Late 2014, when I was a graduate student at NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress, I wrote a long essay trying to make sense of something that felt genuinely exciting and slightly overhyped at the same time: the idea that cities had become legible to science in some new way. Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt had published their scaling law work. Michael Batty had written "The New Science of Cities." Santa Fe Institute researchers were finding power law relationships in urban data that ...