Word: alongism
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...fact, there are two cyclic waves in American history: one for politics and the general national spirit, the other for economic growth and contraction. Think of the two wave systems as running along the same timeline but perpendicular to each other - politics on the horizontal, weaving left to right; economics on the vertical, weaving up and down. Each affects the other, but unpredictably. A political or economic era can be as brief as 10 years or as long as a quarter-century, but the politics and economics don't move obviously in sync. Prosperity, for instance, can reinforce the "natural...
...industry is comatose, yet even that has a silver lining. We have a moment to pause and reflect before we begin building again. When big-time real estate development resumes, we can move beyond the incoherent, anything-goes paradigm of the postwar era and produce more places to live along the lines of the towns and cities everyone instinctively loves, communities designed to become true communities. "The days where we're just building sprawl forever," Obama said in February in South Florida, "those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats - everybody recognizes that that's not a smart...
...same goes for our individual senses of lifestyle entitlement. During the perma-'80s, way too many of us were operating, consciously or not, with a dreamy gold-rush vision of getting rich the day after tomorrow and then cruising along as members of an impossibly large leisure class. (That was always the yuppie dream: an aristocratic life achieved meritocratically.) Now that our age of self-enchantment has ended, however, each of us, gobsmacked and reality-checked by the new circumstances, is recalibrating expectations for the timing and scale of our particular version of the Good Life. Which, of course, fuels...
...state of shock. In a matter of months, half the value of the stock market and more than half of Wall Street's corporate pillars have disappeared, along with several million jobs. Venerable corporate enterprises are teetering. But as we gasp in terror at our half glass of water, we really can - must - come to see it as half full as well as half empty. Now that we're accustomed to the unthinkable suddenly becoming not just thinkable but actual, we ought to be able to think the unthinkable on the upside, as America plots its reconstruction and reinvention...
Caro was intrigued enough by the topic to want to see for himself. He watched the force feeding regimen on farms from California to upstate New York to France, interviewed the dedicated (and often aggressive) animal activists who are trying to shut down the industry and, along the way, confronted his own food demons. Caro, author of a new book about the debate, The Foie Gras Wars, talked to TIME about why Donald Duck is a force to be reckoned with, the true goals of the animal rights camp and why he won't be craving foie gras any time...