John Lanchester:

The general public's first sustained look at Richard Fuld came when he testified to Congress in the aftermath of his bank's destruction. His strange and strong affect was immediately apparent: a man who gave the impression of having to fight very hard, at all times, to rein in a powerful feeling of anger. He looked angry on the way in, he looked angry on the way out, he looked angry when he was offering a non-apology for what had happened, and he looked angry when Congressman Henry Waxman was asking him if it was true he had taken $480 million in compensation out of the collapsed company in the years since 2000. To many viewers, Fuld also looked like what Wall Street would look like if it allowed its mask to slip: arrogant, furious at criticism and perceived slights, and so far gone in its own sense of embattled entitlement that it seemed to have lost touch with reality.

Cory Doctorow:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ...

Richard Fuld, on short sellers:

I want to reach in, rip out their heart and eat it before they die.

A banker:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Lanchester:

The official rules of the market are different from what actually happens.

You can tell a man is serious when he uses the most threatening, the most gravitas-laden word in the modern lexicon: 'appropriate'.

Judith Hertog:

I love the word "rectify" when I'm angry. It's so proper and so obscene at the same time!

Lanchester:

For the free-marketers, the idea of endless bail-outs was just so obscene that the temptation to walk the walk of market discipline would somewhere, sometime, have proved too great to resist. Lehman did not create the reality of Too Big to Fail, it merely exposed it to general view. There was a brief moment when the general horror at the new state of affairs seemed likely to lead to change; but as stock markets and liquidity have recovered, that moment is receding, and we seem to be settling back into the status quo ante, with a few cosmetic changes about bonuses. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills.

The Shoveller:

We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.

Bankocracy

Jon Lee Anderson:

Twenty years ago, there were said to be 300 favelas in Rio. Ten years ago, the number had climbed to 600. No one knows exactly how many favelas there are today, but it is estimated that more than 1,000 exist.

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

One young fish to another:

What the hell is water?

Donald Rumsfeld:

Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday -- or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory: Where do things stand today when compared to what they were five years ago?

Alfredo Sirkis:

Nobody wants to make revolution any more. What these people with the guns want today is their immediate share of the consumption culture.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

A man who knows his place:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Susan Signe Morrison:

Filth in all its manifestations -- material (including privies, dung on fields, and as alchemical ingredient), symbolic (sin, misogynist slander, and theological wrestling with the problem of filth in sacred contexts) and linguistic (a semantic range including dirt and dung) -- helps us to see how excrement is vital to understanding the Middle Ages.

Seth Kugel:

That's not grime you're seeing, it's historical charm.

Michelle Gillmartin:

The world is full of things in need of embellishment.

Roy Wadia:

At first glance, Rocinha is just another crowded neighborhood. Look again.

Jello:

Go and live in the favela ...

John Rapley:

As states recede and the new medievalism advances, the outside world is destined to move increasingly beyond the control -- and even the understanding -- of the new Rome. The globe's variegated informal and quasi-informal statelike activities will continue to expand, as will the power and reach of those who live by them. The new Romans, like the old, might not enjoy the consequences.

From the photo gallery:

BOPE is a small group of well-trained officers infamous for their brutality. They are renowned for not carrying handcuffs.

It's Like The Middle Ages

Ruth Simon And James R. Hagerty:

23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater.

Decius:

Imagine if they all walked.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Brent T. White:

Despite reports that homeowners are increasingly "walking away" from their mortgages, most homeowners continue to make their payments even when they are significantly underwater. This article suggests that most homeowners choose not to strategically default as a result of two emotional forces:

1) the desire to avoid the shame and guilt of foreclosure; and
2) exaggerated anxiety over foreclosure's perceived consequences.

Moreover, these emotional constraints are actively cultivated by the government and other social control agents in order to encourage homeowners to follow social and moral norms related to the honoring of financial obligations - and to ignore market and legal norms under which strategic default might be both viable and the wisest financial decision. Norms governing homeowner behavior stand in sharp contrast to norms governing lenders, who seek to maximize profits or minimize losses irrespective of concerns of morality or social responsibility. This norm asymmetry leads to distributional inequalities in which individual homeowners shoulder a disproportionate burden from the housing collapse.

Fiserv:

The Fiserv Case-Shiller Home Price Index forecasts that average single-family home prices will fall another 11 percent over the next twelve months, with declines expected in about 90 percent of the more than 350 metro areas tracked by Fiserv.

Mike Shedlock:

There is no good reason to assume home prices will rebound before 2012, and in fact prices might fall for much longer.

In the meantime, most Option-ARM holders are only making the minimum payment with negative amortization increasing monthly. When those loans do recast, anyone in their right mind will hand over the keys.

Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis

David Dobbs:

Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It's one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications.

Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.

Jay Belsky:

They don't see the upside, because they don't look for it.

Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Malcolm Gladwell:

The Cezannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Seth Stevenson:

Fascinating anecdotes can, just by themselves, make you feel like you've really learned something.

Ker Than:

History suggests that the line between creativity and madness is a fine one, but a small group of people known as schizotypes are able to walk it with few problems and even benefit from it.

Bradley Folley:

Creativity at its base is associative. It's taking things that you might see and pass by every day and using them in a novel way to solve a new problem.

The Science of Success

Elliot Gerson:

Many thought a silver lining of last year's financial crisis -- or from the populist rage that flared against Wall Street excess and to profits born not from creativity but from leverage -- would be that earnings differentials would return from obscene to merely enormous levels, if not to the very generous multiples that had long been adequate to fuel a vibrant economy. Well, the hyper-bonuses are back -- astonishingly having been made even easier to achieve with taxpayers socializing the downside risks. And the crisis? What crisis?

