My brother is teaching a semester in London, and he casually video Skyped me last week to show me around his apartment, which is small but charming. I reciprocated by hauling up the cover of the e-book I am reading, and shared my desktop to show a YouTube performance of ...read more

Emerging transformational technologies, as economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, do not advance the economy by consistent predictable increments. Rather, they disrupt and destroy, bankrupting entire industries by offering clearly superior alternatives. Historically, however, these technological advances have rarely been recognized and welcomed when they first appeared. For the most part, they ...read more

President Obama exhorted Senate leaders just over a month ago to pass the health care bill. “We are on the precipice,” he declared, of health care change. At the time, I figured he’d simply misspoken. A precipice, after all, is a situation of great peril or the edge of a ...read more

There are two realities "out there" now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let's call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a "consumer" economy to resume ...read more