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beware of the “poverty of ambition” in a culture of “the big house and the nice suits.”

College seniors might start by reading “A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure” in the current edition of The New York Review of Books, an impassioned plea from Felix Rohatyn (who knows something of financial rescues) and Everett Ehrlich for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, or N.I.B.

Its aim, at a time when the Chinese are investing $200 billion in railways and building 97 new airports, would be to use public and private capital to give coherence to a vast program of public works.

It's refreshing to hear someone explain Street Art beyond monetary or cultural terms, because few will. Ben Lewis, an art critic who's currently filming a documentary about the contemporary art market called Brave New Art World, says: 'People buy Street Art and they like looking at it. That doesn't make it good quality.'

Though he cheerfully describes much of the Street-Art movement as 'wank', he does admit that Banksy and a few others may stand the test of time. 'Banksy's work is interesting because there are lots of ways that meaning is accreted to it. He'd done these pieces in difficult places - there's a political story, a celebrity story and a youth culture story, and he's capitalised on that by producing work that consumers can buy. '

so busy taking standardized tests and building their resumés with internships and assistantships.

I watched a group of them sort through a brightly colored stack of anti-war quotations to make sure that every single one, literally, bore the stamp of approval from the college activities office so they could hang them around campus without getting in trouble.

I remember feeling so busy, so responsible, so important. Now I realize that there was a real cost to that frenzy of school-sanctioned productivity. I rarely thought beyond the borders of folding tables that lined the student activities fairs. I rarely put my body or my future on the line. While I was tutoring fellow students in grammar and composition and making door tags for my residence halls, I missed the escalation of a bogus justification for a messy war in my name.