In the Atlantic’s 150th anniversary issue, they asked a variety of authors, inventors, intellectuals and cultural figures to comment on “the future of the American Idea and the greatest challenges to it.” The responses are interesting to read, even as many of the respondents struggle to define the American Idea, much less predict its future.

John Updike, George Will, Google Founder and CEO Eric Schmidt, Edward O. Wilson, Nancy Pelosi, Greil Marcus, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Pinsky, Sam Harris, Frank Gehry, Judith Martin and many others participated. Many of the reactions align the state of the American Idea with our country’s current direction, rendering it bleak, while others are more hopeful. Some are creepy (Tim LaHaye, the author of the Left Behind screeds), some are shallow (Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, whose piece could be a tourist brochure), and some are outright pricks (Tom Wolfe, whose patronizing essay makes me relieved I never bothered to pick up I Am Charlotte Simmons).

Continue reading The American Idea →

Fast Company magazine has an amazing article about Johnathan Goodwin, a Wichita mechanic who’s able to modify cars to provide drastically more running time on dramatically less fuel (or biodiesel).

As the article reports, “The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered–the poor man’s version of a Goodwin conversion–he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% fewer emissions.”

Continue reading Grease Is Good →

Chris Colin has a damning article at SFGate.com documenting the workplace harassment faced by Kurdish-American mechanic Hamid Sayadi after September 11th. Sayadi, who was granted amnesty in the United States in 1977 after fleeing Iraq, alleges he was called a terrorist, had his tires slashed and had his lunch box inspected by his superior (for fear of a bomb being inside); he’d worked for his employer, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., since 1990. The last straw? Being strip-searched by security when he attended a company-sponsored “Mission Accomplished” party after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

I doubt this is an isolated incident; I can’t imagine the barrage of hostility people of Middle Eastern descent have had to endure over the past six years. Of course, American ignorance isn’t a finely wielded tool–my best friend, who is of Indian descent, has been called “a Palestinian terrorist” and “Osama Bin Laden” by thoughtless pigs on the street. If this is the new America we’ve chosen, let me offer a thought for our updated national anthem: a series of oinks and squeals.