How to 'Live Slow' in the City That Never Stops

My husband and I recently moved back to Washington, D.C., after a three-year assignment in Beijing. We lived an uncluttered life there, bringing only some kitchen essentials, clothes, and a few pieces of furniture. But now we’ve moved back home and unpacked our household items from where they had been stored—unneeded, unwanted, unnecessary—for three years. There are comforter sets we haven’t used in 15 years, pictures in cracked frames, and enough scented candles to light a church.

So the timing of William Powers’ new book, New Slow City, could not have been better. The book, a memoir of a time when Powers and his wife tried “living simply in the world’s fastest city” (New York, but that’s because he hasn’t seen Beijing), explains how the couple sold off, threw out, and gave away 80 percent of their possessions and moved to a “micro apartment” of 340 square feet. The place was so small that anyone who wanted to sit on the toilet had to leave the bathroom door open. The kitchen counter was four inches by eight inches.