Picked up this book a while back... after hearing about it somewhere (wish I could remember where). Started digging into it again the past couple of days and stumbled upon this passage...
"...the revolution would bring better parks to New York, and beautiful places to live, and day-care centers, and hospices. Her idea was that New York should be human. Now, this is simply a mistake. New York is an inhuman machine put together to serve the most ambitious interests of a certain part of American secular society. It has human aspects, because human needs must be me before ambitions can proceed toward realization, but the fulfillment of those human needs is an uninteresting precondition of the life of the ambitions. In human terms, there is no reason to live in New York, and if New York were to become a city in which day-care centers and hospices were the dominant institutions, it would soon be depopulated."
Apropos! The book is an intense scorching (er...perspective) of what media has done to humans. For a more... democratic context, please see the internets.
Here it is published in the New Yorker.
A review of the re-release by John Irving.
Also, what are YOUR thoughts on Dan Rather?
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