New York Observer

Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We KnowBy Randall StrossFree Press, 275 pages, $26 First I must confess: I am a Google junkie. Like most info-hungry New Yorkers, I spend an unreasonable amount of time searching for things on the Internet, from breaking news to videos of hugging lions. Using any other search engine would seem absurd. But while reading Randall Stross’ book Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, I became uncomfortable with how much Google knew about me and how much I had been relying on it. A self-imposed rehab seemed to be the only ... Read Full Story

Pop! That’s the implosion of New York’s seemingly indestructible hotel industry, which this January had one of its worst months of the past six years. According to Smith Travel Research, an industry research firm based in Nashville, Tenn., the citywide occupancy rate in January was 59.5 percent, an annual decrease of 16.1 percent and the first time the occupancy rate slipped under 60 percent since 2003. Average daily room rates are down, too, falling from $229.10 last January to $199.05 this year. It’s the first time average rates fell below the Mendoza line since February 2006, breaking a streak of 34 consecutive months with ... Read Full Story

The Oscars are like dividend statements from Bernie Madoff. You know they’re coming, you expect the worst, but you open the envelopes anyway, with your fingers crossed, hoping this year will be better. It never is, but despite rock-bottom ratings, and dwindling interest in too many nominees nobody ever heard of, too many categories nobody cares about and too many movies nobody wants to see, the people who put on this annual clambake never stop trying. The grim previews of the 81st Academy Awards show on Feb. 22 at the Kodak Theatre, designed by David Rockwell—the modern-day Rube Goldberg responsible for the Mohegan Sun ... Read Full Story

On Friday night, Feb. 20, in Los Angeles, Mark, a friendly expert in the art of mixology, tore up a few more bits of oregano at Cecconi’s, a sprawling Italian bistro that sits atop the hallowed Melrose Avenue dirt that was home to longtime industry staple Morton’s. The restaurant, which is owned by the folks who operate SoHo House in New York, was playing host to the Oscar crowd. Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman and Elton John were among the famous faces. The din of conversation overwhelmed whatever music was playing; everyone was having a gay old time. Mark, who had come over from Leicester ... Read Full Story

When real estate markets crash, low-income-housing developers often can escape relatively unscathed. After all, unlike luxury condos, there is always a demand for apartments that target low-income households, so downturns tend to bring shovels to a halt on the market-rate projects far faster than on the subsidized ones. But the ever-deepening economic crisis has proven anything but typical, and developers of low-income housing are being sucked into the vortex, feeling the same paralysis affecting the rest of the real estate world. Now, on top of the lending crisis affecting all construction, a plunge in public funding awaits, as the cash-poor city and state governments ... Read Full Story

Animal Spirits: How HumanPsychology Drives theEconomy, and Why It Matters for Global CapitalismBy George A. Akerlof andRobert J. ShillerPrinceton University Press, 264 pages, $24.95 Get Reagan off our backs!—translated into layman’s terms, that’s how distinguished economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller begin Animal Spirits, their inquiry into the role of human psychology in the economy. The small-government, laissez-faire outlook that Reagan helped popularize has severely damaged the financial system. “Now, three decades after the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we see the troubles it can spawn. No limits were set to the excesses of Wall Street. It got wildly drunk. And now ... Read Full Story

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans By Dan Baum Spiegel & Grau, 335 pages, $26 About halfway through Dan Baum’s brilliant but frustrating Nine Lives, a ventriloquist’s collage of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Tim Bruneau, a young, strong cop hungry for some “boot-in-the-ass” policing, chases a suspect through the back streets of one of the city’s seediest projects. He turns a corner, the action freezes, and you find yourself looking through his frantic yet perceptive eyes. “The courtyard was full of wiry young men with short dreadlocks, wearing identical white wife beaters and sagged carpenter’s pants. The fucking uniform ... Read Full Story

As the first decade of the 21st century closes, the climate problem is starting to mature, both as a policy issue and as an area of academic inquiry. In fact, we are starting to see the development of two distinct elements to the field. The oldest area of inquiry is the one that seeks to understand the causes of climate change and tries to prevent them from taking place. This is an effort to mitigate or reduce the amount of climate change. One of the facts of climate science is that the carbon dioxide that causes global warming tends to accumulate in the upper ... Read Full Story

The Book of Dead PhilosophersBy Simon CritchleyRandom House, 265 pages, $15.95 Whatever you think of his philosophy, or his celebrity, give Simon Critchley this: He’s a courageous writer. It takes an author possessed of true courage (or utter folly) to follow these sentences—“Philosophy begins, then, with … the cultivation of a love of wisdom. Philosophy is erotic, not just epistemic”—with this one: “There has never been a more important time to emphasize this distinction between philosophy and sophistry.” Mr. Critchley writes these words in “Learning How to Die—Socrates,” one of three stone-cold-serious essays preceding 240 or so chronological pages on “190 or So Dead ... Read Full Story

Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to PragmatismBy William H. GoetzmannBasic, 399 pages, $35 In 1851, in the forests of Long Island, Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews founded a community dedicated to individualism and free love. They named it Modern Times and it flowered, for a period, attracting an array of converts to match the broader, motley population of the new republic. But in 1857, Modern Times collapsed, mirroring the fate of other utopian ventures of the period, including the partner-swapping Oneidans of upstate New York and the ecstatic, celibate Shakers of Harmony, Ind. It’s easy, now, to laugh ... Read Full Story