Once, society celebrated money-making chancers and lauded prudent hard workers. Today, says a new book, it is plying us with dumbed-down ‘stuff’ in order to keep us infantilised.

The cultural contradictions of consumerism

On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.

Where do all the neurotics live?

Next time you are lost in an unfamiliar city, console yourself with the knowledge that the layout of its roads are probably much the same as in any other.

City road networks grow like biological systems

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

...

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus: Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land.

This began as an example I created for a student in the fall of 2006, and I just recently got a chance to document it properly. Alaska and Hawaii were initially left out for simplicity's sake, but I felt guilty because of the sad emails received from zipdecode visitors. Unfortunately, the two states don't "work" because there aren't enough roads to outline their shape, so I left them out permanently. More technical details can be found here.

all streets | ben fry

We picked some of the best brains in town to write an account of the next 17 years

Washington's Future, a History

A mind-boggling investigation of the all-pervasive, constantly morphing presence of the Pentagon in daily life—a real-world Matrix come alive

Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex—an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives.

From iPods to Starbucks to Oakley sunglasses, historian Nick Turse explores the Pentagon’s little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with the products and companies that now form the fabric of America. Turse investigates the remarkable range of military incursions into the civilian world: the Pentagon’s collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers; its outlandish schemes to weaponize the wild kingdom; its joint ventures with the World Wrestling Federation and NASCAR. He shows the inventive ways the military, desperate for new recruits, now targets children and young adults, tapping into the “culture of cool” by making “friends” on MySpace.

A striking vision of this brave new world of remote-controlled rats and super-soldiers who need no sleep, The Complex will change our understanding of the militarization of America. We are a long way from Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex: this is the essential book for understanding its twenty-first-century progeny.

The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives

The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church.

If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?

"Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport," Jay Leno once said. "The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances."

"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter," said Marlene Dietrich.

Friends Indeed?

Urban planners at the end of the 19 century faced a "vexing" problem, writes Jill Jonnes: "how to connect the wealthy and influential island of Manhattan to the mainland and the rest of America." In Conquering Gotham, Jonnes chronicles the effort to make this connection, at least architecturally, with the construction of Pennsylvania Station and its tunnels. Jonnes ably recounts the technical challenges posed by a pioneering venture of such proportions, offering a refresher course in New York history along the way. But at its heart the book is an admiring biography of the "cultured, steely engineer" behind the plan: Alexander Cassatt (brother of artist Mary), whose efforts were stymied by politics, real estate battles, the limits of engineering -- and the fact that he was not from New York.

Globalization 1.0