Ideas List

Atlantic Monthly recently published their “Ideas of the Year” issue. You’ve seen this concept from other magazines like Time, Popular Science or Technology Review. And, like Time’s Man of the Year selections, these ideas aren’t all good ones, but impactful, nonetheless. What I particularly like about these are the sub-categories, i.e., “Seemingly Horrifying Ideas with Potential” or “Once Repudiated Ideas, Staging Comebacks”.

Here’s a sample:

Innovations we might seriously regret: the Hadron Supercollider (hello-oh!) the Wendy’s Baconator (hello-oh!) and high-def pornography.

Post partisanship: Nice concept, Easy to imagine politicians holding the glass, but hard to imagine them drinking that Kool-Aid, although the presidential candidates appear to be bellying up to the bar. Proof’s in the pudding, as they say.

Mass market atheism: Not sure this is a new idea but it is clearly an area of struggle for many who wonder about either the sustainability or ethics of organized religion or the wandering eye of God.

Once repudiated but staging comebacks: leeches, Van Halen, John McCain, the gold standard and HillaryCare.

Renting: as the magazine commented, “enough said”.

It’s lonely at the top: One of their examples, a NY pimp’s best friend - Eliot Spitzer.

Modest proposals for coming year: a weekly Sabbath from the web, an end to global warming, a Fulbright scholarship for Dick Cheney.

Horrifying ideas with potential: talking to our enemies, Chief Justice Hillary Clinton, Wii yoga.

Ideas that have outlived their usefulness: In-car ciggie lighters, Corn syrup.

Ideas where jury’s still out: Pay what you want for music.

Conventional ideas once thought unimaginable: non-white, non-male president, your dad on Facebook, $100/barrel oil.

The Surge: Whoodathunk? It’s working. If only Petraeus had run the war early on.