During this calendar year, I have published a few short works on 3quarksdaily, including autobiographical essays on cities…
There is something about cities that provokes people to make sense of their lives. In the extreme cases of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, this meant establishing new schools at the edges of Athens. Cities have long provided spaces for public debate and economic exchange to happen in close proximity. If the denseness of the city suffocates the mind (and I am not claiming that it does), then a well cultivated garden placed just outside the city provides a good place from which to criticize what is happening inside.
…and graduate education.
I have come to imagine the classical university as being a prototypical T.E.D. conference, a place where the power of an idea was carried not only by its intellectual content, but also by the theatricality of its presentation.
Fast forward to the present in Santa Barbara, California, where I am a graduate student. Are people filled with a spirit of learning at the university? The answer is yes only if by the word, “spirit,” one really and cynically means, “weariness.”
I called out the Seed editors over on Thick Culture.
Kevin O’Connor’s advice on small business innovation was one of the best parts of my reading in school this Fall. He advises, not surprisingly, that new technologies and new markets are crucial to startup success. He cautions, however, that distinguishing between trends and fads is extremely hard. He suggests (in Chapter Three) that infrastructure is a crucial limiting factor: Slow development of infrastructure can force a potentially great trend to actually manifest itself as a fad.
Can we unpack this a little bit with respect to new ventures that depend on network protocols or a distributed services architecture? Read More »
I wrote on Thick Culture about The Prosperity Agenda. Don’t all jump at once.
This Summer, New York University researchers Jaime Napier and John Tost suggested that people on the Left are generally not as happy as their counterparts on the Right. Ewen Callaway explains:
The recent surge in home foreclosures, for instance, is due to poor economic choices on the part of borrowers, a conservative might think. Liberals, on the other hand, seethe at predatory lenders and lax government regulation of the mortgage industry.
The result: conservatives mix a martini and hit the country club, while liberals write angry letters and stage protests.
Now, what goods do progressives ultimately demand, if not greater happiness for more people? Progress may have no purpose if it does not result in more happiness. Good democratic governance is useless when it does not make the governed more happy. Thus, progressives, when they themselves are not as happy as they easily could be, are contradicting the progressive project in their own lives.
Consider two regions in Los Angeles: Santa Monica and Skid Row. Read More »
There are certain books that have contributed to who I am. Here is my mentally and editorially filtered list. What other books do you think I should read? Read More »
The world, it seemed, was getting flatter and flatter. Oil was cheap, and the global economy was a time-crunching, electron-beeping, carbon-smoking, border-integrating network of trade and finance. The Berlin Wall came falling down and the world wide web connected the Central Asias and Romanias to the North Americas and Japans. Seafood crossed the Atlantic once to be packaged and again to be sold, all with little thought to climate systems. A table bought in Toronto was the same as a table bought in Miami, because they both came from the same factory near Shanghai.
And then oil became more expensive. Read More »
I have been in the Bay Area this week, and the trip prompted me to reflect on the reasons why I travel. Why do I so eagerly return to certain regions — including Silicon Valley — whenever I get the chance? The answer, it seems, is that in those places I can easily be the most ignorant person in the room. In Palo Alto, I can know the least about telepresence; in the District of Columbia, about human dignity; in New York, about economics. Being the most ignorant person in the room is at once gratifying, challenging, and humbling. Read More »
My second editorial column is up at Consilience.
When it comes to creating new systems, ideas, things, and experiences on planet Earth, there are two ways of making things happen. The first is blind evolution: Start with some variation, add a mechanism for selecting the fitter variants, and watch what happens. And then there is conscious design: A designer, who is typically human and therefore herself a product of evolution, purposefully produces something new, and if she is fortunate or skilled, something also predictable, efficient, and easily controlled.
Consilience posted my editorial on sustainable development for Consilience.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the rise of human rights in the European imagination. By any account, human rights were a good idea. But as anyone who was around to witness the French Revolution would be able to attest, actually implementing human rights is a messy and potentially bloody process. Today, the idea of human rights has become mundane, but their implementation is no easier.