Park Slope, Brooklyn, is just a microcosm of the slippery slope upon which so many of us are finding ourselves these days. We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our own better judgment, as well as our collective self-interest. Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best

While legends of violent meat-eating Homo sapiens vanquishing tribes of Neanderthals still garner rapt attention at dinner parties, there is little evidence that such events ever took place. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence for the less dramatic assertion that a combination of tools, hunting, gathering, and food-sharing permitted what

The more we are asked to adapt to the biases of our machinery, the less human we become.

The ideal of home ownership was the fruit of a public-relations strategy crafted after World War II—corporate and government leaders alike believed that home owners would have more of a stake in an expanding economy and greater allegiance to free-market values than renters. Functionally, though, it led to a self-perpetuating cycle: The more that

Make no mistake about it: by the late Clinton-Blair years, both the Right and the mainstream Left had accepted the basic premise adapted from systems theory that the economy was a natural system whose stability depended on the government’s getting out of the way and allowing self-interested people to work toward a dynamic equilibrium. Gone were the

Commerce is good. It’s the way people create and exchange value.

Today, thanks to TV, print, billboards, and Internet banners, the average person sees over three thousand advertising messages a day. And deep down, all those ads are saying the same thing.

as originally pointed out by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is that by removing something from its original context or setting, we kill the sense of awe that we might attach to its uniqueness. Great works of art were once intrinsically a part of their settings.

Going into debt, distancing ourselves from our neighbors, and striving for conformity became equated with freedom.