What applies in urban design applies in many other fields as well—politics, certainly, but also aspects of medical practice and the arts. Anton Chekhov, whose thoughts on “pluses” we met a few pages ago, took this human-first approach in his work both as a physician and as a writer. His short stories, especially, are humanistic in the close attention they pay to the events (or quiet non-events) from people’s everyday lives: moments of love or heartbreak, journeys, deaths, boring days. His views on religion and morality were also those of a humanist: he disliked dogma and was skeptical about
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