rational?

Check it out suckas!  I found this quick read at nytimes.com to be pretty damn interesting in that it explores the impacts of emerging ideas in the field of cognitive neuroscience.  Apparently our minds are less rational than we once believed and much more associative.  The ramifications of these findings will certainly be felt throughout various fields of study.  This article, written by Sarah Williams Goldhagen, focuses on the way in which humans relate to trees and commonly use them as metaphors to describe abstract concepts, i.e. apples not falling far from their trees.  Architects, landscape architects and urban designers are now considering this as they construct our built environment.  Nothing like a little bit of real science to debunk an assumption about economic man while linking contemporary architecture to the natural world.
-KJW

adbusters

Adbusters Magazine, Editor Kalle Lasn

If you're not familiar with Kalle Lasn's Adbusters Magazine, then wake the fuck up. Aesthetically this magazine will keep your eyes pasted to its pungent pages cover to cover. Its content, concocted by some of the most progressive thinkers alive today, spits fire into a printed media world that is otherwise limp. Get your ass off the cushy mainstream media outlets, step out of the consumerist cage and inject a spine-piercing dose of reality into your thirsty Valium-laced veins.
-KJW

plenitude

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, by Juliet Schor

I don't care who you are, read this book.  Juliet Schor has intelligently written a road map for the world in the face of political, economic, and ecological decline.  This book does for economics what Michael Pollen's Omnivore's Dilemna did for the food industry.  The problems that we face as a society are great, but the solutions that the author presents are exciting to say the least: less time at work, more time self-provisioning (think gardening, home-brewing or knitting), and more time on small-scale decentralized entrepreneurship endeavors.  Schor offers an ambitious yet realistic alternative to business as usual economics and politics.
-KJW