People often bemoan the spread of malls, suburban strips, subdivisions, and other sprawling places in contemporary America. But are these places as bad as critics claim? In Sprawling Places, David Kolb questions widely held assumptions about our built environments.

Interact with the hypertext form of the book:

Are contemporary places as bad as some critics claim?

Are we building "non-places"?

Are we imprisoned in a universal Disneyland?

In this text I argue against the concepts used to attack contemporary places as inauthentic or unreal or totally commodified. I develop a new critical perspective that emphasizes the need for complexity in places and fights against oversimplification. We can get beyond criticisms that concentrate on the problems of place today without also seeing their new possibilities.

Do our new kinds of places make room for new kinds of community? With places being themed and the past thinned for easy consumption, what can be done?

Contemporary places can be improved if we understand their new modes of unity and linkage. Besides exposition and argument, this site also contains narrative scenes of places today, and reflections about philosophical issues lurking in the background.

Sprawling Places

E. Benjamin Skinner recorded the following conversation inside a brothel in Bucharest, Romania. Listen as a pimp offers Skinner and his translator a handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car.

From the archive:

In prior eras, the slave trade was conducted openly, with ads prominently posted and the slaves paraded and inspected like animals, often at public auctions. Today’s sex traffickers, the heirs to that tradition, try to keep their activities hidden, although the rest of the sex trade, the sale of the women’s services, is advertised on a scale that can only be characterized as colossal.

As a society, we’re repelled by the slavery of old. But the wholesale transport of women and girls across international borders and around the U.S. — to serve as prostitutes under conditions that in most cases are coercive at best — stirs very little outrage.

And from earlier this week (or, rather, from 1902):

The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

And from farther back, and farther afield:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

The Price of Life

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs -- students' declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year -- are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy -- or an ensemble of literacies -- will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can't yet envision.

The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading.

In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted today to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

Harvard To Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles For Faculty

IT may be a universal truth that war is hell, but in "One Soldier's War," Arkady Babchenko's jagged memoir of serving in the Russian army during the Chechen wars, nobody gets away unscathed, least of all the reader.

Babchenko's book was excerpted in the February issue of Harper's in a very sharp piece called The things they ate.

'One Soldier's War,' a memoir by Arkady Babchenko

George Packer, writing in the World Affairs Journal:

The Iraq War introduced entirely new kinds of cruelty to the world, so it’s strange how many of my memories are of kindness.

In wartime Iraq, perhaps in most wars, viciousness and generosity were never far apart. The menace in the streets of Baghdad was always overwhelming—the suspicious piles of roadside garbage, the dark sedans casing other cars, the checkpoint that wasn’t there thirty minutes ago, the hard stares in traffic, the hair trigger of American gunners, the heedless SUV convoys, and the explosions that always seemed to happen three streets away. In this national ruin, any act of kindness, even as small as offering someone a ride, created solidarity. You were always meeting someone who had run out of options, and someone else who would risk far more to help than he would in normal times. Perhaps it was part of their culture, and perhaps these were not normal times, but Iraqis lacked the sense of shame about heartfelt declarations and naked emotions that people in more secure, better functioning places possess naturally. All of this made them harsh and lovable, and it was possible to spend an hour with Haithem or Muna, or to see Abu Malik once every six months, and feel that more human business had been transacted than over a hundred New York lunches or dinners. The same was true of soldiers with whom I would have had nothing to discuss back at home. Without these connections, Iraq would have been unbearable.

Essential reading. Read it alongside the latest work of Drew Gilpin Faust.

Over Here: Iraq the Place vs. Iraq the Abstraction

A Letter to America boldly faces the question of how long the United States, with only six percent of the world’s population, can remain a global superpower. University of Oklahoma president David Boren explains with unsparing clarity why the country is at a crossroads and why decisive action is urgently needed. He draws on his experiences as the longest-serving chair of the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence and as a state governor and leader of a major public university.

America is in trouble because its people are losing faith in the country’s future. What the country needs, Boren asserts, are major reforms to restore the ability of our political system to act responsibly. We have shared values, and we should use them to replace cynicism with hope and the determination to build a better future. Bipartisan cooperation on behalf of national interests needs to replace destructive partisanship, and we should not rule out electing a president independent of both existing parties. We must fashion a post–Cold War foreign policy that fits twenty-first-century realities—including several contending superpowers. We must adopt campaign finance reform that restores political power to the voters, rather than special interests. Universal health care coverage, budget deficit reduction, affordable higher education, and a more progressive tax structure will strengthen the middle class.

Boren also describes how we can renew our emphasis on quality primary and secondary education, revitalize our spirit of community, and promote volunteerism. He urges the teaching of more American history and government, for without educated citizens our system cannot function and our rights will not be preserved. Unless we understand how we became great, we will not remain great. The plan Boren puts forward is ambitious and hopeful. It challenges Americans to look into the future, decide what we want to be and where we want to go, and then implement the policies and actions we need to take us there. A Rhodes Scholar, David Boren is President of the University of Oklahoma. A former governor of Oklahoma, he served as U.S. Senator from Oklahoma from 1979 to 1994 and chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1987 to 1993.

David Boren: A Letter To America

Our brains are terrible at assessing modern risks.

Here's how to think straight about dangers in your midst.

I. We Fear Snakes, Not Cars
II. We Fear Spectacular, Unlikely Events
III. We Fear Cancer But Not Heart Disease
IV. No Pesticide in My Backyard—Unless I Put it There
V. We Speed Up When We Put Our Seat belts On
VI. Teens May Think Too Much About Risk—And Not Feel Enough
VII. Why Young Men Will Never Get Good Rates on Car Insurance
VIII. We Worry About Teen Marijuana Use, But Not About Teen Sports
IX. We Love Sunlight But Fear Nuclear Power
X. We Should Fear Fear Itself

Psychology Today: 10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong

Dumbing down?

As college admissions officers sift through thousands of application essays penned by eager-to-please high school seniors, they increasingly encounter writing that sparkles a bit too brightly or shows a poise and polish beyond the years of a typical teenager.

With the scramble to get into elite colleges at a fever pitch and with a rising number of educational consultants and college essay specialists ready to give students a competitive edge, admissions officers are keeping a sharp lookout for essays that might have had an undue adult influence. In some admissions offices, such submissions receive the dubious distinction DDI, short for "Daddy Did It."

Colleges are now cross-referencing student essays against the SAT writing sample, and, if doubts linger, will ask for a graded writing sample or raise their concern with the student's high school guidance counselor. Harvard even passes along suspiciously strong essays to professors for a scholarly opinion.

College applications can be too good

World War I.... who would have thought there were original color photos of WWI? This site contains hundreds of photos taken by the French in the last two years of World War One.

World War One Color Photos