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Atlantic
24-06-2025
- General
- Atlantic
How Did Design Become the Solution to Everything?
On the first day of a required class for freshman design majors at Carnegie Mellon, my professor stood in front of a lecture hall of earnest, nervous undergraduates and asked, 'Who here thinks that design can change the world?' Several hands shot up, including mine. After a few seconds of silence, he advanced to the next slide of his presentation: a poster by the designer Frank Chimero that read, Design won't save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck. My professor wasn't the first person to deliver such discouraging news. In 1971, the design educator Victor Papanek began his best-selling book, Design for the Real World, with a similar message. 'There are professions more harmful than industrial design,' he wrote, but 'very few.' By designing and popularizing products that 'pollute the air we breathe'—including cars, which are responsible for 'murder on a mass-production basis'—he argued, 'designers have become a dangerous breed.' But design was capable of inflicting such harm, he wrote, only because it had so much potential, and therefore also the capacity for immense good. For Papanek, it was 'the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environment (and, by extension, society and himself).' Many working designers today echo Papanek's ambivalence about the profession. In her fascinating, rigorously researched new book, The Invention of Design, the designer and educator Maggie Gram shows how the field transcended its humble origins as the mere art of decoration and became a more ambitious, and more conflicted, discipline. Designers are responsible for more things than ever before: hardware, software, services, infrastructure. Many designers aren't just trying to beautify the world; they want to make it a better place. In the process, they have tackled societal issues such as racial injustice and economic inequality, with mixed results. Design works best when it knows what it can achieve and what it can't; the history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference. Gram's book is critical of the hubris and techno-optimism that have led design thinking astray, but it is also hopeful, imagining how the discipline might eventually live up to its stated ideals. In the 19th century, designers were typically commercial artists who worked to make everyday objects more attractive to consumers. But Gram's book shows how, over the course of the 20th century, practitioners such as Eva Zeisel helped shape a new way of thinking about the profession. Born in 1906 to a highly educated Hungarian Jewish family, Zeisel became, at 18, the youngest woman to join the potters' guild of Budapest. Her first job was to make prototypes of pots to be mass-produced at a factory—a skill that brought her to Berlin and then the Soviet Union. But her career there was cut short by Stalin's Great Purge, and Zeisel moved to New York in 1938, where she taught at the Pratt Institute and designed dinnerware that was exhibited and sold at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work married Old World craftsmanship with industrial-manufacturing practices, and showed that popular modernist styles, which were often seen as rigid and circumscribed, could be executed with what Zeisel called 'real elegance.' Zeisel was one of many European émigrés who shaped American design culture. In 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art school where first-year students were given a foundation in color, form, and fundamental aesthetic principles. The school was initially funded by the German state of Thuringia, but when the government began shifting to the right in the 1920s, the Bauhaus had to find a different business model. It began to partner with companies to sell its own products, which made the curriculum more explicitly pre-professional. As Gram writes, the Bauhaus began 'using machines to mass-produce objects that worked,' including chairs, lamps, and other household items. When the school eventually closed and Gropius fled Nazi Germany for America, he brought the Bauhaus's ideas to Harvard's design school as a professor. Gropius's approach to industrial design—epitomized by the famous dictum 'Form follows function'—was enormously influential; the Bauhaus's synthesis of art, technology, and practicality shaped America's understanding of design over the following decades. In a 2003 interview, Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple, remarked that 'most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.' But, as he argued, 'it's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.' Jobs's reframing marked the culmination of a decades-long cultural shift. By the end of the 20th century, design students were typically categorized into one of two buckets: industrial designers who made physical, mass-produced products, and graphic designers who communicated information with visuals. But following the rapid rise of the technology sector during the early 21st century, many design students gravitated toward careers in that industry, where they worked on intangible products such as interfaces and software systems. As Gram writes, designers need more than just craftsmanship skills; they should 'be students of human culture.' Here, the field benefited from another kind of émigré: social scientists who, faced with a declining academic-job market, entered the tech industry instead. One