Raleigh may be at the top of all those "where to live" lists for yuppies, but it's also the sixth most dangerous city for pedestrians.

The history of America is the history of the automobile industry: it starts in fields and garages and ends in boardrooms and dumps; it starts with daredevils and tinkerers and ends with bureaucrats and congressmen; it starts with a sense of here-goes-let’s-hope-it-works and ends with help-help-help. We tend to think of it as an American history that opens, as if summoned by the nature of the age, early in the last century, when the big mills and factories were already spewing smoke above Flint and Detroit, but we tend to be wrong. The history of the car is far older and stranger than you might suppose. Its early life is like the knock-around life one of the stars of the ’80s lived in the ’70s, Stallone before Rocky, say, picking up odd jobs, working the grift, and, of course, porn. The first automobile turned up outside Paris in 1789, when Detroit was an open field. (The hot rod belonged to the Grand Armée before it belonged to Neal and Jack.) It was another of the great innovations that seemed to appear in that age of revolution. (via)

GM says the Volt will get 230 miles per gallon in city driving. More astounding, Nissan says its electric car (the Leaf) will get 367 mpg. Of course the carbon cost of electricity generation (*cough* *cough* coal plants) needs to be accounted for, which will make the Volt roughly equivalent to a 55 mpg vehicle—still a potential gamechanger in a nation addicted to the automobile.

Friday night in Jersey links.

* My eighth Infinite Summer post this morning on brains, rats, happiness, and the problem of atheism drew some really great comments both from my regular readers and other IJ readers; check them out.

* From @cfoster, participating in that thread: news of Inherent August.

* Topher says Dollhouse season two will live in the shadow of "Epitaph One."

* When does a Prius have the same environmental impact as a Hummer? The 95 percent of the time it’s parked.

* Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God. Via Boing Boing.

* And what do Slate readers fear? Their top five apocalypses.

Sunday links.

* How Neil Armstrong ruined science fiction.

* Increasing cell phone use may be largely responsible for highway fatality numbers that remain static in the face of widespread safety improvements. If you're looking for hyperbolic commentary on this subject, check out Matt Yglesias and the good people at MetaFilter, none of whom have ever used their cell phones while driving, of course not, no sir.

* Curing blindness by implanting a tooth in the eye. Also via MeFi.

* And Buster Bluth stars in Ctrl, about a man who can use keyboard commands to modify his life.

A second round of late night shouldn't-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Why GM failed; link roundup from Kottke.

* A.O. Scott vlogs the awesomeness of Rushmore. Via TRA. It's vlogtastic.

* Mrs. Santorum is a very lucky woman.

* The headline reads, "Secret US Nuke Site List Accidentally Published Online by US Gov." Whoops!

* Handicapping the 2012 Republican field at Open Left.

* The median number of tweets by a Twitter user is one. This and other Twitter bubble factoids via MetaFilter.

* J.D. Salinger sues to block the publication of the unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel. I feel torn here between my liberal attitude towards copyright and my sense that said sequel can only be an abomination.

* “It’s remarkable, what we’re unable to do as a country": Wire creator David Simon on BBC Radio 4, via Edge of the American West.

* Monkey astronauts.

Exxon is betting Americans will never again purchase as much gasoline as they did in 2007.

Still working through a backlog of open tabs. First up: ecology and the environment.

* There's no such thing as clean coal. Just ask the Coen brothers. Also at Grist: dealing with the fact of environmentalism's soft public support.

As I have argued before, our attention to wide but weak public support is misplaced, leaving us vulnerable to the cycles of an ADD media and alienating our potential core. It is increasingly evident that the vast scale of climate risk provokes a number of numbing psychological responses -- pre-conscience cognitive dissonance and buffering in various forms -- which exacerbates the usual forces of diffusion.

The only means by which a worldview and solution that is significantly at odds with majority public opinion may be driven onto the public agenda is through the agency of "a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens" -- in other words, a determined, partisan core.

* George Will: still lyin'.

* 'Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left?' First up: a sunshield. I guess it's true what they say: from the dawn of time mankind really has yearned to block out the sun.

* Sympathy for the Unabomber? Don't open any packages from Kevin Kelly for a few days.

* Times Square and several blocks of Broadway are being shut down to cars for most of the year in the name of traffic management and pedestrian malls. Awesome.

* Nuke your city. Via BLDG BLOG (which has a lot of examples) and io9. Of course, we've already done Durham.

Toyota secretly developing solar-powered green car. We're saved!