So how many more of America's young and brightest will ask themselves what kind of chumps they are to give up the chance to earn 100 or 500 times as much as their mentors, their doctors, their favorite professors, their idols and heroes?

Decius:

These are intelligent people, our best and brightest, who faithfully represent the best interests of everyone in our country.

The best and brightest should be running at full speed at this point. The question is into what?

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Vanessa Grigoriadis:

The meritocracy wasn't supposed to work this way.

A banker:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Cory Doctorow:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ...

The Siren Song of The Street

Jeffrey Kaplan:

The machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take.

By 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979.

We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.

The comfort of consumption:

Lisa: Hey, Tubby! Want another Pop Tart, Tubby?

Bart: I'm comfortable with the way I am.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys?

To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming?

Is there an app for that?

Paul Markillie:

However you do it, you won't beat the computer.

Jeffrey Kaplan:

Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Stefan Klein:

We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Robert Sapolsky:

The truth is we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.

Dan Soltzberg:

There's a funny Zen saying: "Don't just do something, sit there." It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

Nora Johnson:

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Andy Carvin:

Several weeks ago, the family of information studies professor Phil Agre reported him missing, saying that they had not heard from him in over a year.

Charlotte P. Lee:

All of us had lost touch with him over the years. How would you know if one of your friends not only lost touch with you, but had also lost touch with almost everyone they know? You wouldn't.

Decius:

I regularly read Agre's Red Rock Eater News Service around the turn of the decade. I've also seen Agre speak at a conference. He was very interesting -- a real heavyweight.

I, too, was a long-time reader of RRE, and had seen him at CFP '99. I remember when he moved from UCSD to UCLA. I own Technology and Privacy, which Agre co-edited with Marc Rotenberg in 1997. On the Friends page, I see familiar names like Michael Froomkin, Keith Dawson, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Philip Greenspun.

Phil Agre, I hope you are well.

Sterling Hayden:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea -- "cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Sanford Schwartz:

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Jeffrey Young:

The scholar apparently had many professional contacts but few close friends. An expert on privacy, he was always guarded about his own, say those who know him.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together,... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Mysterious Disappearance Of Phil Agre

Spencer Ackerman:

Rory Stewart compares the Obama administration's twinning of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to a policy of dealing with "an angry cat and a tiger," after Council on Foreign Relations' Steve Biddle reiterated his argument that the U.S.'s interests in Afghanistan are primarily about Pakistan.

"We're beating the cat," Stewart said, "and when you say, 'Why are you beating the cat?' you say, 'It's a cat-tiger strategy.' But you're beating the cat because you don't know what to do about the tiger."

Tom Streithorst:

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its needs are straightforward. Building roads, digging wells, and providing irrigation would make peoples' lives much better at minimal cost. Hiring Afghans to do the labour would put money in their pockets, stimulate their economy, and improve their infrastructure. And yet, despite huge western expenditures, the average rural Afghan is probably no better off today than he or she was five years ago.

Our NGO and government officials are responsible not to the people of Afghanistan, but to their masters in Washington or Brussels or London. So they pepper their policy papers with cliches that will play well at home and remember not to mention that they really don't know what is going on. What they provide our governments is the illusion of understanding and so the illusion of control.

Alex de Waal:

Both Karzai and his opponents know that the surge of 40,000 extra troops proposed by US General McChrystal is unsustainable, and that any agreements dependent on battlefield advances will be short-lived at best. Underneath the old model remains: a political souk where buyers and sellers haggle over the going rate for renting allegiances.

Today, it would be more cost-effective to ditch the extra troops and revert to funding patronage.

The Big Picture:

As casualties mount on both sides, 2009 is shaping up to be the deadliest year yet for coalition troops -- twice as deadly as 2008.

Richard Beeston:

The occasional middleman might be picked off, but the drug barons sleep safely at night in their "poppy palaces", the garish villas that have sprouted up in Kabul. Ask any Afghan politician or journalist and they will readily reel off the names of ministers, generals and businessmen involved in the trade. Many are the same people supp... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Pascal Bruckner:

A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream.

Ruth Simon And James R. Hagerty:

23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater.

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

Steven Pinker:

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

Simon And Hagerty:

Mortgage troubles are not limited to the unemployed. About 588,000 borrowers defaulted on mortgages last year even though they could afford to pay -- more than double the number in 2007, according to a study by Experian and consulting firm Oliver Wyman. "The American consumer has had a long-held taboo against walking away from the home, and this crisis seems to be eroding that," the study said.

John Bird and John Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Richard Brody:

On the island where he encounters the Wild Things, Max talks of his desire to do away with the "sadness and loneliness" -- something that has less to do with their needs and desires than with his own -- or, rather, with the screenwriters' notion that so much of experience can be summed up under those two signifiers, and that there's some implicit happiness awaiting those who can suppress them.

John Lanchester:

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

The Economist's Washington correspondent:

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

1 in 4 Borrowers Are Underwater

Gold Star. It's almost enough to make you hopeful about the future.

Be nice until it's time to not be nice.

Things will be frustrating. Don't get frustrated.

$500 can build things that change how people live.

You can see a preview of selected slides.

Charles C. Mann:

Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

David Foster Wallace:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Richard Haass:

Let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen.

David Kilcullen:

You've got to make a long-term commitment.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

Thoughts and Tips on Non Kinetic Actions