contributor was Lucy Suchman, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984 with a Ph.D. in anthropology, then took a job at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center as a researcher. In an influential study, Suchman placed two successful computer scientists in a room to see whether they could, as Gram writes, use 'a brand-new, feature-rich Xerox photocopier' without issues. They couldn't. It turned out, as Gram observes dryly, that learning how to use an unfamiliar machine 'is never as simple as technologists want it to be.' Other tech companies also hired social scientists, who became a new kind of design professional: user researchers. In theory, they were meant to instill a more 'human-centered' approach to technology. In practice, however, they were pressured to solve problems quickly and prioritize profit over the ideal experience. Eventually, some designers and design educators grew to feel that the 'problems worth solving,' as Gram writes, were the 'wicked problems' of society—a term coined by the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 to include issues such as crumbling public infrastructure, education inequality, and poverty. Teachers encouraged their students to apply design to things that really mattered—not just the creation of mass-produced consumer goods. And companies such as Ideo, a design consultancy founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, helped turn design from a specialist skill into a general-purpose one, selling the concept of 'design thinking' to corporate America. Design thinking, as Ideo's CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in 2008, 'uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible.' While Ideo employed design thinking to invent user-friendly insulin pens and an updated PalmPilot, the company also suggested that its approach to identifying issues and brainstorming solutions could be applied to all kinds of problems—including the 'wicked' ones plaguing corporations, educational institutions, health care, and government. Corporate America fell in love with the idea, and Gram describes how design thinking became an almost 'spiritual movement,' with Brown's 2009 book, Change by Design, as its bible. Its influence extended around the world: In 2006, an advertising agency in Bogotá, Colombia, was asked by the government to research, prototype, and launch an ad campaign imploring a group of Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighters to demobilize. But design thinking often disappointed its disciples. Take Gram's example of Gainesville, Florida, where in the 2010s, about a third of the city's residents lived below the poverty line. In 2013, the city's mayor asked Anthony Lyons, the director of a newly formed economic-development committee, to turn the city's prospects around. Lyons looked to Silicon Valley for inspiration and hired Ideo for a two-month, $200,000 project to research how Gainesville could become a more 'competitive' city. Lyons soon became city manager, and quickly implemented Ideo's suggestions—including creating a new logo, establishing trainings for city employees in design thinking, and renaming the Department of Planning and Development the Department of Doing. These sorts of changes, Gram writes, had a 'tenuous relationship' to the real challenges facing Gainesville, one of the most racially unequal places in the country. Black residents had lower high-school-graduation rates and higher unemployment rates than white residents, and Ideo's more surface-level solutions could do little to address that reality. Lyons's eagerness to redesign Gainesville to be 'the most user friendly city in the world,' as Ideo advocated, ignored the expertise of existing city employees. There was low morale and high turnover, and when Lyons himself resigned after a few years, a resident told a local university's newspaper, 'Gainesville is not a Silicon Valley startup.' The trouble, as The Gainesville Sun 's editorial board wrote, was that Lyons, despite being an 'agent of change' in the city, failed to 'build consensus.' He didn't have a design problem to solve; he had a political problem. The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an 'extraordinary career.' No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, 'design is one of the terms that has replaced the word 'revolution'!' That might be the problem. 'Our contemporary idea of design,' Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves 'that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.' But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what's profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work. The solution, though, isn't to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like? When it comes to making the world a better place, Gram writes, 'design can contribute to that project, and it should.' In 2000, the designer Sylvia Harris helped revise the U.S. census to be more accessible and comprehensible, leading to a 2 percent higher participation rate compared with the 1990 census. This meant that more Americans, especially those from marginalized and undercounted communities, were represented. In her work, Harris exemplified a different path for the profession: one that seeks to understand the needs of the community being served and emphasizes participatory design. Designers' instincts for aesthetics, utility, and usability can play a crucial role in addressing society's 'wicked problems.' But they can't solve them alone.
