Saturday, March 20, 2004

Abandon cities? Posted here Saturday, March 20, 2004 at 10:59:02 AM     Since the logic here helped move me to the remote, I have to think it affects others. Of course it makes the cities cheaper,and that make them atractive...hmmm..?? Cities soon bounced back from 9/11 and, despite repeated warnings of terror attacks, are now said to be enjoying a renaissance. Eric Klinenberg asks if they will survive this latest shock The network responsible for bombing three trains in central Madrid on 11 March wants you to think twice before descending into the Underground, boarding a city bus, or strolling down Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. But do the Madrid attacks augur a new era of urban anxiety and insecurity, scaring city-dwellers, corporate offices and large retailers out of Europe's metropolises and into the quiet countryside and suburbs? Will terrorism kill great cities, and the long histories of political organisation, cultural imagination and social integration that they embody? http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSTemplate_NS&;newTop=Section%3A+Front+Page&newDisplayURN=Section%3A+Front+Page ********

white black deepinequality where it hurts Posted here Saturday, March 20, 2004 at 10:44:14 AM     Creative, and distresing reult. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/arts/20DEVA.html or Devah Pager, a young sociologist from Honolulu, "kulia i ka nu'u" — "to strive for the summit" — means to do research that can influence policy, a realistic quest for her if the last few years are any indication. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean. Ms. Pager's study won the American Sociological Association's award for the best dissertation of the year in August, prompting a Wall Street Journal columnist to write about it. Howard Dean repeated her main finding in stump speeches and interviews throughout his glory days as the front-runner. ********