Joseph Clarke:

Tracing the parallel histories of the American megachurch and the corporate-organizational complex.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Peter Drucker:

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

William Whyte:

The fault is not in organization, in short; it is in our worship of it. It is in our vain quest for a utopian equilibrium, which would be horrible if it ever did come to pass; it is in the soft-minded denial that there is a conflict between the individual and society. There must always be, and it is the price of being an individual that he must face these conflicts. He cannot evade them, and in seeking an ethic that offers a spurious peace of mind, thus does he tyrannize himself.

Paul Graham:

If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them.

Paul Bloom on Robert Wright:

God has mellowed.

Infrastructure for Souls

Lisa Selin Davis:

There's something deeply wrong with Tysons Corner.

Nate Silver:

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Louis Kahn:

In his plan for midtown Philadelphia he attempted to press the forms of Piranesi's Rome of 1762 into the service of the modern city. In this, expressways were thought as "rivers" and the traffic-light controlled streets as "canals." Kahn was conscious of the profound antipathy between the automobile and the city and of the fatal link between consumerism, the suburban shopping center and the decline of the urban core. He proposed a "dock" solution (1956) comprising a 6-story cylindrical silo housing 1,500 cars and surrounded on its perimeter by 18-story blocks that was deprived of elements at a human scale.

Amy Gardner:

A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a fiber optic cable no one knew was there.

Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, "You just hit our line."

Walk Score:

Walk Score shows you a map of what's nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.

Christopher Leinberger:

It’s not a matter of waiting for two or three years to absorb the overproduction. It’s a matter of drastically reducing real estate prices to well below replacement cost. And when you sell something for below replacement cost – that might sound like, well, “Somebody takes a hit but life goes on as usual.” No, life doesn’t go on. For the owners of that retail or housing space, every dollar that they invest will be money they don’t get back. That is another definition of a slum. There’s no incentive to invest in a slum. So here you are.

A (Radical) Way to Fix Suburban Sprawl

A blog by Clifford J. Doerksen:

My current research has me looking through microfilmed tabloid newspapers of the 1930s. My progress is greatly impeded by my inability to scroll past unrelated “human interest” stories, most of them tiny nightmares like something out of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (which you should read immediately if you haven’t already). Anyway, I’ve started this blog as a place to memorialize these spectral and transient tragedies.

The Hope Chest

Roger Scruton:

An intoxicating drink, which both slides down easily and warms as it goes, is a symbol of — and also a means to achieve — an inward transformation, in which a person takes something in to himself. The religious use of wine and its soul-transforming effect reflect the underlying truth that it is only rational beings who can appreciate things like wine. Animals can be drunk. They can be high on drugs and fuggy with cannabis, but they cannot experience the kind of directed intoxication that we experience through wine, since relishing is something that only a rational being can exhibit, and which therefore only a rational being can do.

At some level, I venture to suggest, the experience of wine is a recuperation of that original cult whereby the land was settled and the city built. And what we taste in the wine is not just the fruit and its ferment, but also the peculiar flavour of a landscape to which the gods have been invited and where they have found a home.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

In Vino Veritas: I'll Drink to That

Jay Heinrichs:

Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony.

1. Argue to teach decision-making.
2. Focus on the future.
3. Call “fouls.”
4. Reward the right emotions.
5. Let kids win sometimes.

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Michael Lopp:

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

How to Teach a Child to Argue

Paul Krugman:

Hong Kong, with its incredible cluster of tall buildings stacked up the slope of a mountain, is the way the future was supposed to look. The future — the way I learned it from science-fiction movies — was supposed to be Manhattan squared: vertical, modernistic, art decoish.

What the future mainly ended up looking like instead was Atlanta — sprawl, sprawl, and even more sprawl, a landscape of boxy malls and McMansions. Bo-ring.

From the archive:

Welcome to the exhibition of rediscovered works by the mid 20th century illustrator A.C. Radebaugh.

From the archive:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Michael Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings' facades.

Paul Graham:

It's cities that compete, not countries. Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be

Adam Shand:

The flexibility to manage your own time is invaluable.

Sometimes managing your friends really sucks.

It's possible to get accustomed to anything. Make bloody sure you are aware of what you've become accustomed to.

Curiosity is worth looking for, especially in technical interviews.

Donald Rumsfeld:

Learn to say "I don't know." If used when appropriate, it will be often.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Robert McNamara:

Rationality will not save us.

Colin Powell:

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

Norm Augustine:

Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Lessons Learned from Previous Employment

Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

Former foreign editor of Time, Joshua Cooper Ramo pushes the reader into uncomfortable yet exhilarating places with controversial ways of thinking about global challenges (e.g., studying why Hezbollah is the most efficiently run Islamic militant group).

His book, which lays bare the flaws in current thinking on everything from American political influence to the economy, is designed to change the physics of the way we think.

Analyzing the failure of the Bush administration's Democratic Peace Theory and the fruitless efforts at a Mideast peace process, Ramo suggests that people must change the role they imagine for themselves from architects of a system they can control to gardeners in a living ecosystem.

Ramo's message—that the most dynamic forces emerge from outside elite circles: geeks, iconoclasts and maligned populations—is persuasively argued. And while the author doesn't explicitly offer up solutions, he goads readers to approach problems in unexpected ways. His revelatory work argues that there must be some audacity in thinking before there can be any audacity of hope.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It

Philipp Meyer:

In 2005 I began a third novel, American Rust, about the way that our circumstances, whether poor or wealthy, can so completely shape our morality and our way of looking at things. I was fascinated by the lost generation in America - the people whose towns and hopes have been wiped out by outsourcing - people for whom the American Dream has ceased to be relevant. As Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath, I wanted to show the inner lives, for better and worse, of the new lost generation. I wanted readers to think about exactly what it means to be human. What is at the core of us? Where do our morals come from? What differentiates us from the other animals on earth? What measures do we use to define our friends and family and how far are we willing to go to protect them?

Of course these are questions for broader society, not just literature. Maybe it’s only in crises like this that we get shaken up enough to ask ourselves those larger questions - who are we, what is important to us, how should we define our humanity. The answers we choose will determine the sort of world we live in for the coming decades.

American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all

Sue Halpern:

We have certain expectations for the fabulously wealthy.

Warren Buffett's frugality is part of what marketers would call his brand identity. His apparent personal disregard for the money he so excessively accumulates reinforces his credibility: he's not greedy, he's just good at what he does.

Buffett, it is safe to say, has a different relationship to money than you and me. For us it's a means to an end. For him, it's a vocation. He is called to it. If it's for anything, it's for getting more of. The man is a collector. He just happens to collect dollars.

It's as if success is a corollary of obscenity: you know it when you see it.

And "seeing" may be the most crucial variable of all.

Margaret Atwood:

What we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.

From last year's best-of:'

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important!

Making It