Boston Globe
08-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Marina von Neumann Whitman dies at 90; carved path for women in economics
'As a woman, she will be outnumbered on the council 2 to 1, but not in terms of brains,' the president said in the Oval Office with Dr. Whitman and her family by his side. (The council's other members at the time were Herbert Stein and Ezra Solomon.) Advertisement Dr. Whitman was an academic economist by training -- she taught at the University of Pittsburgh and later at the University of Michigan -- but she alternated her work in the classroom with extensive stints in the public and corporate sectors. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Before joining the Council of Economic Advisers, she had worked for it as a staff economist and then served on the president's board overseeing price controls. In 1979, she joined General Motors as a vice president and chief economist. She later rose to become group vice president for public relations, making her one of the highest-ranking women in corporate America at the time. 'One of the things about being an economist is that you seldom get the chance to practice your profession as well as teach,' she said in her own Oval Office comments, following Nixon's. Advertisement She was the daughter of mathematician John von Neumann, a polymath who developed game theory, made critical early advances in computer science, and played a central role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II. He was one of several Hungarian Jewish emigres who worked on the Manhattan Project -- others included Leo Szilard and Edward Teller -- who came to be known, jokingly, as the Martians, for their intellectual brilliance and supposedly exotic personalities. In her 2012 memoir, 'The Martian's Daughter,' Dr. Whitman wrote that her father's immense intellectual accomplishments drove her to excel, especially as a woman in a male-dominated field like economics. Were it not for him, she wrote, 'I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations.' Marina von Neumann was born March 6, 1935, in New York City. Her parents, members of what she called 'the Jewish but highly assimilated haute bourgeoisie' of Budapest, had emigrated from Hungary in 1933, after her father received a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. They divorced when Marina was 2. Her mother, Mariette (Kovesi) von Neumann, studied economics in college and later worked as the office administrator for a science consortium. After her divorce, she married James Kuper, a physicist who became a department chair at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Marina spent long stretches living with her father, whose Princeton home became a salon and way station for some of the country's leading intellectuals. Advertisement 'I was 15 before I realized this was not the normal American way of life,' she told The New York Times in 1972. The home, she added, was always filled with 'terribly interesting people and terribly interesting conversations.' She studied government at Radcliffe College, graduating at the top of her class in 1956. That same year, she married Robert F. Whitman, who was studying for his doctorate in English at Harvard. He died in 2024. Along with their son, Malcolm, a professor of developmental biology at Harvard, she leaves her half brother, George H. Kuper, and two grandchildren. Her daughter, Laura M. Whitman, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale University, died in 2023 at 59. Marina Whitman initially thought of becoming a journalist. But her first job after college, with the Educational Testing Service, ignited an interest in economics. She wanted to attend Princeton, but at the time, its acclaimed economics department did not accept female graduate students. Instead, she studied at Columbia University. After receiving her doctorate in 1966, she became a professor at Pittsburgh, where her husband taught English. They took leaves of absence in 1972, when she joined the Council of Economic Advisers, and moved to Washington with some intention of remaining there long term. But she resigned after just a year, disillusioned by the Watergate scandal that was beginning to unfold around Nixon. Dr. Whitman spent 13 years at General Motors. After she left in 1992, she taught at the University of Michigan's business and public policy schools. A lifelong Republican, she did not put herself forward as a feminist. But she did her part to prop open the doors she had gone through, for other women to follow. Advertisement 'There is a very small group of highly visible women who have now been offered a lot of boards,' Dr. Whitman told the Times in 1984. 'What has not developed as much as I hoped is going beyond that to a second wave. When I turn down offers, I sometimes have tried to suggest other women, but people do not react well to names they haven't heard before.' This article originally appeared in
Time Magazine
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
How an Auschwitz Prisoner Saved the Lives of Twins Targeted for Nazi Medical Experiments
Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's biggest killing center, a new documentary screening on June 6 focuses on a 29-year-old prisoner who cared for young twins who were subjected to Nazi medical experiments—giving them hope in a situation that seemed completely hopeless. Narrated by Liev Schrieber, The Last Twins starts screening on June 6 at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. The documentary marking a grim milestone in World War II history happens to be on the 81st anniversary of D-Day, a turning point in the Allied forces' road to victory. The documentary features survivors who sing the praises of their guardian angel Erno 'Zvi' Spiegel, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner ordered to look after them. Spiegel's daughter, Judith Richter, also speaks in the film about the present-day lessons from her father's courageous acts. Here's what we know about the medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz and how The Last Twins tells Zvi's story. Why did Auschwitz conduct experiments on twins? Nicknamed 'the angel of death,' Josef Mengele was 'the most notorious of the Nazi doctors,' as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it. Mengele sought out twins who arrived at Auschwitz in order to subject them to medical experiments. Spiegel, a twin, was separated from his twin sister Magda, and at Auschwitz, Mengele tasked him with looking after a group of male twins and escorting them to Mengele's office for experiments. It's unclear exactly what kinds of medical experiments were performed on these boys. 'There's very little evidence of exactly what was done,' says David Marwell, author of Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death, who did not work on the documentary. The survivors in The Last Twins are among the few left. Many of the twins who were subjected to the experiments did not live to talk about it. The twin prisoners in Auschwitz did not give their consent, and the experiments were not conducted by scientific research standards. If a twin died during one of the experiments, Mengele ordered the surviving twin be executed so their bodies could be autopsied and compared. Twins may have been saved from death by the gas chamber, but many who survived the experiments ended up permanently maimed. One survivor, Ephraim Reichenberg, who appears in the doc describes how he and his brother were subjected to injections in the neck. His brother was discovered to have a beautiful singing voice, but he did not have one, and the Nazis focused experiments on their necks. A year after the war, his brother died a painful death, and in 1967, Ephraim's throat and gullet were removed. He speaks in the documentary with a voice amplifier. Spiegel, he says, 'gathered all of the young children around him and took care of them, taught them, and watched over them.' How Spiegel helped the twins While Spiegel couldn't stop the experiments, he did his best to keep the boys alive. In a place where prisoners were known by numbers tattooed to their arms, he made sure the boys called each other by their real names. If one boy found a piece of food, then he had the youngster share it with the rest of his peers so everyone could enjoy some of it. He even taught them math, history, and geography in the barracks. 'He was a father figure to us,' says survivor Tom Simon. 'We had no father there.' The documentary also features a man that Spiegel snuck in as a twin to save their lives. Gyorgy Kun says he and his brother were directed to the twin medical experiments, even though they weren't actually twins. Instead of turning them away, Spiegel changed the birthdates for the Kun brothers so that, on paper, it looked like they were born on the same day, and therefore they wouldn't be sent to the gas chambers. Mengele was never prosecuted for his crimes and lived in fear that authorities would come after him. Marwell says he didn't find 'any specific evidence that he was in any way remorseful.' Mengele fled to Brazil after the war. TIME's 1985 obituary called him "the most hated man in the world." After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel moved to the Czech city of Karlovy Vary and lived near his twin sister Magda, who also survived Auschwitz. He got married, had a child, and immigrated to Israel in 1949. LIFE magazine featured him in a 1981 article about Mengele, and surviving twins started to reach out to him. He always took their calls. He died in 1993 at the age of 78. Richter says her father used to tell his children that Nazis 'could take away your family, your house, everything, but they would never be able to take what you have learned and your knowledge.' She cites Spiegel as a reason why she pursued a career in academia and set up a program that schools young people in the basics of medicine. Now she is the co-founder and active chairperson of Medinol, a medical device company, focusing on ethical forms of medical treatment, in stark contrast to the unethical medical treatments that her father saw in Auschwitz. She hopes viewers will inspire them to act and help others. 'One person matters,' she says, explaining that she hopes that her father's story will empower people to be courageous in dark times. 'This film is not just a Holocaust film. It's a universal story about the human spirit triumphing over evil. It's a story of resilience…not just of surviving, but protecting others.'
