Jonah Lehrer:

City life isn't easy.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening.

Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities.

From the archive:

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

Great cities have always been hard to manage. Like other complex systems, they grow spontaneously but then demand more management and investment if they are to avoid decay and disintegration. A time comes in the lives of big cities when the need for regulation and rational allocation of space, money, and other resources prevails over impulsive processes.

Consider:

Government policies -- from as early as the 1890s -- subsidized the spread of cities and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity.

Finally, Stewart Brand:

What the world has now is new cities with young populations and old cities with old populations. How the dialogue between them plays out will determine much of the nature of the next half century. The convergence of the two major trends, globalization and rampant urbanization, means that all cities are effectively one city now.

The City Hurts Your Brain

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

For the past few years, blog comments sections, acting as virtual town squares, have offered residents around the country a forum in which to weigh in — and vent — on a wide spectrum of local issues. But given New York’s size and diversity, not to mention its fabled brashness, political energy and high emotion, its blogosphere is taking a particularly striking shape.

The issues that are consistently "hot button" are those tied to gentrification. "Queens does not care for being cool," wrote one anonymous commenter.

From the archive:

Great cities have always been hard to manage. Like other complex systems, they grow spontaneously but then demand more management and investment if they are to avoid decay and disintegration. A time comes in the lives of big cities when the need for regulation and rational allocation of space, money, and other resources prevails over impulsive processes.

Also:

In Atlanta, the buzzwords of soft-core urbanism are everywhere these days.

The city itself, a small splotch of fewer than half a million residents in a galaxy of sprawl, is now attracting the affluent ... with their bloated new houses ... landlords sell out ...

Finally:

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

You Talkin’ to Me?

Dalton Conley has a new book.

Conley makes a prescient analysis of how technology and free markets have transformed American life, comparing the mid-20th century American with the present-day incarnation.

These are two very different animals -- one compartmentalized and motivated by the traditional American ethos of success, and the other a psychological hybrid of impulses connected to work, pleasure, materialism and consumption. The results of this brilliant and, at times, chilling comparison, are manifest not only on these pages but in real life.

Cheap and easy credit, he writes, has been a major reason why the United States recently dipped into negative savings for the first time since the great depression. Conley examines how, technology has altered how Americans earn and spend money, playing out the behaviors characteristic of late capitalism, or simply an evolving economic system that, by attaching a price to virtually everything from child rearing to dating, has helped devalue people, the work they do and the material goods they desire.

A sociological mirror, this book is equal parts cautionary tale, exercise in contemporary anthropology and a spiritual and emotional audit of the 21st century American.

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?"

Recently:

A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.

Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety

Nouriel Roubini:

The US has been living in a situation of excesses for too long. And when you have too many financial engineers and not as many computer engineers, you have a problem.

I think this country needs more people who are going to be entrepreneurs, more people in manufacturing, more people going into sectors that are going to lead to long-run economic growth. When the best minds of the country are all going to Wall Street, there is a distortion in the allocation of human capital to some activities that become excessive and eventually inefficient.

From the archive:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Speak up:

When nonengineers think about engineering, it’s usually because something has gone wrong. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored.

If you see something, say something:

The difference between alchemy and science is if you tell people what you’ve learned.

Consider:

Georgia is about to become the first state to approve the use of the Bible as a textbook in public schools.

Finally:

Government policies -- from as early as the 1890s -- subsidized the spread of cities and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity.

Facetime with the Money Honey

These two ladies have everything under control.

See also, Nick Burns:

"I can't get this stupid email attachment to open at all."

Nick: "It's the email that's stupid, not you, right?"

Fran & Freba

"All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy" is nothing short of a complete rethinking of what a novel can and should be.

It's true that, taken on its own, All Work is plotless. But like the best of Beckett, the lack of forward momentum is precisely the point.

If it's nearly impossible to read, let us take a moment to consider how difficult it must have been to write.

From the archive:

The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre.

