Wired

Here's one view of America circa 2008: The US is a modern-day Roman Empire -- overstretched, underperforming, slowly crumbling into history's dustbin. Here's Parag Khanna's view: Nonsense. The geopolitical wooziness Americans are feeling isn't decline. It's realignment.

In his book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Khanna, 31, describes a planet dominated by a trio of superpowers: the US, China, and Europe. In this tripolar era, America's fate depends on tough national choices, not lame historical analogies. If the US wises… more

...Two new books – The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria and The Second World by Parag Khanna – argue that the new global economy power will be more dispersed and multipolar.

"Mr. Zakaria believes we are experiencing modern history's third great power shift, after the rise of the West from the 15th century on, and the rise of the U.S. in the 19th century. But he argues that this latest transition is not so much about the decline of America as… more

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world -- the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly… more

Yves Béhar sits at a wide worktable on the lofted second floor of fuseproject, his San Francisco design studio, surrounded by windows and whiteboards and nearly a dozen foam laptops. He is tall and tan, with a surfer’s mess of curls and the quiet, easy manner of someone who just woke up from a nap. “There are two types of projects,” he says. “There are the stylist projects -- the ones you sign with your signature. Then there are the… more

In Washington, DC, eco-vandals smear SUV door handles with dog crap. In Santa Cruz, California, protestors tag more than 60 gas-guzzlers with anti-oil graffiti. In Los Angeles, a Caltech grad student is sentenced to eight years in prison for trashing more than 120 SUVs around the city. It's almost enough to make you feel bad for SUV drivers. After all, some of them are green, too -- just not as hardcore about it.

Now they have TerraPass, a clever eco-capitalism… more

Toyota promised me 60. The spec sheet on the 2005 Prius clearly states that the car gets five dozen miles per gallon of gas on city streets. But I'm test-driving a beige hatchback along Sepulveda Boulevard on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and according to the touchscreen on the dash, I'm topping out at 49.7.

Granted, 49.7 miles per gallon is at least twice what all the gas hogs around me are getting. But whenever I hit the… more

At 28, Joe has become something of an expert at heroin detox -- he's tried it nine times. Between programs, he's attempted to quit on his own. Once, when the cravings got the best of him, he tried to knock himself out by hitting his head against a brick wall. So late last year, when Joe checked himself into a New York outpost of Phoenix House, the country's largest residential rehab program, he knew exactly what to expect: the plastic… more

In nations both rich and poor, families are having fewer children. As people move to crowded urban areas, and as women gain more educational and economic opportunities, countries are beginning to see their populations decline. This could have grave consequences for their economies.

Global fertility rates are now only half what they were in the 1970s. Many demographers accordingly believe that the population of the world will begin to contract within the lifetime of today's children. Before… more

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust -- fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas.… more

"My dream is big, OK?"

Coming from a man who used to boast of having a 300-year business plan, that's saying a lot. But Masayoshi Son isn't exaggerating. His latest master plan includes nothing less than the demolition of Japan's telecom industry, and, not incidentally, the revival of his moribund company, Softbank. To get there, he's hawking next-generation, superfast, supercheap DSL to the Japanese masses.

He may no longer be the world's eighth-richest man -- Softbank's stock price is down 98 percent… more