Boston Globe
17-05-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Peter Lax, preeminent Cold War mathematician, dies at 99
Advertisement In 2005, he was the first applied mathematician to win the Abel Prize — in mathematics, the closest equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Presented in a ceremony in Oslo, Norway, the prize recognized his contributions to the field of partial differential equations, the mathematics of things that move and flow. He 'has been described as the most versatile mathematician of his generation,' the prize citation said. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Lax's engagement with the new field of electronic computing grew out of his wartime weapons research. Working with the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945-46, he had performed intricate calculations for the development of the atomic bomb. His work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University rapidly altered the trajectory of the computing field, supporting new uses of computers in the analysis of complex systems. Advertisement He played a key role in formulating government policy that bridged civilian and military computing resources, leading to the establishment of large national computing centers, which expanded the reach of supercomputers in science and engineering, paving the way for today's era of big data. In a 1989 article, Mr. Lax compared the impact of computers on mathematics 'to the role of telescopes in astronomy and microscopes in biology.' Peter David Lax was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 1, 1926, to Henry and Klara (Kornfeld) Lax, both of whom were physicians. Fascinated by mathematics, Peter was tutored in the subject as a youth by renowned mathematician Rósza Péter, a founder of recursion theory, a branch of logic that investigates which mathematical problems can be resolved by computation. Péter connected him to her community of Hungarian Jewish mathematicians, many of whom made significant contributions to midcentury mathematics. Mr. Lax was a young teenager when he demonstrated his early promise. At Péter's suggestion, he completed the problems that were being presented in Hungary's national math competition for high school graduates. He produced solutions that would have won the contest had he been old enough to enter. In December 1941, in the face of rising antisemitism in Hungary, an ally of Nazi Germany, Mr. Lax and his family fled the country, obtaining passage to the United States with the help of the U.S. consul in Budapest, a patient and friend of Henry Lax's. The family arrived as refugees in New York, where Peter Lax, by then a 15-year-old prodigy, came under the wing of other Hungarian mathematicians, who connected him to German emigre mathematician Richard Courant. At the time, Courant was blazing a new direction for applied mathematics and laying the foundation for the institute at NYU that would later bear his name. Advertisement Mr. Lax's father became Courant's physician, while Courant mentored Mr. Lax in mathematics. At 18, having already published his first math paper, Mr. Lax was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in the summer of 1945, just in time to participate in the final stages of the race to build an atomic bomb. He worked as a calculator, executing the kind of elaborate multistep computations that would later be performed by electronic computers. His group analyzed the shock waves that would enable a neutron chain reaction, creating the atomic bomb's enormously powerful explosion. He became part of a community of Hungarian mathematicians at Los Alamos that included John von Neumann and John Kemeny, both of whom would later join him on the frontiers of postwar mathematics and computing. After the war, he completed his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at NYU and was appointed assistant professor in 1949. He returned to Los Alamos in 1950 for a year and several subsequent summers to work on the next-generation hydrogen bombs. He became a full professor at NYU in 1958. The connections that Mr. Lax made at Los Alamos — to the people there, the problems they worked on and the equipment they used -- would set the agenda for early postwar computing and guide the rest of his mathematical career. In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission put Mr. Lax and several of his NYU colleagues in charge of operating an early supercomputer to calculate the risk of flooding to a major nuclear reactor if a nearby dam were sabotaged; they showed that the reactor would be safe. Advertisement His work on computing dovetailed with his contributions to the theory of hyperbolic partial differential equations, an area of research essential to understanding shock waves from bombs, as well as a wide variety of physical phenomena, from weather prediction to aerodynamic design. Among