The concept may sound antithetical to a digital era defined by ubiquitous communication and interactivity, but Slydial turns out to be only the latest in a breed of new technologies that fit squarely into an emerging paradox: tools that let users avoid direct communication.

Technologies like e-mailing and blogging give the communicator the power to choose the time and manner of expression. Now, some academics, text messagers and creators of technologies say a trend has emerged: We are constantly just missing one another — on purpose.

Don’t Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

From the archive:

I was surprised to find out during a campus visits with my son that the '80s are now a big nostalgia craze for college students. To those of us who lived it, it's as weird as nostalgia for polio.

The end of western civilization

Enjoy!

"We have a housing market going into cardiac arrest. This bill is like CPR to stabilize the situation," said David Abromowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington.

Don't buy a house today if you aren't going to stay there at least 7 years. That's right, a mortgage lender is telling you that if you don't have at least a 7 year time frame in mind, you shouldn't buy a house right now. Why? It's all about the math. If the market drops another 5% over the next year and then stays the same for two years, it's going to take 7 years for you to recoup the 5% loss and then build up enough to pay the 6% Realtor's fees when you sell and make a little profit too.

This paper estimates the evolution of equilibrium real home prices in the United States and finds that despite recent declines, single-family homes remained 8 to 20 percent overvalued as of the first quarter of 2008. In the short run, the gap between actual and equilibrium prices does not exert powerful influence over price dynamics. Instead, that dynamics is driven by the inventory-to-sales ratio and by foreclosure starts in a highly inertial relationship. Taken together, this implies that price declines are likely to continue, including past the point where overvaluation is eliminated. The paper also finds that from the early 1990s onwards changes in regional home prices have been more synchronized than before, and that the recent movements in the average price index have reflected a nationwide housing boom, followed by a nationwide housing bust.

Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women’s story through the end of 2007.

Forty percent of gamers are women according to a new survey released today by the... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

To find stories you must give yourself to the moment. Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations and silences. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease.

It helps to be cut off, to have nowhere to go, nowhere but your story, and no excuse for not telling it.

I worry about stories dying, replaced by stuff. Content for platforms does not a story make. Today, you arrive anywhere and surf the Net. Being “always on” is being always off, to something.

In Praise of Being Cut Off

Haruki Murakami:

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

Richard Sennett, author of The Culture of the New Capitalism, and husband of Saskia Sassen (colleague and counterpoint to Manuel Castells) has a new book.

He says:

“It’s a book about the relation between doing things physically, with your hands, and thinking,” he said. “We’re losing that connection between physical and mental skills. Even the most abstract kinds of thinking, like mathematics, draw on something physical.”

From the jacket:

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Praise from Robert Reich:

As Richard Sennett makes clear in this lucid and compelling book, craftsmanship once connected people to their work by conferring pride and meaning. The loss of craftsmanship -- and of a society that values it -- has impoverished us in ways we have long forgotten but Sennett helps us understand.

New Statesman says:

The sociologist Richard Sennett has a habit of writing the things that we end up talking about years later.

To learn more, read the prologue, or check out this ... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett

Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.

Who would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, ... I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

From the archive:

All we need to do is remember that reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context.

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

Although my grandmother has seen a lot of it, she never liked change much. "The things you see when you don't have a gun" was a favorite expression, delivered on encountering any novelty or irritant.

I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.

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.

An Englishman said to me recently, "You Americans live on a much higher plane of expectancy than we do. You constantly work toward some impossible goal of happiness and perfection, and you unfortunately don't have our ability just to give up. Really, it's much easier to accept the fact that some things can't be solved." He is right; we never accept it, and we kill ourselves trying.

This essay appears in The American Idea.

The Captivity of Marriage | Nora Johnson | June 1961 | The Atlantic

The internet must be getting old: eBay has given up its idealism.

For most of its 13 years, eBay has been run largely as a self-policed island, a place where order was preserved less by real world laws than by norms and customs and expectations and reputations that were almost entirely virtual.

The theory was that everyone would know who the crooks were by reading their feedback. Now the company has basically admitted that this model does not work.

Most sellers see eBay's response as a dramatic shift in the balance of power, and they are right. In future, the consumer will be king: buyers will easily be able to threaten sellers with negative feedback and sellers will find it much harder to strike back. Many sellers fear the new dictatorship of the consumer.

From the archive:

In my experience the answer to bad speech has always been more speech.

She clearly understands equality. Shame she doesn't also understand that the answer to bad speech is more speech.

In response to "bad" speech, more speech leads to self censorship, on the basis of financial self interest.

Democracy meets capitalism at its finest.

The death of self-rule on the internet

"Catalin Avramescu presents an interesting view on what urbanism reveals about a society."

What I realized was that the respect towards the line is something beyond traffic regulations. Seeing a foreigner's unaffected, natural observation of the few centimeters on the line from the asphalt, I realized we are dealing with a fundamental difference between cultures. In the Occident almost everything is organized "on the line."

... All of these are just exterior signs. More important is the order that is generated spontaneously, in the absence of the lines, arrows, markings.

... Nowadays we live in a social web that seems to be unraveling. We creep through holes in fences to get to government buildings, cars park on the pavement, businesses no longer adhere to regular opening times, the controls in lifts are blocked, signs with missing letters are a common sight. All around us, a micro-anarchy spreads. This is the point at which the reform of our society must begin--the primitive origin of the chaos. Our country is suffering from a lack of lines.

Have you seen 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days?

... a masterpiece ... devastating ... gripping ... a commitment to reality unlike any we're used to seeing ... remarkably engrossing and thoughtful ... beautifully rendered ... what you see will floor you ... ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed ... stunning, at times harrowing ... brilliantly discomfiting ...

"4 Months" earned my Gold Star for January.

A Country in Lines: The Shortest Distance for Romania