Lance Armstrong and his team's abilities to meld strength and strategy -- to thoughtfully plan ahead and to sacrifice today for a big gain tomorrow --- seem to be such fading virtues in American life.

Maybe we have the leaders we deserve. Maybe we just want to admire Lance Armstrong, but not be Lance Armstrong. Too much work. Maybe that's the wristband we should be wearing: Live wrong. Party on. Pay later.

Upon reading this op-ed by Tom Friedman, I was immediately reminded of a 1998 article from Wired Magazine, in which Stewart Brand interviewed Freeman Dyson. The article was entitled Freeman Dyson's Brain. It is worth reading (or rereading) in its own right, so I'll file it separately.

Learning From Lance

I have to tell you, things are good.

What's been going on? HAHA! I'm so in love with this bitch! HAHAHA! I can't ... I'm so ... I can’t restrain myself. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

It's a tasty dish of literary mockery, served up just for you. Enjoy.

My Dog Is Tom Cruise

I must admit to being unaware that population growth had leveled off..

Make sure you read that closely:

In the 1990s, the U.N. started taking a closer look at fertility patterns, and in 2002, it adopted a new theory that shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow.

The site to visit is the United Nations Population Division Home Page. Africa is at 4.8, Asia is at 2.5, Latin America is at 2.8, and Oceania is at 2.4. Only Europe and North America are at or below replacement rate, at 1.5 and 2.1, respectively.

Of course, the fertility rate is not the same as the replacment rate, so a proper mapping requires additional data.

RE: Environmental Heresies

Was it the intellectuals who replaced Toscanini and "Playhouse 90" with "Mr. Ed" and "Gilligan's Island"? Was it the intellectuals who shifted resources away from opera reviews in Time magazine and toward celebrity puff pieces in People and its various epigones?

Ultimately, it was the bottom line that destroyed American middlebrow culture.

I have to wonder how many questions on standardized tests are devoted to appreciating the works of Faulkner or Hemingway. How can we expect children to establish a love of learning when we take all of the exploratory fun out of it? Not everything can be boiled down to a multiple-choice question.

In the 1950's and 60's, the middle class looked longingly at the upper class. Now, the American middle class aspires not to the values and sensibilities of the privileged classes of half a century ago, but to the wealth and power of the new class of celebrity rich.

The Decline of Middlebrow Culture

Read your Neal, you geek!

It's not every day that Neal Stephenson writes an op-ed.

In the spring of 1977, "Star Wars" wasn't famous yet. The only people who had heard about it were what are now called geeks.

Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out

MARSHALL McLUHAN waited for the reporter's lips, mine, in fact, to stop moving, leaned back in his seat in the rear garden of that year's (1967) restaurant of the century, Lutéce, looked up at a brilliant blue New York-in-May sky, lifted a forefinger and twirled it above his head in a loop that took in the 30-, 40-, 50-story buildings that rose all around and said, apropos of nothing anybody at the table had been talking about:

"Of course, a city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome ..."

At that stage of his mutation from unknown Canadian English teacher to communications swami and international celebrity, cryptic, Delphic, baffling, preposterous predictions were McLuhan's trump suit. Intellectuals argued over whether he was a genius or a dingbat. If the case of New York is any proof, however, the man was a pure genius.

Pleasure Principles, by Tom Wolfe

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Society's growing mania to "propertize" every idea, image, sound and scent that impinges on our consciousness is ably dissected in this hilarious and appalling expose of intellectual property law.

David Bollier compiles a long litany of outrageous copyright and trademark excesses:

Music royalty consortium ASCAP sought fees from the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs around the campfire; McDonalds threatened businesses with the Mc prefix in their names;

Disney threatened a day-care center that painted Mickey and Goofy on its walls; and Mattel sued a rock band that dared satirize Barbie in song.

Nor is it only corporate megaliths that resort to this petty legal thuggery. Martin Luther King's estate forbids unauthorized use of his "I Have a Dream" speech (but rents it to Telecom ad campaigns), and the author of a completely silent composition was asked for royalties because it allegedly infringed on avant-garde composer John Cage's own completely silent composition.

Bollier is a sure guide through the thickets of intellectual property law, writing in an engaging style that spotlights capitalism and its supporting cast of lawyers at their most absurd. But he probes a deeper problem: as the public domain becomes a private monopoly, he warns, our open society, which depends on the free, collective elaboration of a shared "cultural commons," will wither away.

Brand Name Bullies : The Quest to Own and Control Culture

In taking cluster analysis and its classifications to the logical extreme, are we not building a superfinicky society?

Five minutes in any Starbucks line will answer that one.

We used to be one nation, undivided, under three networks, three car companies and two brands of toothpaste for all. Today we are the mass niche nation.

There's a niche born every minute.

One Nation, With Niches for All

A new phase of evolution is dawning in which quadriform Tribal + Institutional + Market + Network societies will emerge to take the lead, and a vast rebalancing of relations among state, market, and civil-societal actors will occur around the world. To do well in the twenty-first century, an advanced, democratic, information-age society must incorporate all four forms and make them function well together, despite their inherent contradictions.

Public policy dialogue has, for over a century, revolved around contentions as to whether government or the market represents the better solution for particular policy issues. In the network age, this choice will prove too narrow, too binary, even for blending. New views will come to the fore that the network is the solution.

This essay by David "netwar" Ronfeldt appears as a chapter in the book Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow. Other chapter contributors include John Seely-Brown and Stewart Brand. (Table of contents)

A Long Look Ahead: NGOs, Networks, and Future Social Evolution [PDF]

People are not browsing in bookstores like they used to, according to booksellers just winding up their annual New York convention. More customers phone in orders or double-park while they dash in to make a purchase. [1]

"People are spending less time in the back of the store, looking through the philosophy section, and more time at the tables for recommended books in front," said a California bookseller.

So what's the moral of the story? People love recommendations!

The old-fashioned bookstore browser who picks and pokes and doesn't care about the critics or Oprah or the bestseller charts may wind up on the endangered species list.

"I'll have what she's having!"

[1] Po Bronson wrote recently:

Starbucks put a quote of mine on 500,000 of their tall cups, as part of their "The Way I See It" program, meant to bring provocative discourse back to coffee shops. The quote on the cup reads: "Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever."

Bookworms Book It