When Alma Dickson slipped on an icy sidewalk in Dallas, Texas, she knew she was hurt. But she wasn’t sure that she could pay for the medical care she needed. The year was 1929 and Dickson, a schoolteacher, didn’t make enough money to pay for x-rays and treatment on her own. But Dickson had recently signed up for something new: A plan under which she paid a monthly premium in exchange for a promise of care at a local Dallas hospital. Dickson went, had her broken ankle set, and left without paying a penny.

Now that we’re a full week past the initial high-speed rail announcement, we’ve taken the time to resurvey some of the elements of this massive investment. Demand is one of those elements and it’s critical to projecting ridership.

Yesterday’s release of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index has economists—and probably the Obama administration—on edge. The reason: an apparent softening of demand in October, which translated into weak home price growth across the 20 markets that the index tracks. That followed stronger, more widespread price growth in the summer months. The news has stoked fears of a “double dip” in house prices and the resulting havoc it might wreak in the mortgage market.

Like the economy itself, though, what you make of U.S. home prices depends on where you look. The latest Case-Shiller data portray an eclectic collection of metropolitan housing markets, experiencing divergent trends in recent months. The 20 metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller seem to break down into five types:

Consistent recovery. The three big coastal California metro areas—San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, along with Phoenix and Detroit, posted price gains in October, following at least three consecutive months of price growth. Prices in San Francisco were up a considerable 12 percent from their trough in April 2009.

James Gardner, formerly the architecture critic of the New York Sun, now writes on culture for several publications.

To put the matter politely, presidential libraries tend not to inspire very good architecture. One generalization that can be made about the twelve libraries already in existence is that they tend to err on the side of dullness, like the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda and the Bush 41 Library in Texas. And when the architects reach for edginess, they come up with a tame composite of all the newest clichés of the moment; consider the brutalism of LBJ’s library or the drab curtainwalls in the building that honors Gerald Ford. The good side of that equation is that, as architectural typologies go, these libraries are rarely downright awful. Also, because they usually inhabit the outskirts of cities, they are able to expand horizontality over a fairly generous allotment of land.

A few days ago, some preliminary plans were unveiled for the George W. Bush Library, to be built on the campus of Southern Methodist University in University Park, near Dallas. (Click here for a slideshow of the library.) To judge from the renderings, this new project, which will also house the George W. Bush Policy Institute and the offices of the George W. Bush Foundation, is revealingly different from its immediate predecessor, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. There is a hard-edged and unapologetic modernity to the Clinton Library, designed by Richard Olcott of the New York-based Polshek Partnership. Though some (including Clinton himself) have compared this long and rectangular structure to a double-wide trailer, with all its unsavory associations, the building still achieves a certain elegance, presence, and functionality.

It is surely not accidental that the new Bush Library is to be designed by Robert A. M. Stern, also of New York. Whether Stern is or is not conservative himself, the contextualism he represents has endeared him to people who incline towards a certain establishmentarian traditionalism. The dean of the Yale School of Architecture, he is one of the few living architects to earn the respect of his colleagues by working in an historicist, or as he would have it, “contextualist” idiom. In practice this means that—a few modernist buildings aside—he and his colleagues opt for a largely classical articulation of structure that usually results in a good deal of columns and red brick.

With a just-released Brookings report suggesting that high speed rail (HSR) could mitigate excessive congestion at airports, it would be nice to know if and where rail is a viable investment. The Harvard economist Ed Glaeser sparked a useful debate on the merits of high speed rail with a few recent posts at Economix over at The New York Times.

Glaeser concluded that HSR was not likely to be an efficient investment, but, as with any analysis, examining the assumptions is key.

Though Glaeser’s core approach is sound, if we tweak two of his assumptions ever so slightly--in a more realistic direction--we see that the net benefits go from negative to positive. I’ll focus on just those aspects of Glaeser’s analysis which merit criticism: the interest rate and the costs per passenger.

Fox and MSNBC have been airing a freeway chase in the Dallas area for the better part of the last two hours. As a friend writes:

Man, those guys know what people want on a Friday afternoon.