mathematicians, he was most renowned for theoretical breakthroughs that others used to analyze specific phenomena. Again and again, Mr. Lax demonstrated the theoretical richness of applied mathematics, providing, in the words of his early doctoral student Reuben Hersh, 'a singular exception to the usual mutual disrespect between these two inseparable and incompatible twins, the pure and the applied.' As Courant wrote in 1962, Mr. Lax embodied 'the unity of abstract mathematical analysis with the most concrete power in solving individual problems.' Mr. Lax's impact is suggested by the number of concepts that bear his name. They include the Lax equivalence principle, which explains when numerical computer approximations will be reliable; the Lax-Milgram lemma, which relates the interior of a system to its boundary; and Lax pairs, a milestone in understanding the motion of solitons, a kind of traveling wave related to tsunamis. With Ralph Phillips, Mr. Lax developed the Lax-Phillips semigroup in scattering theory, which explains how waves move around obstacles and shows how to use the pattern of frequencies in a wave to understand its motion. That theory yielded many uses, including the interpretation of radar signals. In 1960, Mr. Lax made his first of eight scientific visits to the Soviet Union. His exchanges with Soviet mathematicians — in which 'vodka flowed like water,' he said — led to lasting friendships and represented a warmer side of his Cold War science. Advertisement Starting in 1963, Mr. Lax directed the Courant Institute's cutting-edge computing facilities, funded by the Atomic Energy Commission. He led the institute as director from 1972-80. He also increasingly represented the mathematics profession on the national stage, culminating in his presidency of the American Mathematical Society from 1977-80. From 1980-86, Mr. Lax served on the National Science Board, which sets American research funding policies. In 1982, his 'Report of the Panel on Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering,' commonly known as the Lax Report, set a lasting agenda for academic- and military-networked research with government supercomputers. His personal life was as integrated with the Courant Institute as his professional life. His first marriage, in 1948, was to mathematician Anneli Cahn, a fellow doctoral student. After her death in 1999, he married Courant's daughter, Lori Berkowitz, the widow of another Courant Institute mathematician and principal violist for the American Symphony Orchestra. She died in 2015. In addition to his son James, Mr. Lax is survived by his stepchildren, David and Susan Berkowitz; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another son, John, was killed by a drunken driver in 1978. Mr. Lax's work bridged worlds — military and civilian, pure and applied mathematics, abstract theory and computation — reflecting a belief that the underlying math was universal. In a 2005 interview with The New York Times, he cited the fact that geometry and algebra, 'which were so very different 100 years ago, are intricately connected today.' 'Mathematics is a very broad subject,' he said. 'It is true that nobody can know it all, or even nearly all. But it is also true that as mathematics develops, things are simplified and unusual connections appear.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
Time Business News
30-04-2025
- Time Business News
16 Fun and Fascinating Facts That Will Make You Fall in Love With Budapest
Planning your next getaway? Add Budapest to the top of your list. This city has something for every kind of traveler—bubbling thermal baths, dramatic architecture, underground caves, quirky bars, paprika-infused food, and stories that go way beyond the tourist brochures. It's one of Europe's most underrated gems, and once you're there, you'll wonder why it took you so long. From steamy spas to secret tunnels, here are 16 fun, weird, and wonderful facts that will make you want to book that flight immediately. Let's start with the nightlife. Szimpla Kert, located in the Jewish Quarter, isn't just a bar—it's a cultural icon. This quirky spot was rated the #3 best bar in the world by Lonely Planet and is the top bar in Budapest. With mismatched furniture, surreal décor, hookah pipes, and dirt-cheap beer, Szimpla feels more like a wild house party in a post-apocalyptic art gallery than a typical bar. You'll find street food stalls, live music, and plenty of locals hanging out. Trust us—you'll never forget your night here. Surprise! Budapest is the result of merging Óbuda, Buda, and Pest into one city in 1873. Originally called Pest-Buda, the name was later flipped to Budapest, probably because it sounded better. The majestic Széchenyi Chain Bridge was the first to link the hilly Buda side with the flat Pest side across the Danube—and it's still one of the most iconic sights in the