Wired

Parag Khanna and Fareed Zakaria in Wired | 'The Post-National, Post-American World as a League of Regions'

Communications — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:51:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...Two new books – The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria and The Second World by Parag Khanna – argue that the new global economy power will be more dispersed and multipolar.

"Mr. Zakaria believes we are experiencing modern history's third great power shift, after the rise of the West from the 15th century on, and the rise of the U.S. in the 19th century. But he argues that this latest transition is not so much about the decline of America as it is about “the rise of the rest,” and by that he means much more than simply China or India. The end result will be a “landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now – one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.” Mr. Khanna similarly predicts that we are headed toward a “global, multi-civilizational, multipolar” world with three superpowers: the U.S., China and the European Union.

"Each of the Big Three powers will assert its influence differently, but the intense demand for energy and resources means that the underlying goal will be the same. And the main battlefield for this geopolitical competition, Mr. Khanna argues, is the “second world” – about 40 strategically important “transition” states whose relationships with the superpowers have the capacity to tip the balance...LINK

Pop-Up Cities

Articles — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:14:00 -0400

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world -- the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

McKinsey wanted to know if the developer, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation,… more

The Laptop Crusade

Articles — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:19:27 -0400

Yves Béhar sits at a wide worktable on the lofted second floor of fuseproject, his San Francisco design studio, surrounded by windows and whiteboards and nearly a dozen foam laptops. He is tall and tan, with a surfer’s mess of curls and the quiet, easy manner of someone who just woke up from a nap. “There are two types of projects,” he says. “There are the stylist projects -- the ones you sign with your signature. Then there are the ones that are going to be difficult.” He looks at his pile of discarded ideas, none of them much alike,… more

SUV Redemption Sticker

Articles — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 06:00:00 -0400

In Washington, DC, eco-vandals smear SUV door handles with dog crap. In Santa Cruz, California, protestors tag more than 60 gas-guzzlers with anti-oil graffiti. In Los Angeles, a Caltech grad student is sentenced to eight years in prison for trashing more than 120 SUVs around the city. It's almost enough to make you feel bad for SUV drivers. After all, some of them are green, too -- just not as hardcore about it.

Now they have TerraPass, a clever eco-capitalism experiment. Launched by a group of Wharton Business School classmates, the startup sells a decal that drivers can slap on… more

Rise of the Green Machine

Articles — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 03:00:00 -0400

Toyota promised me 60. The spec sheet on the 2005 Prius clearly states that the car gets five dozen miles per gallon of gas on city streets. But I'm test-driving a beige hatchback along Sepulveda Boulevard on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and according to the touchscreen on the dash, I'm topping out at 49.7.

Granted, 49.7 miles per gallon is at least twice what all the gas hogs around me are getting. But whenever I hit the accelerator, no matter how gradually, my mileage dips. I must be doing something wrong. I click the screen over to… more

The Bitter Pill

Articles — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

At 28, Joe has become something of an expert at heroin detox -- he's tried it nine times. Between programs, he's attempted to quit on his own. Once, when the cravings got the best of him, he tried to knock himself out by hitting his head against a brick wall. So late last year, when Joe checked himself into a New York outpost of Phoenix House, the country's largest residential rehab program, he knew exactly what to expect: the plastic cups of methadone to wear down his dependence, the sedated days and sleepless nights, the chill of the toilet seat,… more

Multiply and be Fruitful

Articles — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

In nations both rich and poor, families are having fewer children. As people move to crowded urban areas, and as women gain more educational and economic opportunities, countries are beginning to see their populations decline. This could have grave consequences for their economies.

Global fertility rates are now only half what they were in the 1970s. Many demographers accordingly believe that the population of the world will begin to contract within the lifetime of today's children. Before this occurs globally, the populations of many European nations will shrink, as will those of Japan, China and possibly the… more

Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future

Articles — Wed, 31 Dec 2003 04:00:00 -0500

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust -- fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas. Tennenhouse was intrigued enough to authorize several hundred thousand dollars in funding. Then he moved on to the next bizarre… more

Fat Pipe Dream

Articles — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

"My dream is big, OK?"

Coming from a man who used to boast of having a 300-year business plan, that's saying a lot. But Masayoshi Son isn't exaggerating. His latest master plan includes nothing less than the demolition of Japan's telecom industry, and, not incidentally, the revival of his moribund company, Softbank. To get there, he's hawking next-generation, superfast, supercheap DSL to the Japanese masses.

He may no longer be the world's eighth-richest man -- Softbank's stock price is down 98 percent from its bubble peak -- but Son still moves with an impressive entourage. A cadre of yes-men, crowded around him… more

Born Again

Articles — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400

So much depends upon a lone water molecule. Take the alkaloid C17H19NO3, better known as morphine, a painkiller no hospital can do without. Lop off two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, as German chemist Augustus Matthiessen first did in 1869, and you're left with apomorphine, which is less effective at dulling pain than a shot of Southern Comfort. Instead, its most obvious effect is to cause rapid and severe vomiting -- useful when a toddler drinks Liquid-Plumer, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of pharmaceutical legend.

Like so many compounds concocted during that first golden age of drug research, when… more