I'm sorry for vandalizing your schoolhouse.

This happened in 1985, when I was a freshman at Red Bank Regional High School. Red Bank Regional as you know, draws from the towns of Shrewsbury, Red Bank, Union Beach and Little Silver, where I lived. It was fall, not too long after school had started, and we kids from different towns were still getting to know each other. I was on the soccer team with a guy named Scott who lived right across the street from the Shrewsbury elementary school. Scott's mom went out a lot, and his red-walled kitchen became a place where groups of 14 year olds would gather to [...]

Now households spend (in the suburbs) 1/4 of their income on transportation or (in the cities) more than 1/10th. This is, in many ways, where everything went wrong, writes Christopher Leinberger in The Atlantic: "In the early 20th century, every town of more than 5,000 people was served by streetcars, even though real household income was one-third what it is today. A hundred years ago, the average household spent only 5 percent of its income on transportation. How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way."

Dear owner of the white house at the corner of Northvale and Southvale Avenues in Little Silver, New Jersey,

I'm sorry for throwing rocks at your house.