Category: ideas

“Plans are afoot in [cities across the U.S.] to provide residents with low-cost or free wireless internet access. It’s a great idea whose time has come, like drinking fountains, public toilets and park benches.” But that doesn’t mean that municipal wi-fi will get done without some major fights – after all, those high-cost internet providers (otherwise known as your cable and phone companies) are dead-set against the idea of competition in general, and city-wide internet access would pretty much kill a profitable chunk of their business. “Without legislation, ISPs have no legal basis for stopping community Wi-Fi. But legislation is a distinct possibility.”

As the rebuilding of New Orleans begins, concern is growing about the direction the reconstruction will take, and whether it will benefit the city’s poorest and darkest-skinned residents. In particular, New Orleans jazz musicians have begun to raise their voices against what they fear will be the “Disney-fication” of the cultural scene. “And if the plans for the future of the city don’t include its humblest residents, I fear that the communities that created jazz in the first place will be dispersed — and the country will have lost a good bit of its soul.”

There was a time, not so very long ago, when it was possible, even easy, to be conversant in the language of popular culture without a great deal of effort. There was a lot out there, sure, but most Americans could keep up with the steady stream of hit movies, recordings, and books deemed to be the foundation of modern life. “But that foundation is buckling under the sheer weight of all the things that now qualify as pop culture — and all the new technologies that deliver them to finely calibrated consumer niches. Today the national water cooler bubbles with competing monologues rather than inclusive dialogues… The proliferation has been so fast and so dizzying that even people who study popular culture for a living find it hard to keep up.”

“Today, fads ping across continents and disappear so quickly that the coolhunter, even the whole notion of “cool,” has become passé. Every big-city scenester or bored teenager on the planet has a blog or mass e-mail anointing the moment’s hot restaurants, hobbies and handbags. Add to this, mass obsession with celebrity style and global corporatization and you can get nearly the same chai latte or straight-off-the-runway skirt in Columbus, Ohio, that’s available in Manhattan or Milan. Trend-spotting has, in essence, become just another trend…”

“For decades now, we have been witnessing the slow, ruthless dismantling of America’s urban infrastructure. The crumbling levees in New Orleans are only the most conspicuous evidence of this decline: it’s evident everywhere, from Amtrak’s aging track system to New York’s decaying public school buildings. Rather than confront the causes of that deterioration, we are encouraged to overlook it, lost in a cloud of tourist distractions like casinos, convention centers, spruced-up historic quarters and festival marketplaces. The inadequacy of that vision has now become glaringly obvious. And the problem cannot simply be repaired with reinforcement bars or dabs of cement. Instead, our decision makers will have to face up to what our cities have become, and why. The great American cities of the early 20th century were built on the vision of its engineers, not just architects…”

Wanted: futurist visionaries. Must be able to observe the larger culture around you and translate complex human interactions into wild, counterintuitive, and occasionally optimistic predictions about the future. Must be comfortable with corporate practices and be capable of expressing opinions as if they are indisputable facts. No experience necessary, but applicants should be able to convincingly act as if they’ve been doing this forever. Pay scale varies with results…

What is it with the American obsession with Harvard? “At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide.”

“Rebuilding ‘The City That Care Forgot’ represents the greatest urban renewal project in American history, but nearly everyone with a stake in the city’s future agrees that the outcome is far from certain: Will officials oversee a process that yields a stunning model for 21st-century living, or will fighting among special interests produce a more homogeneous, tourist-centric New Orleans?”

“In the 19th century, painting was supreme, prints were a lesser form of painting, and photography was artistic only insofar as it aspired to the condition of painting. What happened, though, when technology and representation collided at the end of that century to create the motion picture, a whole new way of visualizing reality? Did still pictures change when there emerged a new kind of picture, one that moved? Might Thomas Eakins and Thomas Edison have shared more than just a first name and monogram?”