There's nothing I love better than interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson.

TB: I understand that you live in a utopian community [called Village Homes, pictured above and below; images by Michael Corbett]. How does that work? Is it pre- or post-modern?

KSR: A little of both, I guess. The model is an English village really; about eighty acres, a lot of it owned in common, so there is a “commons” and no fences, except around little courtyards. There are a lot of vegetable gardens, and the landscaping is edible, meaning lots of fruits, grapes and nuts.

It’s really just a tweaking of suburban design, but a really good one. Energy mattered to the designers and we burn about 40 percent the energy of an ordinary suburban neighborhood of the same size. That’s still a lot, but it’s an improvement. Village Homes was built in 1980 or so; if every suburb since then had followed its lead, we would have much less craziness in America, because the standard suburb is bad for sanity. But that didn’t happen, so for the 1,000 people who live here it’s a kind of pocket utopia. Not the solution, but a nice place to live right now, and it could suggest aspects of a long-term solution. It’s been a real blessing to live here.

The difference is that in Raleigh, in 1976, the Wake County Public School system was created to zone the suburbs and inner city together to ensure a continued healthy mix of social classes.

Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh. Via Donkeylicious.

Taking care of a little link business.

* How to Organize an Insurrection: tips from the protestors in Greece. (Via Vu.)

* It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. Via Kevin Drum.

* Fimoculous's 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008. #31 for the second year running!

* Burris bags benighted Blago embrace. Democrats demur.

* Jim Webb will introduce legislation to beat back the prison-industrial complex.

* The case for Caroline Kennedy. I find this interesting because it's a completely ends-based analysis, the only field in which I think Kennedy's potential appointment has merit. She will be probably a good senator from my perspective and probably (yes) advantageous for New York—but she just doesn't deserve the nod. The Senate's not the House of Lords.

* The 1,000 Greatest Films of All Time. Subset: The 250 Greatest Films of the Last Eight Years. Via MeFi.

* Also from MeFi: an improbable defense of the suburbs from a most-probable place.

* Franken... wins?

* "Golden Years": A pre-Office one-off from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

* "Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House." 22 days remain.

In the Guardian: 'The party's over for Iceland, the island that tried to buy the world.'

The nation's celebrated rags-to-riches story began in the Nineties when free market reforms, fish quota cash and a stock market based on stable pension funds allowed Icelandic entrepreneurs to go out and sweep up international credit. Britain and Denmark were favourite shopping haunts, and in 2004 alone Icelanders spent £894m on shares in British companies. In just five years, the average Icelandic family saw its wealth increase by 45 per cent.

But, as a result of the international banking crisis, the billionaires who own everything from West Ham United football club to the Somerfield supermarket chain, Hamleys toy shops and the House of Fraser, are in trouble and the country is drowning in debt.

Iceland's cheap labour force, the Poles and Lithuanians, have left already - there's little point in sending home such a worthless currency, and the tourist season is over. Iceland is on its own.

Whatever else you may say about Iceland's economic crash, at least they put their prosperity while they had it into something more useful than still-empty McMansions: Iceland is one of the cleanest, most energy-independent industrialized nations in the world. More at MeFi.

Peak Oil Cassandra James Howard Kunstler was on Colbert last night:

Man, I've been slack today. Here are a few things I've been looking at:

* A list of science fiction with a linguist bent.
* 'The Return of the Paranoid Style': How Iraq brought us not John Wayne but Jason Bourne.
* Every bit of spoiler news there is about the upcoming season of Battlestar Galactica.
* New York Governor David Peterson's daily revelations are becoming sort of hilarious.
* Eric Alterman on the death of the American newspaper.
* The end of suburbia, this time in the Boston Review.
* We're #22! We're #22!

'Entropy made visible': James Howard Kunstler talks about our suburban nightmare at TED 2008. Via the MeFi thread.

There are a lot of ways you can describe this. I like to call it "the national automobile slum." You can call it "suburban sprawl." I think it's appropriate to call it "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." We can call it a "technosis externality clusterfuck." And it's a tremendous problem for us. The outstanding, the salient problem about this is that these are places that are not worth caring about.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”

In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty...

Suburbs: the new slums. See also.

I've written before about the need for better civil engineering on the national scale in this country, to do whatever we can to reduce and reverse the tremendous damage caused by the short-sighted suburbification of America in the second half of the twentieth century. Via Ezra Klein comes an article at Worldchanging.com about how what we build influences how we live. One point the article could emphasize more—as Klein himself does in a follow-up post—is the extent to which desuburbification is not a tradeoff or a sacrifice but instead a return to a better way to live. Towards the end, though, it gets there:

Most arguments against land-use change presume that building compact communities is a trade-off; that investing in getting walkable, denser neighborhoods, we lose some or a lot of our affluence or quality of life. What if that's not true, though? What if the gains actually far outweigh the costs not only in ecological and fiscal terms, but in lifestyle and prosperity terms as well? I think that's the case.

I believe that green compact communities, smaller well-built homes, walkable streets and smart infrastructure can actually offer a far better quality of life than living in McMansion hintersprawl in purely material terms: more comfort, more security, more true prosperity. But even more to the point, I believe they offer all sorts of non-materialistic but extremely real benefits that suburbs cannot. Opponents of smart growth talk about sacrificing our way of life -- but it's not a sacrifice if what you get in exchange is superior.

Amazing new Web site ZIPskinny (via Matt Yglesias) gives detailed demographic information about all the places you've ever lived.

Where I grew up
Where I grew up in the other universe
Where I went to college
Where I went to grad school (part 1)
Where I live now (grad school parts 2 through 2012)

Beyond the obvious income and poverty line disparities, the thing that leaps out most when you use the comparison function is the marriage disparity—Randolph's 67.8% marriage rate dwarfs all the other locations. The continual proximity of colleges in my life must play a big role in this, but I doubt that's the full explanation.

Also of note is the final demographic showdown between Randolph and Jaimee's beloved Scotch Plains. Scotch Plains, with its biologically unstable surplus of females, proves no match for Randolph's frightening racial purity.

Suburban sprawl inevitably gives way to suburban blight. Via Atrios.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, a tremendously important and scary book I've talked about before, now has a blog, the appropriately named Clusterfuck Nation.

Via MetaFilter, which links to yesterday's post, Peak Suburbia:

It is not an accident that the housing bubble coincided with the phenomenon of Peak Oil. First of all, the housing bubble should more properly be called the suburban bubble, because most of the activity came in the form of "greenfield" housing subdivisions, and included all the additional crap-o-la accessories required by them -- strip malls, power centers, Outback steak houses, car washes, et cetera. The suburban expansion has been based entirely on cheap-and-abundant supplies of oil. Similarly, it was not an accident that the suburban project faltered briefly in the 1970s, when America's oil production entered its long decline, OPEC seized the moment, and oil prices shot up. Notice that the final suburban blowout occurred after 1990, when the North Sea and Prudhoe Bay oil strikes came into full production, disabling OPEC, and a world oil glut finally drove prices as low as ten dollars a barrel in 1999. That ushered in the climactic phase of suburbia, as represented by things like the standard 4000-square-foot Toll Brother's McMansion and the heyday of the super-gigantic SUV to go with it.

The American public has no idea how over all that is. The bottom is falling out under not only the housing market (as in houses up for sale) but on the whole apparatus for delivering future houses, and the car-oriented crap associated with it. The production home-builders, such as Toll Brothers, Hovanian, Pulte, et cetera are going down and they will not be coming back. There will be a great deal of wishing that they might come back, but they won't.