recursion

Blame It on Canada: Vancouver urban planning guru preaches high-density tower living in San Francisco. I thought this was interesting because it talks about the similarities between San Francisco and Vancouver, and how Vancouver solved their housing crisis. While informed by Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander, they went with huge, dense towers amid open space that sounds more like Modernism than New Urbanism. I would've liked to have seen this presentation.

Big and Blue in the USA. Everyone's favorite suburb skeptic James Howard Kunstler talks about the link between suburban, auto-dependent living and obesity and depression. Apparently, Kunstler writes a column for Orion. I love his books The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere.

Here's two interviews with Paul Krugman, economics professor, Clark Medal winner, and New York Times columnist. Krugman has a new book out soon: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century.

1. Liberal Oasis interview
2. Buzzflash interview

In the Liberal Oasis interview, Krugman makes an interesting point about globalization. He's primarily pro-globalization, but aware that there are problems with it, particularly in Latin America. He notes that until we get America back on its feet, your postion on globalization is more or less irrelevant:

Liberal Oasis: Are issues such as trade and globalization more relevant to the long-term effects of the economy?

Paul Krugman: I have to say those issues - they seemed terribly big issues a few years ago. And I'd like to imagine us back to a situation where they become top issues.

But at this point, they're really second-order.

The key thing, in terms of the state of the world right now, is that the United States has gone mad.

Let's get some return to fiscal and environmental and general governmental sanity in this country, and then we can talk about we manage globalization.

I think this is a good attitude for all anti-Bush partisians to have. Let's bury the hachet until November 2004. Then we can pick up where we left off.

When Words Fail Us.

I thought of this passage when I heard the news:

The flat-topped identical twin towers, currently coholders of the runner-up distinction of being the second-tallest buildings in the world, are square-shaped and rise straight up without ornament to a height of 1,350 feet. Although in good weather they can be seen from up to fifty miles away, standing on the horizon like chimneys or milk cartons or salt and pepper shakers, depending on the distance, the towers are more tolerated than admired by New Yorkers, and the large plaza at the base of the towers is generally avoided in any weather. The two buildings create strong winds that buffet passersby, and when you get close to them they seem to loom over you in a way that sometimes makes me think of the colossal ruined statue encountered in the middle of a trackless desert in Shelly's poem "Ozymandias": "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone" somehow survived where "Nothing beside remains."

-- Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place, 1990

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley