Glenn Beck has apparently told his listeners to leave their churches if they talk about “social justice” or “economic justice”. Christian leaders of all branches are responding by adding Beck’s show to the list with Howard Stern on it.
Frankly, it’s been pretty wonderful to have a break from the chaos of kid life. I’ve had much more personal time. I’ve been able to get out and exercise. I haven’t had to wash baby bottles. I haven’t had to schedule my life around Sienna’s needs. But I just got an anticipatory thrill when I looked at the freshly laundered snow suit that Sienna will soon fill (if temperatures don’t bump up a notch). I’m getting excited for her and YK’s return. Because joy and love come with the chaos.
Grayson has just introduced a four-page bill that would extend Medicare to any American who chooses to buy in at cost. Sheer brilliance.
I just purchased my first album in probably years. “Heavy Heavy Heavy” by Geraldo Pino & The Heartbeats is now funking away. This is the music that turned Fela Kuti from high-life to afro-beat by introducing him to the James Brown sound. And I’ve been immersing myself deeply in Fela for a few weeks.
One fun aspect of my immersion is that Fela would have been extremely popular in Nigeria and much of Africa in the late 1970s when Robert H. Bates wrote “Markets and States in Tropical Africa“, which I’m teaching in a couple of weeks. The students have got another assignment.
(also via Metafilter) Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, long nicknamed the “Lavender Lake” for its copious oil slicks, has gained a new title : Superfund Site. New Yorkers respond with really cool photography. While some developers bow out in light of the recent news, other area developers, hoping for a speedy cleanup of the industrial waste and, uh … other things … vow to continue their plans to revitalize the formerly-industrial corridor.
(via Metafilter) Model cities are useful to city planners and architects. But they’re also beautiful.
A student today said to me: “I’ve had harder classes that were easier.” I’m still trying to figure out what he meant, but I don’t think it was a terribly positive assessment!
So I had a novel experience today in the wake of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and other school shootings. A student had scrawled on a bathroom stall something about killing students today in Hickman Hall. That’s where my class is.
After the police carefully inspected my bag, I made it to class to find a intrepid dozen. It was too large a proportion of the class not to continue with class, so I closed the door, pointed out the exit around the corner, and launched into a correction of Jeffery Sachs’ overly sanguine “End of Poverty.”
And it was a good lecture. And we all went home.
The head of the IMF, following Joe Stiglitz’s suggestion, has suggested that global greenbacks might become a needed alternative to the US dollar:
“That day has not yet come, but I think it is intellectually healthy to explore these kinds of ideas now,” he said in a speech on the future mandate of the 186-nation Washington-based lending organization.
I just this afternoon came across this article in Newsweek. I tells the story of Gobekli Tepe, as does this Smithsonian article. Gobekli Tepe is an 11,500-year-old temple complex in southern Turkey that the archaeologist in charge, Klaus Schmidt, believes was used for death rituals. That is before agriculture, before pottery, before bronze, before writing, and before the wheel. However, the first domestic crop has been traced to a strain of wheat located just 20 miles away and dated about two-thirds of the way through Gobekli Tepe’s lifespan in 9000 BC. The first domesticated animals are similarly close and similarly dated. The exciting thing about this is that it suggests a hypothesis that contradicts the common belief that religious settlement, that urbanization, arose from the leisure and stationary lifestyle provided by agriculture. Rather, religous activities required permanent settlement, which led to agriculture and domestication.
[Note to self: Reread Jane Jacob's explanation for the first cities in Economy of Cities.]
Positive feedback from tourists and merchants have convinced Bloomberg to make the temporary closings in Midtown permanent, despite worsening traffic flow.
I just came across this article in Prospect Magazine by Paul Romer on Charter Cities. Though there are serious risks of neocolonialism, I find the idea extremely intriguing. It may just have to shape my future research, after all, they do depend on container ports.
Last night I accidentally caught Digital Nation on PBS’s Frontline. David Rushkoff hosted and presumably wrote the piece. An unapologetic advocate of the digital internet age for twenty years now, he expresses his first quiver of uncertainty, wondering if we’re becoming too distracted. The internets had been building up the program, so I watched.
It was broadly interesting if a bit light, but I have to take umbrage with it basic, underlying ideolgical claim, which is based on a misrepresentation of Korea. Rushkoff first travels to Seoul to look at PC Bangs, rooms full of high speed, networked computers, and internet addiction. He argues, basically, that Asians have become addicted to the internet. Meanwhile, America (USA! USA!) is finding its own way forward. While the internet is isolating individuals in Asia (cut to asian youth on computer), it’s bringing people together in America (cut to World of Warcraft convention with people talking to each other).
But the argument fails. The presentation itself contains evidence that the correct thesis may be the opposite. I didn’t get the numbers exactly, but approximately the same percentage of people were addicted to the internet in Korea as players of WOW were. More importantly, however, the “coming together” of Americans seemed to be a once a year convention. If that’s the basic measure of togetherness, then the Koreans are immeasurably closer. What he fails to note when he’s interviewing a bunch of young men about how much time they spend online playing games is that they all probably came to the PC Bang as a group of friends, and that they probably do that frequently. So, the use of PC Bangs in Korea is vehicle for socializing with friends rather than going out to find friends.
I won’t deny that there are Koreans who get addicted nor that there are Koreans who go online to find friends (After all, my sister-in-law met her current boyfriend playing some online game.), but there is a good chance that they are online with friends they know in real life. So, Rushkoff is wrong to argue that the internet isolates Asians and brings Americans together. If anything, it’s the opposite. And if the Asians have a problem, ours is already much, much worse.
[Straight from Metafilter] Tishman Speyer Properties is defaulting on its $5.4 billion, high profile acquisition of the enormous Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan, resulting in million in losses for investors and possibly “signaling the beginning of what is expected to be a wave of commercial-property failures”. The failure is the result of an aggressive business model designed to “push moderate income tenants out and replace them with well-heeled renters willing to pay rents at a much higher price” a practice referred to as Predatory Equity. [more inside]
Wish I could go…
The Ammann Singstad Lecture series on Infrastructure
January 21, 2010 | Thursday | 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
The Museum of Modern Art
Theater 3 (The Celeste Bartos Theater)
Enter at the 4 West 54th Street entrance to the Museum
The Ammann Singstad Lecture on Infrastructure honors the memory of the two great civil engineers who shaped the bridges and tunnels of New York in the middle of the twentieth century-Othmar Ammann (1879-1965) and Ole Singstad (1882-1969)-by inviting the most distinguished civil engineers in the world today to speak about their own work and its greater impact. The lectures highlight the aesthetic and social dimensions of large civil and landscape engineering works and their repercussions on the physical, social, and political environment. Norwegian civil engineer Tor Ole Olsen will speak on infrastructure in the marine environment with an emphasis on his work with concrete structures in oil and gas, bridges and renewable energy sources. This program is sponsored by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General and presented as part of the public programming associated with the upcoming MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. This lecture has been scheduled in conjunction with the Detour exhibition at Parsons, The New School for Design.
The event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required. Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning at 5:30PM on Thursday, January 21st. Please RSVP at <mailto:adevents@moma.org> adevents@moma.org.