links for 2009-08-09

Moses and Jacobs clashed during the 1950s and ’60s over three of the huge public works projects Moses tried to force on Manhattan. ...

There was his plan to build a four-lane highway through the middle of Washington Square Park. Another project would have razed 14 blocks in the heart of Greenwich Village under the guise of urban renewal. There was also a plan to plunge a 10-lane elevated superhighway, to be called the Lower Manhattan Expressway, through SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

Each of these projects is, from today’s vantage point, clearly insane; each would have had cataclysmic effects on the quality of life in Manhattan. But their flaws were less obvious to many at the time. It took an accidental activist, Jacobs, and her ability to marshal popular support and political will, to stop them. The battles over all three projects form the spine of “Wrestling With Moses.”

Blog post debunking the Mashable report on Nielsen's latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don't Tweet.

FT.com executives are considering introducing a pay-as-you-read model loosely based on Apple’s iTunes to increase its digital revenues further. FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw told paidContent:UK in an interview that the site is “exploring the possibility of pay-per-view” and could introduce some form of micropayment model within 12 months, as long as it’s easy for readers to pay and at the right price.

A leading authority on type, Mike Parker is convinced that William Starling Burgess created the font we now know as Times New Roman