Atlanta is the seventh most dangerous city overall. It is the fourth most dangerous among the 208 cities of its size (100-500k).

City Crime Rankings by Population Group

The last two elections have seen the fewest incumbents defeated by challengers in all of American history - four in 2002 and five in 2004. In 2004, the average margin of victory for House incumbents was 40 percentage points.

The result is a coordinated political apparatus skilled at designing and presenting even unpopular policies so that they don't set off alarm bells.

Consider a GOP tactic that has come to be called "catch and release." After the leadership has assured itself that a controversial bill will pass, moderate Republicans are released to cast highly publicized votes of "conscience." This is one reason why so many big bills end up magically squeaking through with no votes to spare.

The Center No Longer Holds

Looks as if it may be time to stop mouthing the alt-rocker Ben Folds's song lyrics, "There's always someone cooler than you," and let out a round of huzzahs for the glamour-averse, straight-arrow, speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-brain gang.

Authentically Unhip

In the turn of an instant I went away from youth. Being young I had needed judgment to make myself distinct; because honesty was the way to judgment, I said whatever came to me, thinking the speed and plenty of my words made them true. I'd confused honesty with expedience.

And the way to the future was illuminated. From now on the task would no longer be separation and difference, no longer the sculpturing of a self to be distinct from other selves. From now on the task would be to find happiness in a crowd.

The Unwhole Truth

Watch all of this video. It's astounding.

Living Cornstarch

"The serious novel may be in serious decline," he said, asking rhetorically how many in the audience enjoy reading "an egregiously cruel review" of a serious novel more than trying to appreciate the art involved in creating such a work. The purpose of the serious novel, he said, is "to enter one's life, even alter it," but too often such works are in opposition to "the needs of the marketplace."

Garrison Keillor, the host of the ceremony at the New York Marriott Marquis, noted that it was taking place just before another "Harry Potter" film would open in theaters. "Most of us have stood in Barnes & Noble," he said, "and opened a Harry Potter book, read a few pages and said: 'I could have done that. I could have done that while doing all the other things that I do. Why didn't I?'"

On Decline

I heard a good chunk of this in the car today. It was one of those sitting-in-the-parking-lot moments where you just can't turn off the radio. You may want to start out with part 1, instead.

In January, 2002, the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, spoke at Georgetown University. There he urged Afghan-Americans, especially young ones, to move back to Afghanistan.

It's possible that the very first teenager to heed his invitation was Hyder Akbar, seventeen, from Concord, California. In the summer of 2002, he travelled with his father to live in their home country.

As luck would have it, he met a radio producer named Susan Burton before he left, and she gave him a tape recorder to take along. This show is devoted to his extraordinary recordings.

This American Life | Come Back to Afghanistan

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings' facades.

These are amazing photographs. I wish I could go to the exhibition.

MICHAEL WOLF

The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Africa last weekend.

The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, installed as a part of its defense systems. Earsplitting "bangs" were directed by trained security personnel toward the pirates. The military version is a 45-pound, dish-shaped device that can direct a high-pitched, piercing tone with a tight beam. Its shrill tone is compared to that of smoke detectors, only much louder. It can be as loud as about 150 decibels, while smoke alarms are about 80 to 90 decibels.

Cruise ship attacked by pirates used sonic weapon

From the Foreign Affairs review:

This is a pathbreaking study of how historically, Japanese personal networks, both vertical and horizontal, operated to establish powerful norms of beauty, propriety, and good manners, which in turn gave a distinctive dimension to Japanese political behavior. The powerful, and those aspiring to power, had to take seriously group participation in composing poems (haikai) according to rigorously defined standards; they had to display refinement in reacting to art and music, elegance in carrying out ordinary tasks such as pouring tea, and exact discipline in their dress and social manners. It is standard in most cultures to associate dignity with authority, but the Japanese carried the linkage of aesthetics and power well beyond mere dignity. Ikegami, a sociologist, traces the evolution of the various strands of Japanese aesthetic standards as they developed in the key cities where government officials and merchant leaders interacted. The result is a rich and detailed cultural history from medieval times to the Meiji period.

From the excerpt:

When networks based on aesthetic activities intersected the rapidly expanding social, political, and economic networks of the Tokugawa period, a set of unforeseen complex social and cultural dynamics emerged in Japanese society.

The rise of aesthetic Japan is not simply the story of elite intellectuals who created a national myth. Rather, it was the accumulative effect of largely unplanned actions of originally unrelated people who began to network with each other. They did this in order to search for ways of socializing with each other and, in doing so, to trespass feudal boundaries and limitations.

The central focus of this book is the fluid dynamics and unexpected consequences of what might be called “the Tokugawa network revolution.” As I see it, a critical moment of cultural history in any society occurs when communicative networks suddenly expand in scale, density, and complexity. The resulting patterns of communication influence both the form and the content of the discourse conveyed through the networks. The kinds of cultural resources that are available at the time of network expansion will determine the range of content in the resulting cultural identities of that society. Thus, the extension of a society’s communicative networks and the alteration of its cognitive maps are reciprocally influential.

Bonds of Civility