Margaret Atwood:

These are not lectures about how to get out of debt; rather, they’re about the debtor/creditor twinship in the broadest sense – from human sacrifice to pawnshops to revenge. In this light, what we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.

From the archive, Alberto Manguel's Massey Lectures:

The end of ethnic nationalism, building societies around sets of common values, seems like a good idea. But something is going wrong.

Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood | CBC Radio | Ideas | Massey Lectures

"Superficial is the new intimate."

From the archive, a selection:

Like is the New Say, or How I Learned to Love The Quotative Like.

Fear is the new Comfort.

Data is the new Singularity.

Gray matter is the new black of the hip social scene.

In Cyberwar, Coding is the New Maneuver.

Wardriving is the new pop.

Jihad is the new punk.

The Internet is the new Afghanistan.

Muscular idealism is the new American realism.

Also, a variation on the theme:

Barack Obama is your new bicycle.

Saying Yes to Mess

When does a scene become a cult?

"They wanted me to be wasting my time on it just like they were wasting their time on it."

Facebook’s new “engagement” ads ask users to become fans of products and companies -- sometimes with the promise of discounts. If a person gives in, that commercial allegiance is then broadcast to all of the person’s friends on the site.

Dwindling secrets, and prying eyes, are at the heart of the Facebook conundrum. While offering an efficient and far-reaching way for people to bond, the site has also eroded sometimes natural barriers.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Peter Schiff:

I think things are going to get very bad.

Jack Kerouac:

"You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" We didn't understand his question, and it was a damned good question.

Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow:

"There's no reason we should all be homeowners," says Joseph Gyourko, a professor at the Wharton School of Business and coauthor of "Rethinking Federal Housing Policy." "Homeownership has a lot of benefits, but it has costs, too."

Coming to America:

First world shanty towns.

Rethinking Rent

For all the discussion Facebook has prompted, its most profound impact may be to alter, even obliterate, conventional notions of the past, to change the way young people become adults.

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

The very thing that attracts us oldsters to Facebook — the lure of auld lang syne — will be its undoing.

Decius:

It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

From the archive:

It's not about fondly looking back so much as looking back in horror.

Also:

It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, and a state of melancholy remembrance.

Douglas Haddow:

We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

The Future of Nostalgia

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow:

No one denies that slums - also known as shantytowns, squatter cities, and informal settlements - have serious problems. They are as a rule overcrowded, unhealthy, and emblems of profound inequality. But among architects, planners, and other thinkers, there is a growing realization that they also possess unique strengths, and may even hold lessons in successful urban development.

Christopher Alexander:

A building or town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

The suburbs affect humans as zoos affect animals.

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals.

Coming to America:

First world shanty towns.

Learning from slums

If you're in the habit of buying books two months in advance, Richard Posner's next book is now available for pre-order.

The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we’ve learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn’t it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well.

Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savings flowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fuelled by low interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions.

Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist—that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation—and the Keynesian—that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920’s, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated.

From late 2007, Slavoj Žižek:

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’

The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression

Matt Labash:

Time magazine recently declared Facebook more popular than porn. But who are they kidding? Facebook is porn.

Even as I pile on with the critics, it would be unfair to place blame with Zuckerberg et al for the fact that as their brainchild has expanded from Harvard to America to the world, "thefacebook" has taken on the visage of America to a much greater extent than America has become more like Harvard.

Two from last year's best-of:

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

Down with Facebook!

David Kamp:

This is not a matter of any generation’s having to “lower its sights,” to use President Obama’s words, nor is it a denial that some children of lower- and middle-class parents will, through talent and/or good fortune, strike it rich and bound precipitously into the upper class. Nor is it a moony, nostalgic wish for a return to the scrappy 30s or the suburban 50s, because any sentient person recognizes that there’s plenty about the good old days that wasn’t so good: the original Social Security program pointedly excluded farmworkers and domestics (i.e., poor rural laborers and minority women), and the original Levittown didn’t allow black people in.

But those eras do offer lessons in scale and self-control. The American Dream should require hard work, but it should not require 80-hour workweeks and parents who never see their kids from across the dinner table. The American Dream should entail a first-rate education for every child, but not an education that leaves no extra time for the actual enjoyment of childhood. The American Dream should accommodate the goal of home ownership, but without imposing a lifelong burden of unmeetable debt. Above all, the American Dream should be embraced as the unique sense of possibility that this country gives its citizens—the decent chance, as Moss Hart would say, to scale the walls and achieve what you wish.

Rethinking the American Dream

Richard Morrill:

America’s demography tells not one story, but many. People concerned with looking at long-term trends need to familiarize themselves with these realities – and also consider whether these will continue in the coming decades.

The 33 rapidly growing counties are ALL suburban except for the new metropolitan area of St. George, Utah. Suburban Atlanta dominates ...

From a year ago:

Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.

From yesterday:

First world shanty towns.

Peter Schiff:

I think things are going to get very bad.

Freeman Dyson and Stewart Brand:

You must have principles that you're willing to die for. This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

America’s Ever Changing Demography