Social capital, and art
Another argument against faceless suburban sprawl:
Social capital: it's who you know, not what you know. (But you knew that.) Your contacts determine more about your career success and your earning potential than your academic achievements. The best predictor of low crime rates in a neighborhood is not income, or education levels, or cops on the street, but the number of neighbors who know each others' first names. If you are socially isolated, it shortens your life expectancy as much as smoking does (so the smoking groups who huddle outside Manhattan and Dublin bars probably come out even.) Every ten minutes added to your daily commute cuts your social capital by ten per cent.
But joining a group - any group - cuts your risk of dying prematurely this year in half.
Dervala, summarizing Bowling alone by Robert Putnam
In other news: The Japanese superflat artist Takashi Murakami has a show at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street. near 3rd Avenue in New York (found it on OTBKB). His work is very colourful, pop-art-ish, leaning heavily on animé and Yellow Submarine-era flower power imagery; he had a short animated film in the Venice Biennale a few years back that was one of the highlights of the year. Could I ask some kind art-loving New York resident to have a look, and tell me whether there is a catalogue available?
posted by Udge @ 08:26
3 Comments:
It's not too far from where I work. I won't make any promises since I rarely find myself in midtown on the eastside outside of the office (even for lunch). But the weather's getting nice, finally, so I'll try to remember.
Hey, I used your comment to expand upon an argument about "hate" and appropriate expressions of anger in context. Hope you don't mind. LOL. You inspired me.
Love that quotation, thanks!
One of the reasons we bought our house was that when we first came to see it, the owner stood on the front lawn and told us the names of all the neighbors, at least the ones who own. It's harder to meet the renters, who tend to come and go.
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