Mr. Sammler’s City: Hip young residents of the revived Lower East Side or Williamsburg need to know that it’s possible to kill a city, that the streets they walk daily were once no-go zones, that within living memory residents and companies were fleeing Gotham, that newsweeklies heralded the rotting of the Big Apple and movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy plausibly depicted New York as a nightmare peopled by freaks. That’s why it’s worth looking back at Mr. Sammler to understand why that decline occurred: we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. [City Journal]
Who needs credit?: Surprisingly, perhaps the fleetest country of all has been Argentina. Since it emerged from the financial crisis of 2001-02, it has been one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. It is expected to expand faster than most of its neighbours again this year. How has such a perennial economic miscreant proven so resilient to the credit crunch? Quite simply, it barely has any credit. [Economist]
We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppresed People: Tracing these stolen goods back to where the thefts occur lands us in some of the most wretched places on earth. What these countries have in common is an abundance of natural resources and plentiful political violence and corruption. All suffer from what Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs call “the resource curse.” Here dictators and insurgents sell off the country’s resources to foreigners, terrifying the people into submission while keeping the wealth for themselves. [Cato]
Paris has the Louvre of pawnshops: Even Rodin went to Credit Municipal of Paris, also known as ‘auntie,’ when he was down on his luck. And as times get tougher, the institution has begun accepting wine. [LA Times]
Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex: How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think. [Wired]
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