Audacious ideas for 2012

This week's 14-minute Harvard Business Review Ideacast is well worth your time as it summarizes the magazine's "2012 List of Audacious Ideas." 

Among the grand thoughts are:

• Blowing up the concept of investing in a country's GDP growth, instead of debt. Sounds boring but leading economist Robert Shiller argues it would profoundly rethink global investment and could have minimized the current global economic crisis. 
• Getting real about any manned mission to Mars oor further expansion into space. Not gonna happen without revolutionary breakthroughs in space travel, journalist Gregg Easterbrook argues. Instead of blindly funding NASA, a better alternative would be to invite the private sector to help discover new ways to explore new worlds. 
• Changing how we handle death by having everyone conduct "end of life" conversations with a loved one. The result, argues journalist Ellen Goodman, would be improved interpersonal relationships and improved health care. 
• Closing off portions of oceans and seas for extended periods, ala letting farmland go fallow for a few years to regain nutrients, so that overfished areas can recover before their ecosystems are destroyed.   

Big challenges beckon big thoughts.

Sexy birds

Yes, there's such a thing as a sexy plane. 

Plane & Pilot magazine is asking as much in this month's issue. It lists a Top 10 of sexy civilian and military aircraft that has some no-brainers as well as some head-scratchers. 

First, what exactly is a sexy plane? I think of sleek lines, a bit of menace and breakthrough technology. 

The Plane & Pilot list has some great choices: the P-51, Corsair, Citation X, SR-71 and F-86 Sabre. And I'm thrilled the B-58 Hustler made the list. I saw a B-58 in person at an air museum on Tucson and was blown away by a craft that's both sleek and enormous. 

The famed Concorde, which was retired several years ago.But where's the Concorde? The ME-262? The DeHavilland Comet? Bonanza? 

I realize lists are by nature limited and prime for discussion, so here are some arguments for a few changes: 

• The Concorde may look like a cross between a penguin and stork but the mix of sleek lines, massive power and impact on DeHavilland Cometlong-haul air travel deserves some props. It will be years before we see an airliner that rivals its speed. 
• The DeHavilland Comet certainly had a star-studded past, with a series of mysterious crashes killing its momentum as a popular airliner in the 1950s. But I'm a sucker for the design, which tucked four jet engines inside the wings. Very sleek and Messerschmitt ME-262sexy, but I can understand why that death thing might cost it some points.  
• The ME-262 was the world's first truly dominant jet fighter but World War II ended before its impact against allied fighters like the P-51 could truly be measured. The huge engines are ungainly but the fuselage is menacing beyond belief. I've seen the renovated model at the Amithsonian Air & Space Museum on three different occasions and am always struck by the menacing way the fuselage and nose looks like a shark. The Germans brought us some amazing technology before and during World War II and the ME-262 is one of the best examples of how far ahead of the Allies they were on many fronts. 

And given the recent attention to Burt Rutan's legendary innovation, I'm surprised he wasn't awarded an entry. Maybe the AD-1?

'Pulphead' shines light on dynamic music essayist

Ran across a very entertaining "Soundcheck" podcast and book preview from Southern writer John Jeremiah Sullivan. 

I've never heard of Sullivan but I like what I heard and read in this excerpt from his collection of magazine essays titled "Pulphead: Essays." Sullivan seems to tackle the predictable by taking unorthodox approaches to the topic at hand, hints of which surface in the podcast and the Pulphead excerpt (which unfortunately cuts off before Sullivan describes his own deeply evangelical experiences as a youth).

In some ways Sullivan's style returns us to the glory days of music journalism, when Nick Kent and Stanley Booth lived the ups and downs of their subjects. But there seems to be a nice twist in Sullivan's work. Perhaps it's less focus on the wreck and more on the train.