Americans commuting patterns are changing fundamentally. Similar shifts in the way we work can't be far behind.

A beautiful collection of photos.

The Long Way There

Is Islam the best way to understand the war on terror? Tribalism may offer a clearer view of our enemies' motivations.

I and My Brother Against My Cousin

I was invited to a gathering of activists, academics and media practitioners by the Berkman Centre’s Media:Republic program in LA last weekend. Exhilarating to be in such exalted company but depressing to find them so anxious about the future of political engagement and so negative about big Media’s future.

The context of the meeting was to establish what we don’t understand about the emerging media landscape in order to inform the direction of future research programmes.

More questions than answers

Paul Graham:

There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes.

Some Heroes

Video from the 150th Anniversary celebration of Harper’s Magazine. Introductory remarks by Robert Polito, John R. MacArthur, and Lewis H. Lapham. Remarks by Annie Dillard, Readings by David Foster Wallace, Mary Gaitskill, Darcy Frey, George Plimpton, Fenton Johnson, George Saunders, Allan Gurganus, Richard Rodriguez, Pico Iyer, Seymour Hersh, and Tom Wolfe.

Readings and Remarks: The Harper’s Magazine 150th anniversary, 2000

WSJ reviews The Craftsman.

One could make a strong argument that postindustrial prosperity has helped craftsmanship to thrive. The craft of making wine, for instance, has experienced a renaissance thanks to globalized competition, leading winemakers everywhere to improve their technique dramatically. And those computer programmers whom Mr. Sennett admires are the leading edge of capitalism's most dynamic sector.

Artisanal coffee, hand-made furniture, bespoke suits: Western economies routinely create niche markets for the work of craftsmen. If a lot of what we consume is made without exacting care, it is affordable, something for which many of us are understandably willing to forgo a bit of craftsmanship in our lives. It is to Mr. Sennett's credit that he reminds us of what has been lost thereby.

The Art of Doing Something Well

Samantha Power:

It took until the end for me to really understand what the book was: It’s like The Education of Henry Adams, but about a peacemaker, a humanitarian, someone who deals with these broken places. It allows people to access him at the beginning of the book as an idealist and to learn with him in his moments of adaptation, to witness the mistakes he’s making so that we don’t have to make the mistakes ourselves.

(I recommended this previously)

Akhmatova in Azerbaijan - Triple Canopy

A provocative and witty look at how our private spaces--from boardroom to bedroom--reveal our personalities, whether we know it or not!

Does what's on your desk reveal what's on your mind? Do those pictures on your walls tell true tales about you? And is your favorite outfit about to give you away? For the last ten years psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected--and unplanned--ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it others, and interpret the world around us.

Sam Gosling, one of the field's most innovative researchers, dispatches teams of scientific snoops to poke around dorm rooms and offices, to see what can be learned about people simply from looking at their stuff. What he has discovered is astonishing: when it comes to the most essential components of our personalities--from friendliness to flexibility--the things we own and the way we arrange them often say more about us than even our most intimate conversations. If you know what to look for, you can figure out how reliable a new boyfriend is by peeking into his medicine cabinet or whether an employee is committed to her job by analyzing her cubicle. Bottom line: The insights we gain can boost our understanding of ourselves and sharpen our perceptions of others.

Packed with original research and fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guidebook to our not-so-secret lives.

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

In the capital of Ghana, a teenager nicknamed “Condom Sister” trolls the streets to educate other young people about contraception. Her work and her own aspirations point to a remarkable shift not only in the West African nation, where just a few decades ago women had nearly seven children on average, but around the globe. While world population continues to grow, family size keeps dropping in countries as diverse as Switzerland and South Africa.

The phenomenon has some lamenting the imminent extinction of humanity, while others warn that our numbers will soon outgrow the planet’s resources. Robert Engelman offers a decidedly different vision—one that celebrates women’s widespread desire for smaller families. Mothers aren’t seeking more children, he argues, but more for their children. If they’re able to realize their intentions, we just might suffer less climate change, hunger, and disease, not to mention sky-high housing costs and infuriating traffic jams.

In More, Engelman shows that this three-way dance between population, women’s autonomy, and the natural world is as old as humanity itself. He traces pivotal developments in our history that set population—and society—on its current trajectory, from hominids’ first steps on two feet to the persecution of “witches” in Europe to the creation of modern contraception. Both personal and sweeping, More explores how population growth has shaped modern civilization—and humanity as we know it.

The result is a mind-stretching exploration of parenthood, sex, and culture through the ages. Yet for all its fascinating historical detail, More is primarily about the choices we face today. Whether society supports women to have children when and only when they choose to will not only shape their lives, but the world all our children will inherit.

More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want

From the bold to the beautiful, from the wicked to the wise, every day the Wikipedia team relegates possibly "inappropriate" submissions to the garbage dump of time. Here, we make selected rejects immortal and preserve them for posterity.

From earlier this month:

It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks and puppy smoothies.

The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump