Friday, 19 August 2011

It was the double date we had looked forward to more than any other. Just before sunset on a hot August day in Los Angeles, we sat in a nearly empty hotel restaurant awaiting the arrival of one of the most influential husband-and-wife intellectual teams in history: Alvin and Heidi Toffler.
They may be octogenarians now, but pick up a copy of the Tofflers' most famous books -- Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) -- and you will quickly wonder why anyone bothers to write the redundant meta social and political commentaries that drown us today. These books, written when we were children, contain such stunning and prescient insights, encapsulated in elegant yet racing prose, that they ought to be essential reading four decades onward. Indeed, you couldn't be blamed for thinking they had just been published this year.
Terms and concepts that are on the tip of everyone's tongue today leap off the pages: the crisis of industrialism, the promise of renewable energy, ad-hocracy in business, the rise of the non-nuclear family, technology-enabled telecommuting, the power of the pro-sumer, sensors embedded in household appliances, a gene industry that pre-designs the human body, corporate social responsibility, "information overload" -- and yes, right there on p. 292 of The Third Wave, the phrase Wired magazine can't get enough of today: "DIY Revolution." No wonder the book has been dubbed the "classic study of tomorrow." (Of the very few things they seem to have gotten wrong, or at least not yet right, is widespread polygamist communes...)

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Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna @'FP'

'Future Shock' documentary narrated by Orson Welles (1972)

Wrong Answers in Britain

Potential deal could lead to release of 'West Memphis Three'

The "West Memphis Three" could be released as early as today under a pending deal between state prosecutors and defense attorneys, legal sources and relatives of victims said Thursday.
If the deal is consummated in a closed-door hearing at 10 a.m. in Jonesboro, Ark., the three -- death-row inmate Damien Echols, 36, and co-defendants Jason Baldwin, 34, and Jessie Misskelley, 36, who are serving life terms -- would be free after 18 years behind bars.
The three then-teenagers were convicted for the May 1993 slayings of three 8-year-old West Memphis boys, all Cub Scouts, whose nude bodies were found hog-tied in a watery ditch in West Memphis.
"I've been waiting for this day a long, long time,'' said Dan Stidham, 48, Misskelley's original defense lawyer and now a district judge in Paragould, Ark., who continues to endorse his former client's innocence. "All I asked for was truth and justice.''
The arrangement involves the three defendants pleading no contest to lesser charges in return for their immediate release, according to legal sources knowledgeable of the deal. The sources spoke on condition on anonymity because a gag order forbids parties in the case from discussing it.
The surprise announcement Thursday by Circuit Court Judge David Laser of today's previously unscheduled hearing triggered a landslide of emotion from people connected to the case that shook Arkansas with prosecutors' assertions that the slain boys were victims of a ritualistic cult murder.
Years later, documentary films aired by HBO fanned a national movement endorsing the defendants' claims of innocence. Those documentaries, in turn, attracted several celebrities who helped fund a vigorous new defense with nationally known lawyers, private investigators and forensic experts...