The National's new Album is Streaming

Probably old news for enlightened TCD readers, but the new National album is streaming on the New York Times website. Check it out here if you haven't already.

Who's Your Favorite New York Times Writer?

A classic Gawker gimmick: Who's Your Favorite New York Times writer, and what does that say about you?

My two favorites - David Leonhardt, who appears to be also be Stephen Colbert's favorite, and Joe Nocera, who's been on book leave forever and a day - aren't actually on there.

But of the ones that are, I'm apparently terrified that people will find out I don't actually read the New York times.

I'm Surprised They Didn't Just Give Them All Ritalin

Rural school districts are starting to deploy WiFi on school buses for long commutes, or long trips for sports teams. According to the article, "as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops."

Imagine that! You provide an outlet for teenage energy and they start behaving.

As I said in the title, I am surprised they didn't spend the WiFi money on more pills for the students.

The Suburbs Will Be The Slums of the Future Rant

The latest entry in the "End is Nigh for the Suburbs" series. Briefly, the unifying idea here is that suburban sprawl and McMansions will one day be the place where the poorest amongst us live, when all the rich people have moved back to the cities, or the inner-ring of suburbs that are walkable and require less driving. The most-distant suburbs are too far from jobs, and someday gas prices will be too high to rely on cars for long daily commutes.

Sounds great doesn't it? Whereas the 50's - 60's American Dream focused on leaving behind the slums of the inner-city for a pastoral and tranquil suburban dream, now the American Dream is supposedly just the reverse: Leaving behind the suburbs, where instead of a Green utopia, we've ended up with a traffic-clogged, chain-store dominated, culture-less dystopia.

All of us smart, young, well-educated, wealthy and, let's be honest, mostly white, folks are smart enough to abandon the suburbs. The creative class will all live in cities. And since the Creative Class is apparently the future of America, the future of America is an Urban one.

Sorry, I'm just not buying it. And I'm as much of an urban dweller as there is. I love to walk or bike or mass-transit, hate the 'burbs, and can't imagine ever living there. I'd love to believe that the future of America is one of high-speed rail, connecting lively cities, full of dense, diverse neighborhoods.

But the American Dream is and always has been a DETACHED house with a yard. In The Last Harvest, a fascinating book by architecture professor and critic Witold Rybczynski, he asserts that it's not just in the post-WWII period that Americans have longed for a life outside of cities. It was indeed the founding principle of our country. The quest for open space that brought Europeans to America, the myth-making related to Manifest Destiny and the open expanses of the West, the utopic-visions surrounding many early suburbs, all of it was simply capturing the mood of Americans, their need for space.

The simple truth is that the majority of Americans want to live in a single-family house, not attached to any other dwelling (think town-houses), with at least a small yard, and a spot off the street to park their car. Many cities are made up of just such neighborhoods, especially the newer cities of the Sunbelt.

But think about that for a second. How can you possibly have the density required for mass-transit, ground floor retail and carless neighborhoods if everyone is living in a detached, single-family home? I'll answer my own rhetorical question to say that "You can't."

And what that means is that the future of America will not see an abandonment of the suburbs.

There are so many other reasons to be skeptical of an urban future for America: restrictive land-use policies, rampant NIMBYISM, over-funding of roads and airports, under-funding of mass-transit and rail, among others. All of these prevent denser development.

But all you need to know is:

1. Most Americans want a little space of their own.

2. Our country is still mostly empty space, and can quite comfortably provide the space that every American is seeking.

So to all of you predicting suburban slums and booming cities for America, I say you're making a prediction based on what you WANT to happen, rather than on what WILL happen.

Addendum to previous post

In today's New York Times, there's a SWEET interactive that walks you through the famous werewolf movies from the past 70 years. You can watch the trailer and read a plot summary of each. Worth the time. Go to it here.

Cool infographic: Walking in Holden's footsteps

From The New York Times comes a sweet infographic that tracks Holden's path through NYC with a lot of accompanying information.

Check it out here.

Survivor of both atomic bombs dies at 93

In today's New York Times they reported on the ultimate survival story:

The only official survivor of both the atomic blasts to hit Japan in World War II has died.

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima.

Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than 2 miles away from ground zero. His eardrums were ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.

Russia plans to deflect a huge asteroid that could potentially hit earth

This story is straight out of the movies...click here for the full story.

Russia’s top space researchers will hold a closed-door meeting to plan a mission to deflect 99942 Apophis, an asteroid that will fly close to Earth two decades from now, said Anatoly N. Perminov, the head of Russia’s space agency, during an interview on Russian radio on Wednesday.

