wretched excess

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

Back in the day, you told the kids to go play outside; the outdoors, the street, the park, they were the rec rooms. When they got to be teenagers, they went and hung out with friends. Some got into trouble; most didn't. Things changed. Even though crime rates have dropped to the lowest level in decades, cities like New York are as clean as Disneyland and bikes are cool again, Architecture professor Dana Cuff can say to the Times:

“There is a rise in home technology, all your friends are online, and there are far fewer safe, interesting public spaces to hang out in,” she said. “All of these things come together, and p...

In a practice I can hardly fathom, the Turkish government has been giving 155 million new textbooks each year to students, most of which are thrown into the trash at the end of the year rather than simply requiring they return them for use by next year’s crop of students.

Of course there’s not only an environmental cost to this enormous waste of resources, but an economic cost as well, with the books costing the Turkish public more than $800 million annually.
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