And just recently:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

From last year:

Paradoxically, as cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy.

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

What we are left with is what we've always had: the power of the Gothic. Joyce Carol Oates, who is at her best when at her darkest, sums up precisely what the Gothic still means in these post-everything times:

There is a profound difference between what appears to be and what is; and if you believe otherwise, the Gothicist has a surprise for you. The strained, sunny smile of the Enlightenment — "All that is, is holy;" "Man is a rational being" — is confronted by the Gothicist, who, quite frankly, considering the history and prehistory of our species, knows better.

Oates mentions history, and alludes to the widely held suspicion that the history of humanity is one limned with evil. But what perpetuates evil but the normalization of evil, the transformation of it into the banal?

From the archive:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

What might otherwise seem a banal piece of whimsy is rendered horribly sinister by our knowledge of what is about to happen.

After 9/11 the gloves came off.

What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.

It's not that we're intellectually incapable, either. Americans keep exhaustive amounts of data in their heads about sports, celebrities, frighteningly banal television shows and all manner of other distractions.

It's not much, but it's yet another reminder that even the most banal icons of daily life are tied to some cute little math nerd.

Rarely since the mid-19th century, when it first became a crowd pleaser, has the Gothic aesthetic gained such a throttlehold on the collective imagination.

His performance was an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

There, amid the usual worthy portraits and landscapes, Fuseli's oil displayed the prostrate body of a sleeping maiden, with a depraved-looking ogre or incubus sitting on her chest and the head of a blind horse protruding menacingly through red velvet curtains. What could it mean?

I like to focus on banal, boring issues like standards, protocols, and IPR because I delight in showing how supposedly arcane technical problems actually turn out to be political.

Banal pop music is better when it comes from Mexico ...

What Martha Stewart would be like if she were gothic.

Poe at 200

A new book from the leaders of Stanford, Intel, MIT, Aerospace, CMU, KPCB, CSIS, and many others.

The export controls and visa regulations that were crafted to meet conditions the United States faced over five decades ago now quietly undermine our national security and our national economic well- being. The entire system of export controls needs to be restructured and the visa controls on credentialed foreign scientists and engineers should be further streamlined to serve the nation’s current economic and security challenges.

As economic conditions have improved in China, India, and other countries, many young people who would have come to the United States to study or work in science and technology now opt to stay home for their education or to return to their home country after graduate school in the U. S. All these changes mean that American security and prosperity now depend on maintaining active engagement with worldwide developments in science and technology, and with the global economy.

While the United States remains a world leader in advanced science and technology, it no longer dominates; it is now among the leaders. We are increasingly interdependent with the rest of the world. What is the United States doing to reap benefits from its increased interdependence? Instead of promoting engagement, the United States is required by our current system of controls to turn inward. Our visa controls have made it more difficult or less attractive for talented foreign professionals to come and learn what is great about this country, or to stay and help grow the American economy. Our export controls retard both the U.S. and its allies from sharing access to military technology, and handicap American business from competing globally.

In the post-9/11 world, even if we could accept the costs associated with mistakenly turning away some of the brightest international students or accept the forfeit of some business growth opportunities in the interest of national and homeland security, these are not the only outcomes of current policies.

From the archive:

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

Also:

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.

Finally:

By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

Beyond "Fortress America"

Obama was poised to name Cass Sunstein, an American legal scholar, to an existing White House post as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein would oversee government regulations and devise new approaches for government efficiencies.

From the archive:

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly.

People, it turns out, want to be generous and they want to retain their dignity -- even when it doesn’t really make sense.

Organizations and nations are far more likely to prosper if they welcome dissent and promote openness.

Filtering and focusing on people's interests creates a diverse society with many points of view, but commonality creates one whose members can understand each other.

We should explore ways to structure the law to defer political and legal decision-making downward to decentralized group–based decision–making. If we take seriously the potential impact of technology on collective action, we ought to think about what it means to give groups body as well as soul — to "incorporate" them.

Obama Promises Overhaul