Wasn't it a shame that just before Athens fell, nobody snapped any pictures…or okay, made a few sketches? I mean, wouldn't it be great to see how the Acropolis actually looked? The Roman Colosseum? The Colossus of Rhodes?...

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Just after the election, I read a quote from a woman in France who said, "I think America is re-becoming a new world." All week long that phrase rang musically in the ear of the Urban Man as he went looking for the new world right here in L.A....

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I don't know about you, but tonight the Urban Man feels ten months pregnant. I'm lying here with a strangely distended belly, waiting helplessly for the birth of a new world...

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I don't know about you, but even though the world is coming to an end, I haven't yet noticed any despair on the streets. The people I run into seem curiously upbeat, in fact unusually free with their smiles. New vitality has entered social gatherings. A strange optimism. Maybe that's because every time one world ends, another begins, and who knows—the next world might be better...

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Once upon a time, anyone could be a prophet. It was so easy. We all knew the future would bring the spread of democracy, the retreat of religion, the surge of prices, the extension of freeways, and the fulfillment of extraordinary ambition. It seemed…inevitable.

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Let me assure you that I never wanted to live in a casino. I mean, there's the noise. The smoke. The sleeplessness. The excess of bad food. You can't avoid the constant reports from the tables: sometimes good, mostly bad, but either way…unstoppable...

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Despite the financial crisis, I know we have not come to the end of the age of the high flyers. We admire them too much. We have invested too much in them. We don't remember how to function without them...

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Here in L.A., people believe it's possible to create "the perfect moment." The city as a whole may exhibit dust and chaos, but within the limited confines of a living room or a rooftop bar, we think it should be possible to find just the right art, the right clothes, the right food, the right relationship, the right politics...

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It's a hot day in the Middle East, where The Urban Man finds himself on a kind of archeological safari. Just now, I'm standing above a wide valley in northern Israel, staring at a dusty heap of stones that used to be a city. They call a little hill like this a "tel," which means an artificial mound of many layers where people once loved, argued, enslaved one another, and made a lot of pottery. Cities were small in those days: you can stroll around the average tel in half an hour...

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