on the possibility of a shared American narrative. He centered his argument on equal rights as "the most radical and most powerful ideological force" the Revolution unleashed. "This powerful sense of equality is still alive and well in America," he wrote, "and despite all of its disturbing and unsettling consequences, it is what makes us one people."

When I needed jacket blurbs for my new book Lincoln's Compass, coming out this November, I turned to Gordon. The fit was natural: the book argues that Abraham Lincoln took the Declaration's claim that "all men are created equal" as his guiding moral compass—and that he refocused the nation on that claim. Gordon, ever the gentleman, offered generous praise.

He was, in many respects, the dean of American historians. He will be very hard to replace.

[Hayden @the_transit_guy]

But you’re the crazy one if you think we should have trains between these neighboring metros…

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

Ah yes, storing one's vehicle in peace and with meditative quiet is such an amenity.

[Peter Meijer @PeterMeijer]

If a household can get by on one car bc there’s affordable market rate housing close to jobs or transit, that is a huge ($10K annual) cost savings for families.

Solution is low-cost gentle density closer to urban cores without burdening taxpayers.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@JATompkins The one-way pattern is definitely the way.

U.S. engineers overbuild these things.

Here is my favorite neighborhood like this (where I lived), Newington Green, Islington, London. Safe enough we let our relatively young kids cross the street alone, w/ 1000+ buses a day passing.

[Lewis McCrary @LewisMcCrary]

@aaron_renn Looks like Whitestown, I65.

[Hayden @the_transit_guy]

If buses could run fully autonomously, it would vastly change the economic calculus of running transit in places that make little sense today.