Influx

Author Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom) does not appear to have many positive things to say about technology, in fact, he’s something of a Luddite. In a recent talk given at the Hay Festival in Columbia, Franzen argues that e-books are bad for both the reader and the writer,...

It’s sometimes hard to get to the facts and December retail sales are no different. With dozens of experts weighing in and talking up the holiday season, now the official government numbers are in and most markets suffered. It was only autos with a 8% increase that held the numbers up,...

A nice piece of long-form content from the WSJ that explains the European crisis.

There’s much talk around the web today about a printer that’s been developed by a London consulting company called-BERG. Here’s the film. Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo. Here’s what’s important… 1. Printers are the most boring things...

Lowering the barriers of entry into the world of creativity is something technology has been doing for a while, but in the last few years it seems to have accelerated. Music making and DJ tools have turned your average hipster with some basic music knowledge into a more accomplished creator. If you...

Think of a viewing center for deer in National Park, one can imagine some kind of old hut, perhaps it might be inspired by the 1920s (the golden age of National Parks) and on the surface it doesn’t sound like an excuse to create something extraordinary from an architectural perspective. However,...

As the economy fluctuates and there’s no clear direction, US shoppers are now developing and enhancing their coping and survival strategies. IRI has done a tremendous amount of work to understand how consumers are adapting to the economic landscape and how their behavior is being transformed....

We’ve seen a number of attempts to re-enact the crash of 2008 from the perspective of the lead players. It’s all been well documented; “Too Big to Fail”, the crisis weekend and the search for white knights to save the troubled banks. Margin Call a movie written and directed by JC...

While the “local” trend has been around for a while, it’s mostly been focused around the “soft” things like farmer’s markets and some large corporations acknowledged the trend’s presence by trying harder to appear more “local” and to be more...

If you want an trip into the “money culture” that OWS appears to be rallying against, you need to go no further than look to the trade publications that covered that world. The perfect chronicler of the culture was Trader Monthly- who for the best part of the C21st has recorded and...

Dave over at ETF Digest (a required read for planners) posted an interesting chart yesterday that shows how the correlation between consumer confidence and spending, that had been so reliable, has broken apart. The logical assumption obviously being that the less confidence consumers had in the...

Occupy Wall Street has captured people’s imagination worldwide and now questions are starting to be asked about the movement’s objectives and future. If you happen to be in NYC this Wednesday evening, you have a chance to meet some of the people involved in OWS, hear their perspective and ask...

It would easy to report that America’s food tastes are leaning towards the organic, healthy, natural and pure, but while this is true, there’s a new desire for “man food” that tastes great, but does you more harm than good and there in lies its appeal A great example is the recently...

Philips has always been a company that’s dedicated resources to visioning the future. I’s latest effort for Dutch Design Week is particularly intriguing in the way it integrates microbes and nature into the home. Their idea is to create a home based ecosystem that filters, processes and...

If you had talked to political experts at the beginning of 2011 and they would have told you Americans would never do what Europeans have done for years and take to the streets, but that has now changed with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which with the backing of the Unions has...