The auto bailout has failed in the Senate.

Busy, busy, busy, as the Bokononists say.

* Sci-Fi has put out a "Catch the Frak Up" video for the last four seasons of Battlestar Galactica.

* All about Patrick Fitzgerald, the man everybody wants to put in charge of everything.

* Daily Routines: how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. Via MeFi, which has some greatest hits.

* In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms. “They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to make them universal.” How the bomb spread (and didn't) around the world.

* The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has named WALL-E the best film of the year. It's a bit of a strange choice against Dark Knight and Synecdoche, among others, but WALL-E was a hell of a good film, potentially a very important one, and damnit if I don't love Pixar.

* No book more deeply and revealingly explains the spasm of madness through which the United States has passed in recent years than Moby Dick. For generations, it has been considered a masterpiece of world literature, but now can it be seen as an eerily prophetic allegory about 21st-century America. It is now truly the nation's epic.

* The Barack Obama of 2018 has been playing video games all his life.

* Everybody loves Silent Star Wars.

* Pharyngula has been having an awful lot of fun with found images lately.

* Has Greenpeace been rating Apple unfairly?

* Will we nationalize the auto companies?

* And the good news: Gabriel García Márquez is still writing after all.

Weekend Updates.

* Obama supports the sit-in in Chicago.

* Krugman says he was misquoted: Urk. I gather that there’s a report on the wires quoting me as saying that the US auto industry would disappear. What I actually said was that the concentration of the industry around Detroit would disappear. That proposition sounds significantly more reasonable than the original version, but still, I'm very skeptical. People are not going to just let (completely) Detroit die.

* The conspiracy goes all the way to the top: The Supreme Court has refused to hear the case on Barack Obama's citizenship.

Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman said Sunday that the beleaguered U.S. auto industry will likely disappear. Now, I'm no Nobel Prize winner, but this seems very unlikely to me, about as unlikely as it does to Paul Rosenberg.

Liberal blogs are abuzz with news that California environmentalist Henry Waxman has displaced Michigan autoindustryist John Dingle as energy and commerce chair. But Yglesias worries we cede too much to the moustachioed menance.

Your Sunday night apocalypse is the surrealism of Fred Einaudi. Some of the art's (pleasantly) disturbing and some of it's not safe for work. Via io9.

While you were sleeping, capitalism apparently ended. I've been keenly aware of the emptiness of most free-market rhetoric, but nationalizing banks goes far beyond what I'd ever thought was in the realm of the possible. Our economy is entirely, astoundingly broken, just another gift of eight years of radical Republican misrule.

Elsewhere in the news and internets:

* The House has passed its energy bill over the objections of the Republicans, which Bush has threatened to veto. (See this post from last night for more on this.) Why the veto? Because it actually takes the Republicans up on their empty "all of the above" rhetoric. Right now this looks like some good political jujitsu from the Democrats—perhaps the first time I've ever had occasion to type that particular sentence.

* Harper's has opened up its David Foster Wallace archives in memoriam.

* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.

* In a nearly exact inverse to the Citibank theft story the other day, a banker has been caught stealing $14 million dollars from the Royal Bank of Scotland, giving it to needy customers.

* Colbert's getting his own Christmas special.

* Duke's own Fredric Jameson has received the Holberg Prize.

* All American kids play video games: 99% of boys and 94% of girls, according to a recent study.

* Obama's putting out a long, two-minute ad on the economy. That's all well and good, but he should be running ads like the one Ezra proposes on Social Security night and day.

* Tantalizing news about the Chevy Volt.

* And the always amazing Big Picture blog has photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.

The question is not, as Ryan Avent asks while guest-blogging for Ezra Klein, whether high-energy prices will destroy the suburbs. It seems clear that they will, at least to some extent, and more importantly it seems clear that these energy realities exist in a context with other, perhaps more immediate trends that point in the same general direction: America's cities are on the mend, and it's the suburbs that now face decline.

The important question, then, is not whether all this will happen but how suburban America will react to the fact of re-urbanification, which will have dire financial consequences for those who have concentrated the bulk of their wealth in the prices of their suburban homes. To the extent that middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, increasingly choose to live in cities, prices will rise there and fall in the suburbs, which over time will essentially wipe out those people whose suburban residence is also their primary or sole investment.

These people will have every financial incentive to fight to keep the suburban lifestyle intact, no matter what the cost in money, energy, or sprawl. And they'll vote, demanding pro-suburban incentives and policy counter to every consideration of sustainability or good sense.

