As China's middle class expands, hundreds of thousands of new car owners are hitting the roads each year, driving up imports of luxury cars, snarling traffic, creating a car culture and reveling in what many Chinese describe as a newfound sense of freedom.

In China today, owning a car is what owning a television set was in 1950s America.

Contrast this with the Klinkenborg piece. Then recall:

China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates.

Now, take care to replace that incandescent lamp with an energy efficient fixture, and don't forget to turn it off when you leave the room!

Creating a Car Culture in China

The ever-essential Verlyn Klinkenborg, following up on the thread about Magic Highway:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

To Drive or Not to Drive: That Was Never the Question

With subtle accompaniment by longtime friend Herbie Hancock, and a slide show that has opened the minds (and pocketbooks) of CEOs across the country, Bill Strickland tells a quiet and astonishing tale of redemption through arts, music and unlikely partnerships.

Bill Strickland: Rebuilding America, one slide show at a time

In an 1897 issue of Saturday Night, the rise of the doughnut (and ice-water) is cited as evidence of American cultural domination.

So just when did doughnuts become so Canadian?

Penfold traces it to the 1980s, saying it was a result of a few things: a frustration with endless constitutional debates; a void in national identity and iconography and a simultaneous proliferation of doughnut shops.

Canadian eh? The hole truth

Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission. In Anglo-American law, a child born outside an approved marriage was a “fillius nullius” - a child of no one, entitled to nothing. In fact, through most of history, the precondition for maintaining a strong institution of marriage was the existence of an equally strong institution of illegitimacy, which denied such children any claim on their families.

Even legally-recognized wives and children received few of the protections we now associate with marriage. Until the late 19th century, European and American husbands had the right to physically restrain, imprison, or “punish” their wives and children. Marriage gave husbands sole ownership over all property a wife brought to the marriage and any income she earned afterward.

...

The same things that have made so many modern marriages more intimate, fair, and protective have simultaneously made marriage itself more optional and more contingent on successful negotiation. They have also made marriage seem less bearable when it doesn’t live up to its potential. The forces that have strengthened marriage as a personal relationship between freely-consenting adults have weakened marriage as a regulatory social institution.

The Future of Marriage

Jessica Hagy is a different kind of thinker. She has an astonishing talent for visualizing relationships, capturing in pictures what is difficult for most of us to express in words.

At indexed.blogspot.com, she posts charts, graphs, and Venn diagrams drawn on index cards that reveal in a simple and intuitive way the large and small truths of modern life.

Praised throughout the blogosphere as “brilliant,” “incredibly creative,” and “comic genius,” Jessica turns her incisive, deadpan sense of humor on everything from office politics to relationships to religion.

With new material along with some of Jessica’s greatest hits, this utterly unique book will thrill readers who demand humor that makes them both laugh and think.

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Indexed, by Jessica Hagy

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

Paper by Thom Brooks, of the Newcastle Law School at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Publishing Advice for Graduate Students

Ours are ominous times. We are on the verge of eroding away our ozone layer. Within decades we could face major oceanic flooding. We are close to annihilating hundreds of exquisite animal species. Soon our forests will be as bland as pavement. Moreover, we now find ourselves on the verge of a new cold war.

But there is another threat, perhaps as dangerous: We are eradicating a major cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are annihilating melancholia.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy.

What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss?

Have you seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Savages?

In Praise of Melancholy

In the spring of 1863, Lord & Taylor in New York, down on Ladies’ Mile, opened a “mourning store,” where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the inventory advertised by Besson & Son, in Philadelphia, a mourning store of the same period: “Black Crape Grenadines / Black Balzerines / Black Baryadere Bareges / Black Bareges.” The Civil War dead are still among us—long after their beautifully dressed widows have passed away—and the problem is how to get them buried. The acceptable thing to say now, as it was then, is that the soldiers, and their sacrifice, are what remain to inspire us. But it’s the corpses that haunt us, not the soldiers, as they haunted us then, and no amount of black crêpe can cover them over. The scale of the dying disillusioned a country, and also, as Lincoln saw, gave us a country—turned a provisional arrangement of states into a modern nation. A few new books attempt to place the dying in the right context: What did people of the time make of all that dying? More provocatively, did those who died in some sense want to die, and, most provocative, did so many die, after all?

In the Mourning Store

A system-wide banking crisis increases population heart disease mortality rates by 6.4% (95% CI: 2.5% to 10.2%, p<0.01) in high income countries, after controlling for economic change, macroeconomic instability, and population age and social distribution. The estimated effect is nearly four times as large in low income countries. Conclusions Banking crises are a significant determinant of short-term increases in heart disease mortality rates, and may have more severe consequences for developing countries.

Can a bank crisis break your heart?