One of the key insights in Richard Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset (Harper, 2010) is that rapid transit increases the exchange of ideas and thereby spurs innovation. Where the car used to provide this mass connection, now it hinders it. Increasingly, our cognitive surplus is sitting traffic. Ideas are networks, Steven Johnson argues in… Continue reading The Essential Tension of Ideas
Campus sidewalks meander between places of interest, connecting buildings and parking lots in a maze of concrete stripes. Often where their right angles turn near grassy areas between them and another building or parking lot, there are paths leading off diagonally. These forking paths are called “desire lines,” so named because they show where people… Continue reading Desiring Lines: The Path More Traveled
“Survivalism isn’t about staying alive. It’s about choosing how you die,” writes Neil Strauss in Emergency (It Books, 2009). Strauss, who’s formerly written books with rock stars, porn stars, and pick-up artists, stepped up his game with this one. In the wake of 9/11 and hurricane Katrina, Strauss had a bit of an epiphany. Acknowledging… Continue reading Scatological Eschatologies: The End is Nigh
In his epic, futurist tome The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler (1980) wrote that we need to “move from a Second Wave culture that [has] emphasized the study of things in isolation from one another to a Third Wave culture that emphasizes contexts, relationships, and wholes” (p. 300-301), what Herman Witkin calls “field dependence.” Taking the… Continue reading Thinking Systems
The music scene of the 1990s was confused. At the turn of that last decade, Hip-hop was displacing Metal as the top-selling genre, and Nirvana was allegedly setting off the so-called “alternative revolution,” yet Guns ‘N Roses was all over MTV with opulent, twelve-minute videos and all over the charts with an epic double CD.… Continue reading Race for the Prize: 90s Music Biographies
