Category: politics

• July 8, 2011

  Traveling notes

  Airport culture shock. NYC still a walking culture. At airport, breathless. Barely breathe. Very, very, very fat. Grotesquery of broken bodies. Impending health care epidemic. Fear & trembling. Agriculture and dehumanization. Manning, in Against the Grain, traces problems w/ food back to the beginnings of agriculture 10,000 yrs. ago. Epochal change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.…
• July 7, 2011

  From GDP to happiness

  Great new essays and projects on happiness as a better measure of economic well-being than GDP. Among many others, see Carol Graham, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Brookings Institute; Umair Haque, “Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything,” Harvard Business Review Blog Sustainable Seattle Happiness Initiative.
• June 14, 2011

  Venkat on the life and death of the corporation

  In “A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600-2100,” Venkat examines the 3 phases of the corporate form: maximum power (years 1600-1800), maximum reach (1800-1980), and slow death (1980 and afterward). Strikingly  he writes, The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center…
• June 13, 2011

  Nihilism in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

  On the one hand, Jonathan Franzen does a masterful job of showing how unchecked freedom leads of necessity to nihilism. The ability to choose this or that cannot of itself answer to the more fundamental question, “Why bother choosing in the first place? What makes one item more valuable than the other? And, for that…
• May 20, 2011

  Tomorrow is Doomsday: Remember to bring your passport

  When the world is not in order, when it’s too vast, too complex, too unmanageable, and when it’s all these things for far too long, then people pack their bags and go on holiday. Where to? To paradise, of course, but not before passing through customs–which is to say, Judgment Day. As it happens, tomorrow,…