Mr. Perminov said Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of destruction, is about three times the size of the Tunguska meteorite, apparently the cause of a 1908 explosion in Siberia that knocked over an estimated 80 million trees. He said that according to his experts’ calculation, there was still time to design a spacecraft that could alter Apophis’s path before it made a dangerous swing toward Earth.

“I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” he said, adding, “We’re talking about people’s lives here. It’s better to spend several million dollars and create this system, which would not allow a collision to happen, than wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people.”

The Dude Abides

In today's New York Times, there's an interesting article on how The Big Lebowski has gone from sweet movie, to cult classic, to now academic study piece.

Read it here.


“The Big Lebowski” has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and a drunken annual festival that took root in Louisville, Ky., and has spread to other cities. The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books, including “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” and the forthcoming “The Tao of the Dude.”

The Jobless Rate for People Like You: A New York Times interactive graphic

Not all groups have felt the recession equally. This interactive graphic from the New York Times allows you compare unemployment rates across demographic groups (race, age, gender). Some of the data is shocking.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html

Second City celebrates its 50th Anniversary

Check out this interactive graphic from today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/15/arts/20091216_SECONDCITY_TIMELINE.html

New York Times slideshow: Hunting in Greenland

Check it here: The Hunters of Greenland

Do we need the US Postal Service?

The Postal Service is a mess. They're hemorrhaging cash, people are transferring their bills, payments, and correspondences online and it turns out that jacking the cost of postage 2 cents every year isn't going to provide enough new revenue to cover costs. Below is a little more detail:

From the NY Times:
Although your mailbox may be overflowing with catalogs and a few holiday cards may have started to appear, the United States Postal Service is in crisis. For fiscal year 2009, the Postal Service reported a net loss of $3.8 billion, despite more than $6 billion in cost cuts. Meanwhile, total mail volume fell by nearly 26 billion pieces, or 13 percent.

We still need the Postal Service for now...too many people still don't have computers, consistent access to the internet, or the online savvy to move their finances, etc. online. But do we need it in ten years? I doubt it. I'm not calling the full demise of the Postal Service, but certainly a reduction in services and service days offered and a significant downsizing of employees and benefits.

In a world where print media outlets are being shuttered almost daily, can we really picture a long life for the ultimate paper-based business?

Atlantic Yards Project in Brooklyn Clears Legal Hurdle

The last major obstacle to a groundbreaking for the massive $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn fell Tuesday when New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, dismissed a challenge to the state’s use of eminent domain on behalf of the developer, Bruce C. Ratner.

Mr. Ratner, whose 22-acre development has been delayed for three years by a flurry of lawsuits, the collapse of the credit and real estate markets and a glut of luxury housing, plans to begin selling tax-free bonds next month to finance the development’s cornerstone project: an 18,000-seat basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues near downtown.

For the full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/nyregion/25yards.html?_r=1&hp

Col. Lewis Millett, Who Led ‘Bayonet Hill’ Charge, Dies at 88

This is just an interesting story...

When he became a company commander in the Korean War, serving as a captain in the 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, he seemed a visage from battlefields past with his red handlebar mustache. On Feb. 7, 1951, he employed a tactic of bygone wars with a fury that overwhelmed the enemy.

During the fighting near Osan, South Korea, Captain Millett’s unit encountered Communist troops atop a spot called Hill 180.

It would be remembered as Bayonet Hill for what the military historian Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall would call “the most complete bayonet charge by American troops since Cold Harbor,” a reference to the carnage at an 1864 Civil War battle in Virginia.

After ordering his men to fix bayonets, Captain Millett charged up the hill in front of them in the face of heavy fire, blasting away with his carbine, throwing grenades and, most spectacularly, wielding his bayonet when he encountered three enemy soldiers in a V-shaped gun position.

“I assaulted an antitank rifle crew,” he told Military History magazine in 2002. “The man at the point was the gunner. I bayoneted him. The next man reached for something, I think it was a machine pistol, but I bayoneted him — got him in the throat.”

The third soldier had a submachine gun.

“I guess the sight of me, red-faced and screaming, made him freeze,” he recalled. “Otherwise he would have killed me. I lunged forward and the bayonet went into his forehead. With the adrenaline flowing you’re strong as a bull. It was like going into a watermelon.”

Captain Millett was wounded by grenade fragments, but his men took the hill. President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor in July 1951. As the citation put it, “His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder.”

Read the full obituary here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/us/19millett.html?hpw

Very cool graphic from today's New York Times (click on it)

Read the full article too: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/weekinreview/15barboza.html?ref=weekinreview

From The Times...a great graphic of interesting inventions