The Atlantic Dozen

The Atlantic's new correspondents blog has launched. You can visit the group site or any of the blogs individually. Here's the line up: Richard Florida, Daniel Akst, Alex Gibney, William Haseltine, Hua Hsu, Lisa Margonelli, Richard Posner, Harry Shearer, Edward Tenner, Abraham Verghese, Lane Wallace,  and James Warren. You can subscribe to the firehose RSS or to an individual correspondent's feed. Harry Shearer!

They are already churning out posts. Posner still thinks that the economic crisis qualifies as a depression:

As emphasized in my book, it is the unprecedented scope and cost of the government's recovery measures that mark the current economic crisis as a depression, and no mere recession; for the costs and hence gravity of an economic crisis include not only the loss of output and employment during the acute phase of the crisis but also the costs incurred in trying to put the economy on the road to recovery.

Richard Florida looks at where we should locate high-speed rail:

New periods of geographic expansion require new systems of infrastructure. Ever since the days of the canals, the early railroad, and streetcar suburbs, we've seen how infrastructure and transportation systems work to spur new patterns economic and regional development. The streetcar expanded the boundaries of the late 19th and early 20th century city, while the railroad moved goods and people between them. The automobile enabled workers to move to the suburbs and undertake far greater commutes, expanding the geographic landscape still further.

Mega-regions, if they are to function as integrated economic units, require better, more effective, and faster ways move goods, people, and ideas. High-speed rail accomplishes that, and it also provides a framework for future in-fill development along its corridors

And Lisa Margonelli worries about  the oil glut:

Given that oil prices are likely to rise as the economy recovers, we might spend this time thinking about how to mitigate their impact or at least hold them from rising too fast. We could be proactive about reducing US oil demand by getting people into more efficient transportation, but fast.