A memo to the president-elect, from Richard Haass:

You won, but at a price, as some of the things you said were better left unsaid. Even more important, the campaign did not prepare the public for the hard times to come.

The good news is that many of the arrows in Iraq are finally pointing in the right direction and it will not dominate your presidency. The bad news is that you know you are in for a rough ride when Iraq is the good news.

This is a sobering moment in American history. Some 21st-century version of the fireside chat is called for. My reading of things is that the American people are ready to be leveled with.

From the archive:

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?

Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

The World That Awaits

Great stuff. Check out the Afghanistan Drug War portfolio.

Aaron Huey, Photographer

What is the price of security that citizens are prepared to pay?

Will surveillance technology force us to choose between our right to privacy and national security?

The Proceedings of The Second Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security.

From the archive:

David Brin debates Brad Templeton on "The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?"

I know I'm pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social networks conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

From Dataveillance to Überveillance and the Realpolitik of the Transparent Society

Lying here diagonally across the top of a dining table in the back room of Ambassador Wines and Spirits, naked except for the scallop shells covering my nipples and the silk scarf sheltering my crotch, while guests gorge on sushi and sashimi pieces plucked from my torso, I require your cooperation.

There is more than raw fish at stake.

See also, from 2007:

Japan as a country never stops amazing us.

Confessions of a Naked Sushi Model | Vanity Fair

Each sushi dictator has his own pet peeves, but there is common ground. Most do not allow sushi bar patrons to order off the menu. Instead, diners must accept whatever the chef gives them, a tradition known as "omakase" -- a Japanese expression that can be loosely translated as "trust the chef." They reserve special enmity for spicy tuna rolls -- typically made with scraps of raw tuna, mayonnaise and chili powder -- which they say were only invented so that restaurants could mask the taste of substandard fish. And they generally loathe the ubiquitous California roll. Not only is it a newfangled American invention that combines avocado and cucumber, but it usually contains imitation crab -- anathema to chefs who have spent so much of their energy and money securing pristine seafood.

From the archive:

To the uninitiated, few things can be more intimidating than a sushi bar.

Though the process of ordering and eating sushi isn't nearly as involved as some would think, it does require a certain amount of knowledge and etiquette to dine properly.

Sushi Bullies

Reactions to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide.

Religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. Evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. Evangelical Protestant teen-agers are also significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.

For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

From the last Presidential election cycle:

"Moral values."

By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it's the culture, stupid.

There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News.

Red Sex, Blue Sex

A handful of new studies suggest surprising changes in the marital landscape. Infidelity appears to be on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples. Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men.

From the archive, Vladimir Nabokov:

We both, Vasili Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape, so dangerous for the soul, the impossibility of ever finding out where that path you see leads — and look, what a tempting thicket!

Love, Sex and the Changing Landscape of Infidelity

Some see Dean Kamen as a Willy Wonka character whose most famous invention - the Segway personal transporter - is still the butt of jokes. Others compare him to Henry Ford. His next project, after perfecting an electric car, is to 'to fix the world' - using a 200-year-old engine nobody else thinks can work.

From the archive:

Refactor Everything!

Dean Kamen finally announces his new product today.

Stirling engines -- great on paper but it's been hard so far to build practical ones.

Lindsay Publications has reprinted a lot of old 1900s - 1950s books detailing various concepts and ideas, including how to lay out sheet metal for ornate structures, building engines (combustion and Stirling), as well as subjects like steam power and wind power generation.

Dean Kamen: part man, part machine

At the nanoscale, one can fit trillions of devices in a chip-scale area. This is many orders of magnitude more than we can accomplish today. The Symposium on Computing Challenges brings together people with hardware, software, neuroscience, physics, and mathematics perspectives to discuss the key problems and the possible approaches to solutions for effectively harnessing trillions of devices that are made possible by use of the nanoscale.

Talks are available, including Jon Kleinberg on Information Dynamics and Network Structure.

Symposium on Computing Challenges | Kavli Institute at Cornell

In the same way as the web is quickly extending onto the mobile platform, we are starting to see the web moving further into the physical world. Many emerging technologies are beginning to offer physical-world inputs and outputs; multi-touch iPhones, gestural Wii controllers, RFID-driven museum interfaces, QR-coded magazines and GPS-enabled mobile phones.

These technologies have been used to create very useful services that interact with the web such as Plazes, Nokia Sports Tracker, Wattson, Tikitag and Nike Plus. But the technologies themselves often overshadow the user-experience and so far designers haven’t had language or patterns to express new ideas for these interfaces.

This talk will focus on a number of design directions for new physical interfaces. We will discuss various ideas around presence, location, context awareness, peripheral interaction as well as haptics and tangible interfaces. How do these interactions work with the web? What are the potentials and problems, and what kinds of design approaches are needed?

The web in the world