Among the architectural delights of older cities are row houses: tall, slender homes that stand shoulder to shoulder along city streets. This most elegant of urban housing styles is coming back, but with two differences.

In New York, it's the governor, the Assembly speaker and the Senate president who decide all the state's crucial policy questions.

Car-sharing companies come to undergrads' aid.

Policy makers are demanding unified databases, but mixing and matching data are more difficult than they think.

Response time is the easiest but not necessarily the best measure of performance.