Sublime

The American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, are the characters we envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts. They marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion

The consolidation of vast wealth in the hands of a few industrialists, and a burgeoning population of new millionaires, required moral justification.

Over half of American income is earned in twenty-two metropolitan areas.

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Since the boom of finance-driven salaries catapulted the “working rich” to the top of the income ladder in the 1990s, there has emerged an inverse relationship between leisure and earnings, such that elites now have less leisure time than their poorer, less-educated counterparts.

These searches for social matches, for new information, and for new value take many people—especially younger people, specialized workers, and foreigners—to larger cities,

Capitalists build cities designed for bourgeois identity performance and commerce only to invest in them so heavily that all that can afford to exist are carefully managed environments: postmodern corporate mishmashes of symbols and architectural referents that have no discernible connection to a past, only a technologically mediated amalgam of