Tony Judt:

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Noteworthy:

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

Decius:

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

Mark Whitehouse:

Giving up on the American dream has its benefits.

Joe Nocera:

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

Jon Lee Anderson:

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

Decius:

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

Jules Dupuit:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

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.

What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

Mark Whitehouse:

Giving up on the American dream has its benefits.

Shana Richey:

It was scary. It's still very hush-hush.

Kenneth R. Harney:

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

Pascal Bruckner:

A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream.

Richey:

We're saving lots of money.

Christopher Thornberg:

It's a stealth stimulus.

John Fortune:

It's pathetic.

Whitehouse:

About half of Palmdale's 147,000 residents endure a daily commute that can extend to two hours or more one way.

Nate Silver:

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.

Dan Kildee:

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

American Dream 2: Default, Then Rent

Ever wanted X-ray specs or super-human vision?

Chromoscope lets you explore our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and the distant Universe in a range of wavelengths from X-rays to the longest radio waves.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Charles C. Mann:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

Jonathan Rauch:

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day?

Anne Frank:

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

Chromoscope

Landscaping overgrows, walls develop mildew, ceilings cave in -- a building can be shut down, but that doesn't make it go away. Brian Ulrich's photographs of closed-down malls and big-box retail stores reveal the potential ghost towns lying inside successful shopping complexes all across America.

Dan Kildee:

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

Brian Ulrich:

Not if, but when.

Over the past 7 years I have been engaged with a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live.

George Soros:

The short-term needs are the opposite of what is needed in the long term.

Steve Bellovin:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Jane Jacobs:

When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.

Christopher Leinberger:

It's not a matter of waiting for two or three years to absorb the overproduction. It's a matter of drastically reducing real estate prices to well below replacement cost. And when you sell something for below replacement cost -- that might sound like, well, "Somebody takes a hit but life goes on as usual." No, life doesn't go on. For the owners of that retail or housing space, every dollar that they invest will be money they don't get back. That is another definition of a slum. There's no incentive to invest in a slum. So here you are.

Ghosts of Shopping Past

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger:

Remembering has become the norm, and forgetting the exception.

Adam Keiper:

The implications are uncertain but potentially troubling.

But what's so bad about a little self-censorship?

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Georgie Binks:

Where do computer files go when you die?

Greg Conti:

Time is of the essence.

William Deresiewicz:

Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory.

Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this -- all of them modes of amnesia, foes of true remembering. The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs.

David Clark:

If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon crossbred with a time-travel machine. Don't forget about forgetting.

Thom Andersen:

Perhaps "Blade Runner" expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation, because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter and blander. Computers will get faster, and we will get slower. There will be plenty of progress, but few of us will be any better off or happier for it.

Louis CK:

Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

When Folly Is Forever

Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania:

Generally speaking, [average internet users] know very, very little about what goes on online, under the screen, under the hood. The kinds of things they don't know would surprise many people around here.

Alan Davidson, director of US public policy affairs at Google:

We had the assumption that people who were interested in privacy and were going to visit the [behavioral advertising] site would all be opting out, but that was not the case.

To simply say that people aren't informed, and if you inform them they want to get rid of this stuff, is probably too simplistic a view. Many consumers do understand there is a bargain here.

Decius:

If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

A day in New York:

[Marge and Lisa are gazing dreamily into a window filled with glamorous shoes.]

Lisa: Look at all those beautiful shoes! I know they're made from animals but WOW!
Marge: Mmmm, If only I didn't already have a pair of shoes.
Bart: Speaking of shoes, I don't care about shoes. I'll meet you ladies back here in half an hour.

Homer:

You know, Marge, I was thinking about how much I enjoy your interest. So I wandered over to that theater you went to last night and I bought tickets to their entire season. Look, "Mostly Madrigals"... Yeah, that might be good. Ooh, ooh, "An Evening with Philip Glass." Just an evening?

Joe Queenan:

Even if life were not too short, it would still be too short to read anything by Dan Aykroyd.

Groups Far Apart on Online Privacy Oversight

Justin Heckert:

Swept out to sea by a riptide, a father and his 12-year-old son struggle to stay alive miles from shore.

...

Only his breath in the darkness, a silence as everything settled in. For half an hour, Walt had yelled, begging for Christopher to answer. He had given up conserving energy, had been swimming as hard as he could to try and find his son. "Who's my best boy?" Nothing. "Christopher, who's my buddy?" Only the fish beneath him, brushing against his back and legs.

"Christopher?!"

Walt spun in every direction, trying to spot the small white face and the dark-brown hair.

But he was gone.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Julian Schnabel:

Being in the water alone sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road":

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

Lost in the Waves

Have you seen "The Messenger"?

Mick LaSalle:

When 2009 is over, this is one of the movies we'll remember the year by.

Owen Gleiberman:

It becomes a wake-up call to those of us for whom the Iraq war has, too often, seemed a numbing series of television images, with death relegated to a background statistic.

Roger Ebert:

All particular stories are universal, inviting us to look in instead of pandering to us. This one looks at the faces of war. Only a few, but they represent so many.

Peter Travers:

That's why The Messenger hits so hard. Its truths are personal. It means to shake you. And does.

David Denby:

This is a fully felt, morally alert, marvellously acted piece of work.

"The Messenger" joins the group of strong Iraq-war movies that, like rejected suitors, stand hat in hand, waiting for an audience to notice their virtues.

Claudia Puig:

It serves as a powerful companion piece to The Hurt Locker, the most powerful movie about the Iraq War and one of the year's best.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Skyler Preszler:

Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice.

Elizabeth Rubin:

It didn't take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

The Messenger

Zadie Smith:

For David Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an "unbearably artificial world". He recommends instead that artists break "ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work", via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel ... in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary. And conventional structure be damned.

David Shields:

The world exists. Why recreate it?

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Daniel Dennett:

We have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.

Smith:

In the first place, "well-made novel" seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things - although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. For a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. That's fiction for you: it taunts you with the spectre of what you cannot do yourself. Meanwhile, the essay teases you with the possibility of perfection, of a known and comprehensible task that can be contained and polished till it shines.

Steven Pinker:

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Malcolm Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. When a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that "risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable." As a generic statement, this is true but trite. But as a more substantive claim ... it is demonstrably false.

An Essay Is An Act Of Imagination

Umberto Eco:

The list is the origin of culture.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. How, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible?

We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Rudy Rucker:

It is in the realm of infinity that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations.

Found Magazine:

We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles -- anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life.

Eco:

Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

Decius:

I'm going to file "Giddy Anticipation of an Apocalypse" next to actually having an AK-47 on your flag as God's way of telling you that you're bat shit crazy.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Eco:

Culture isn't knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.

We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die