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The Time Tax
Mazes of coordination, conference and liaison tenuously connect these sprawling and randomly fractionated empires with one another. The mazes are too labyrinthine even to be kept mapped and open, let alone to serve as reliable and sensitive channels of interdepartmental understanding, or channels of pooled information about specific places, or chan
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to the food in
... See moreMichael Pollan • ‘Cooked’: A DIY Manifesto
“I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.”
Michael Lewis • The Fifth Risk
But in any case, this is a huge idea, and one that America desperately needs in these trying times. For half a century, we assumed that America was this golden goose — the greatest industrial nation in the world, blah blah — that would reliably pump out massive amounts of stuff, and that we were all essentially just the custodians of this cornucopi... See more
Book review: "Abundance"
The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened
amazon.com