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David Owen has a new book, titled Green Metropolis, that will be released next week. His 2004 New Yorker essay “Green Manhattan” [PDF] is a classic. The book looks like an extended treatment of the same idea.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan–the most densely populated place in North America–rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

I think I forgot to post this a month or so ago when I couldn’t stop listening to it. Some genius had the amazing idea to remove the backing vocals from all the tracks on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. The result is kind of breathtaking, especially “God Only Knows”:

The difficulty and the peculiarity of these vocal lines can get obscured in the full versions. Just listen to the fugue section of that song. Man.

And of course, “Sloop John B,” my other favorite song from Pet Sounds:

(MetaFilterrific.)

George Packer on the death of Sultan Munadi: “It’s Always the Fixer Who Dies.”

Great, great, great AskMeFi thread: In the art forms you are experienced or well versed in, what kinds of stuff is notorious for being only liked by the experts, and what kinds of stuff is notorious for only being liked by less experienced or educated casual consumers?

Examples of artists (or works of art) beloved almost exclusively by other artists in their domain include Rothko, Linux, Cloud Gate, Yasujirō Ozu, Ernie Bushmiller, Rush, the screenplay “BALLS OUT” (pdf) and Paranoia Agent.

There are also some fun minor art-snob arguments, and mini-digressions on the nature of taste. As well as a terrific New Yorker essay I never read about the appeal of Charles Bukowski.

We’ve been talking a lot about the future of digitization, about how much digitization needs to improve, about the severe limits that digitization still imposes on many things—books, for instance.

So, here’s a change of pace. Here is the almost perfectly digitizable object, almost perfectly digitized.

Small objects, easy to photograph in their entirety? Check.

Defined number of important views? Check. (Obviously two.)

Standard set of metadata? Check. (And click on one of the images above to see an example.)

So, given the ideal material for a digital archive, the American Numismatic Society delivers. There’s a powerful search engine but their collection is pretty browsable, too. And, listen, I only collect coins that I intend to spend on the train, but I defy you not to get a little lost in these pages.

And every coin has its own stable permalink! Swoon!

The only thing missing is that you can’t heft the coins, feel their contours. Fair enough. But I’ll bet you could even generate 3D models from these images, using the depth information implied by the shadows. When I finally have a home 3D printer I’ll crank out some of these guys and send ’em around.

And you know, ancient coins are perfect tokens of historical imagination, especially when captured so crisply. They’re totally familiar but deeply strange. You can imagine keeping one in your pocket, feeling it in your hand.

Check these off the list. Now we just gotta get those books right.

If you don’t watch Mad Men, and haven’t read or don’t know about Phillip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, this doesn’t mean anything to you.

If you do, and have, these two guys seem as far apart as any two white men inhabiting New York in the sixties could reasonably be.

And yet, there’s something about Draper and Portnoy’s shared desire to jump out of history (the history of the world, the history of their own families), their sense that this is the time to do it, and that sex and language are the mechanisms to do so, that pulls the two together. If they met, I think they’d have a lot to say to each other.

(Inspired by this 40th-anniversary article about Portnoy’s Complaint in the Guardian.)

Joni Evans’s memoir-ish essay nicely connects the late Mad Men-era (in her case, of publishing, not advertising) to the digital present by way of an archaeology of office technology. It’s the intermediate transformations she registers that are more interesting, and maybe – arguably – more significant:

The Xerox machine meant that suddenly, not one manuscript was submitted to one publisher, but that 10 copies went to 10 publishers simultaneously. The first publisher to claim the book won, cutting a six-week process to six days or sometimes six hours.

Agents soon realized that they could auction books to publishers and not settle for the first bid. Knopf would bid against Putnam, Simon & Schuster would bid against Random House, and so on. The fax machine accelerated the process of signing contracts, and beamed manuscripts overseas for worldwide auctions.

Our lives changed. Agents descended on our formerly humble authors, empowering the new literary lions with Hollywood-like contracts and making us dizzy with new rules.

We were all drunk on the new attention. We hired public relations firms, sought Barbara Walters interviews and romanced the

I love Matt Novak’s blog Paleo-Future, which combines everything I love about paleoblogging and hot buttered futurism into a single delicious pie.

He hasn’t posted a ton lately, and really, going after mobile phones is low-hanging fruit, but I was still delighted with today’s look at portable phones (from a 1976 book titled Future Facts). It includes this quote:

For a while at least, the portaphone will remain a business tool or luxury item. In time, however, portaphones will get smaller and cheaper, just as transistor radios have.

First: “portaphones!” When did we stop applying multisyllabic prefixes to words? Probably around the same time “port-a” became uniquely associated with outdoor toilets.

Second: today, we would almost certainly have to reverse that analogy: “Over time, transistor radios became smaller and cheaper, just as celullar phones have today.” I consider this a sign of the analogy’s intrinsic merit.

Last: it’s easy to look at old predictions of the future with awe at what they get right and glee at what they get wrong. But this should be taken seriously as symptoms. They show how the past dreamed itself, and indeed, how it dreamed the present, in all of its possibilities and constraints, into being.

I married my wife because not long after we met, she told me that when she was a little girl, she would rehearse for a never-to-happen appearance on Reading Rainbow, reviewing her favorite book, Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.

That’s a true story.

Tom Ewing, on the ironies of music criticism becoming simultaneously more pop-friendly and less popular:

[I]f anything, rock criticism’s become less populist over the last decade, as the spiraling decline of album sales makes it tougher to frame successful records as public events and easier to make niche sensations seem like they matter. And as we’ll see, there were definite limits to the types of pop that could win over wider audiences.

On a personal level, of course, the idea of a pro-pop revolution feels right because it validates the many hours I spent arguing about it on the net. Making niche events feel somehow important is something the Internet is horribly good at: it turns arguments fractal, lets your bunch of digital friends and foes feel like the world when it no way is.