Americans have developed an admirable fondness for books, food, and music that preprocess other cultures.

But for all our enthusiasm, have we lost our taste for the truly foreign?

From the archive, Decius:

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

McCulture

Jim Kunstler:

Along the low horizon, mall followed strip mall followed "lifestyle center," book-ending the "one house" failed subdivisions of otherwise empty unsold lots in a cavalcade of floundering enterprise. It seemed at times as if the terrain was a kind of sea-like expanse, and all the retail boxes ghost ships drifting to oblivion.

All parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life, as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality.

How long will these games go on?

They can't recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future – and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day.

But then, more than half the population lives the suburban way of life, with its deadly mortgage traps, its mandatory motoring, and its civic disengagements. Nobody in power dares tell the truth: that we can't live this way anymore.

Road Trip

George Soros:

I think it has to do with the human condition. The fact that we are mortal and we would like to be immortal. The closest thing you can come to that is by creating something that lives beyond you. Wealth could be one of those things, but evidence shows that it doesn’t survive too many generations. However, if you can have an artistic or philosophical or scientific creation that withstands the test of time, then you have come as close to it as possible.

The credit crunch according to Soros

Jack Cheng:

Lo-fi time, I call it. And it’s about blocking off time for sitting still and letting your mind wander.

Maybe we should consider lo-fi zones as a blessing rather than a curse; as places to be enjoyed, rather than endured. ‘Cause before you know it, the cloud will be everywhere, and not even a cruise on a freighter ship will provide escape.

In Praise of Lo-Fi

Bruce Sterling, in Seed:

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where "history ended." Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

From the archive:

He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

From 2008:

Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives.

From 2004:

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?

What is to become of those of us past schooling, who are aware of these planes? Are we to dredge on with pink shades over our blue eyes?

The True 21st Century Begins

William Deresiewicz, returning to his sad theme:

The great contemporary terror is anonymity. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.

Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." Teresa and Tiresias will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the drift of the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.

In the archive, more from Deresiewicz:

There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

From last year, Jonathan Franzen:

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.

From last year's best-of:

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

The End of Solitude

4. Do not destroy what you cannot create.

From the archive:

"Ten Things I Hate About Commandments" is a mash-up trailer for a John Hughes style teen comedy, using footage from the Charlton Heston version of The Ten Commandments.

Your Daily Friedman:

Imagine if you could offset the whole Ten Commandments.

Finally:

He laughed, and added, "Good thing I’m not an idealist -- I'm just here for the money."

The Ten Commandments of Leo Szilard

Joe Stiglitz:

This year will be bleak.

The question we need to be asking now is, how can we enhance the likelihood that we will eventually emerge into a robust recovery?

From the archive:

It never occurred to me that lamb shanks might be refreshing.

Finally:

He laughed, and added, "Good thing I’m not an idealist -- I'm just here for the money."

The Rocky Road to Recovery

"Bling is over."

-- Karl Lagerfeld

From the archive:

Those who loved the dignity and the sporadic secrecy and the sudden intimacies of traditional French civilization are bound to long for the days when President Mitterrand would go on long walks alone to old bookstores, and then make love to his mistress on the way home to his wife, patting his love children on the head while making sonorous pronouncements about life and destiny.

Also:

And what's with all these sayings? Emo, Metrosexual, Bling-Bling. No wonder the English Language is going to hell in a handbasket, the younger generations are slaughtering it!

What now?

We need to return to the culture of thrift that my mother and her generation learned the hard way through years of hardship and deprivation.

Fun!

The sheer amount of sewing done by gentlewomen in those days sometimes takes us moderns aback, but it would probably generally be a mistake to view it either as merely constant joyless toiling, or as young ladies turning out highly embroidered ornamental knicknacks to show off their elegant but meaningless accomplishments.

Look your best.

Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like.

In the Lap of Luxury, Paris Squirms

Torkel Klingberg has a new book.

As the technological environment speeds up to a maddening degree, a professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience warns that the huge burden of information overload and multitasking can exceed the limits of our slowly evolving stone-age brain.

Klingberg notes a gap between the rapidity of electronic high-tech devices and the brain's relatively slower capacity to process information, leading to memory malfunctions.

The amount of scientific fact translated to something the reader can use is sizable, including keen writing on the impact on working memory of problem solving, meditation, computer games, caffeine and the existence of attention deficit disorder. Klingberg also reviews the evidence that mental exercise can increase the capacity of working memory.

A highly sane look at the increasingly insane demands of the information age, this book discusses with precision a subject worthy of attention.

From the archive:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

Also:

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

The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory