Ideas Whose Time Has Come
ONCE-REPUDIATED IDEAS STAGING COMEBACKS
■ Medicinal leeches
■ John McCain
■ The gold standard
■ Stagflation
■ Multilateralism
■ Van Halen
■ Hillarycare
INNOVATIONS WE MIGHT SERIOUSLY REGRET
■ Mortgage-backed securities
■ High-definition pornography
■ The Hadron supercollider
■ Dubai
■ Non-Communist Russia
■ The Wendy’s Baconator sandwich
SEEMINGLY HORRIFYING IDEAS THAT COULD HAVE POTENTIAL
■ Wii yoga
■ Chief Justice Hillary Rodham Clinton
■ Wastewater recycling
■ Rank-ordered magazine lists
■ Talking to our enemies
NEWLY CONVENTIONAL IDEAS WE USED TO THINK UNIMAGINABLE
■ Viable nonwhite or nonmale presidential candidates
■ Your dad on Facebook
■ Tommy Lasorda, blogger
■ $100/barrel oil— what a bargain!
■ American Gladiators is ripe for a comeback
LEAST HARMLESS INNOCUOUS-SOUNDING IDEAS
■ Gas-tax holiday
■ Business casual
■ Greenwashing
■ Electability
IDEAS THAT HAVE OUTLIVED THEIR USEFULNESS
■ Presidential front-running
■ In-car cigarette-lighting technology
■ Corn syrup
■ Fat-cat political contributors
■ iCaptivity for digital music files
IDEAS WE THINK WE LIKE— BUT THE JURY’S STILL OUT
■ Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want model for pricing music
■ More middle-class financial aid at elite colleges
■ Congestion pricing
■ Mandatory HPV vaccination for girls
MOST-WORRYING FADS
■ Increasingly approximate airline arrival times
■ Petraeus worship
■ Vintage-sex-tape releases
■ Vaccine avoidance in the name of health
■ Monoglot intelligence services
MODEST PROPOSALS FOR THE YEAR TO COME
■ Super-duper delegates for the Democratic Party
■ Nationality-specific ethnic restaurants in all foreign embassies
■ A Fulbright scholarship for Dick Cheney
■ A weekly Sabbath from the Web
■ An end to global warming