city. If you're thinking of exploring both sides of this vibrant city, take a look at some top-rated Budapest hotels to find the perfect spot to stay, whether you're into boutique charm or luxury relaxation. The maddening little puzzle cube that's stumped millions? You can thank Budapest for that. The Rubik's Cube was created by Ernő Rubik, a local architect and professor. It became a worldwide craze in the 1980s and remains one of the best-selling puzzles of all time. And yes, most of us still can't solve it. The Dohány Street Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest in the world. It seats 3,000 people and was built between 1854 and 1859 in a stunning Moorish Revival style inspired by Spain's Alhambra. It's not just a place of worship—it's a moving monument to Hungarian Jewish history. You wouldn't guess it from the shiny modern stations, but Budapest's metro system is the oldest in continental Europe, operating continuously since 1896. Only London's is older. Also, a pro tip: if you're 65+ and an EU citizen, you ride public transportation for free—trams, buses, even riverboats. After the fall of communism, many buildings in Budapest were left abandoned. Locals began transforming them into 'ruin pubs'—creative, gritty spaces filled with found furniture, graffiti, plants, and weird art. These spots became hubs for artists, musicians, and partiers. Now, they're a must-see feature of Budapest nightlife. Hungarian is one of the hardest languages in the world, and it's not even Indo-European. Unlike its neighbors, it shares no real roots with Slavic, Germanic, or Romance languages. Its closest relatives are Finnish and Estonian, but even those links are distant. Linguists still puzzle over its mysterious origins. Both St. Stephen's Basilica and the Hungarian Parliament Building stand exactly 96 meters tall. This height isn't random—it's a symbolic reference to the year 896, when the Magyars founded the Hungarian state. No other building in the city is allowed to be taller. In Hungary, paprika isn't just a spice—it's a lifestyle. Locals reportedly consume over 500 grams of it per year, per person. While the pepper it comes from was imported centuries ago, paprika was refined and turned into a national treasure in Budapest. Visit the markets—you'll see it in every shade of red. Before Budapest became Hungary's political heart, the capital was Esztergom, a charming city on the Danube that still holds spiritual significance. Today, it's best known for its impressive basilica and as the birthplace of the country's first king, St. Stephen. Thanks to geothermal activity, Budapest is built over more than 200 caves and tunnels. One of the most fascinating is the Budavári Labirintus, a 6-mile-long cave system beneath Castle Hill. It's been a prehistoric shelter, medieval prison, WWII hospital, and Cold War command post. Today, you can tour it—torchlight recommended. Budapest is rightly called the 'City of Spas.' It boasts the highest number of thermal springs of any capital city. Iconic bathhouses like Széchenyi, Gellért, and Király use mineral-rich waters said to have healing properties. And in summer? Join a 'Sparty'—a full-on DJ party in a 100-year-old bath. Inside Gellért Hill, you'll find the Sziklatemplom, or Rock Church. Founded in 1926 by Pauline monks, the chapel is literally carved into the side of the mountain. It's one of Budapest's lesser-known religious sites, offering a quiet contrast to the city's more grandiose churches. The Hungarian Parliament Building is the third-largest of its kind in the world. And it's immaculately maintained—thanks to a team of 150 people who clean, repair, and restore everything from roof tiles (scrubbed twice a year!) to flags that are constantly inspected and replaced. Now that's attention to detail. As you wander through the city, look closely at older buildings. You might notice small round marks—those are bullet holes from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when citizens rose up against Soviet oppression. Many of these scars remain untouched as a quiet tribute to the city's fight for freedom. In the Buda hills lies the tomb of Gül Baba, a 16th-century Turkish dervish who died in 1541. His octagonal tomb, built between 1543 and 1548, became a place of Islamic pilgrimage and is considered the northernmost holy site in the Islamic world. It's a peaceful spot with stunning views of the city. Whether you're soaking in a thermal bath, dancing in a ruin pub, exploring caves, or reading bullet holes on centuries-old walls, Budapest reveals itself layer by layer. It's a city of contrasts—elegant and gritty, modern and ancient, relaxing and electrifying—all at once. So next time you're deciding between the usual European hotspots, remember: Budapest doesn't just tick boxes—it breaks the mold. Need help planning your itinerary? I've got you covered. TIME BUSINESS NEWS