This will be not only a geographic fight but a class and intergenerational one as well, and if you'll allow me to make a Big Prediction for a moment I fully expect this to be one of the more highly contested divides in American politics as we face the end of cheap energy and the accordant, dramatic weakening of our automobile-centric culture.

UPDATE: There's more of this sort of speculation at Freakonomics, Political Animal, and Matt Yglesias.

Thank God it's Tuesday.

* Were you watching the time-travel show Journeyman on NBC this year? You'll never get another episode, but at least you can find out how it all would have ended.

* Bush 'antagonizing environmentalists' on his way out of office.

Just months before President Bush leaves office, his administration is antagonizing environmentalists by proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants.

The proposal, first reported by The Associated Press, would cut out the advice of government scientists who have been weighing in on such decisions for 35 years. Agencies also could not consider a project's contribution to global warming in their analysis.

This is nothing we haven't seen before.

* Honda to debut hydrogen-fuel cell car in 2008. We're saved! Unless, you know, the debunkers turn out to be right about hydrogen...

* Fraggmented's John Seavey makes one his storytelling engine posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explaining why the show was never the same (and could never have been the same) after the characters graduated high school.

* A Mac utility that automatically shuts down your Internet connectivity for any length of time you specify. I wouldn't be attracted to something like this if I had any willpower at all.

* Fred Pearce argues the Neo-Malthusian "population bomb" has been defused. We're saved!

Why then is the world’s population still rising? Currently at around 6.7 billion, it is 70 million higher every year. The problem is that the delivery wards are being visited by the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom. They may only have one or two children each. But that is still a lot of babies. Probably nothing will stop humanity reaching 8 billion by about 2040 and many demographers predict that world population will peak at around 9 billion by the end of the 21st century. But once those baby boomers have had their babies, the falling fertility rate will be translated into a real decline in the world’s population — the first since the Black Death of the 14th century.

The question remains, I think, whether 9 billion will be a Malthusian crisis all by itself.

* And it may be time to rethink climate change in the face of the polar bear menace.

Envirolinks!

* Climate Debate Daily, from the good (if too conservative) folks who bring you Arts & Letters Daily, is the latest addition to the ecology section of my sidebar.

* And from way back in February: the top 50 eco blogs, as ranked by the Guardian.

* 25 tips to make your apartment a green paradise.

* More from the the 55-mph wars: Nissan's new ECO pedal "presses back upward when it senses drivers are driving too quickly."

* 'Junk Mail Produces as Much CO2 as 7 States Combined.' Here's how to stop it.

* 'Prepare for global temperature rise of 4°C, warns top scientist.'

* Scientists predict that the disappearance of Arctic sea ice 'will lead to a large-scale transfer of shellfish, snails, and other animals from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.'

* But will algal ethanol save us? Virgin Airlines says yes!

Monday, Monday.

* Speaking of my once and future TA Heather W., I'm told she's devoting her Thursday radio show this week to apocalyptic music in honor of our dear, departed class at [Undisclosed Location]. I'm told the show will air at 9pm on Thursday evening, and you can listen in over the Internet at wxyc.org...

* Of course we always knew Fox was getting its talking points straight from the White House, but it's definitely nice to have actual confirmation.

* What liberal media? Part 5,000,000: The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

* Michael Chabon talks genre to the L.A. Times.

* And Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons talks about why Alan Moore hates Hollywood:

There’s been some implication that [Alan has said], ‘Hollywood is impure, you really shouldn’t go there, Dave.’ No, it’s nothing to do with that at all. The fact is that Alan has had some very bad experiences with Hollywood, and he doesn’t care to repeat them. Now Alan is not a man who does things in halves. You or I might go, ‘Oh, well, if they want to make a film, that’s alright.’ Alan said, ‘No, I don’t want my name on it, and I don’t want any income from it. I don’t want anything to do with it at all.’ So, consequently he asked me to ask the movie company to send him a piece of paper that he could sign that would make both of those things happen. Which I was happy to do. …That’s what he wanted. He was extremely happy, he said, ‘Now I’ve had the piece of paper signed, I don’t care, I’m indifferent.’ I do speak to him from time to time, and occasionally I’d start to talk about Watchmen, and he’d say, ‘Well, I’m pleased you’re enthusiastic Dave, but I can’t really share it.’”

* Can GM save itself from bankruptcy with the Chevy Volt?