Welcome to the new incarnation of Bad Idea online – here are some of the exciting new features you’ll find on our refreshed website:

– Long-form journalism. Previously, Bad Idea feature stories have been held back for print editions of the magazine. From now on though, we will be providing a regular diet of feature articles online, for free.

– Blogging innovation. Industry experts and special guest writers will be giving us their informed perspectives on cutting edge developments in the creative industries, finance, science and technology, and the green economy.

 – Conversations with the world’s smartest people. In the coming weeks, we will be talking to Chris Anderson, Robert Peston and Paul Krugman about innovation in the aftermath of financial crisis – and those are just the opening names on a long, distinguished list.  

– Read previous digital editions of Bad Idea. Our new digital magazine archive allows you to peruse past editions of Bad Idea, again for zip nada. Check them out on our ‘Magazine’ page.

– Facebook and Twitter connectivity. Log into our site with your Facebook profile, comment on articles and then continue jabbering with friends in FB Land. You can now friend us or poke us, or tweet about all the poking, to your heart’s content.

– Videos and podcasts. Look out for exclusive multimedia content on our homepage with radio programmes, video interviews and coverage of live events on the way. We’re kicking things off with a debate on transhumanism from our ‘Future Human’ event in London; check out Cory Doctorow, Ian Watson and Gwyneth Jones grizzling over man’s biological destiny. 

– Crowdsourced Innovation Map. A rich seam of location-based information on the UK’s most exciting new companies.

– Reader offers for The VOX POP, our exciting new monthly event. The VOX POP launches February 10 at a secret venue in London; further details are imminent. 

We hope you enjoy the latest iteration of our website, which is really only the beginning of some of the exciting new features we will be pioneering in coming months, so keep your ear to the floor for further updates.

Meanwhile, do let us know what you think of the way things are headed – either in comments on the blog, on Facebook or Twitter, or via email: editorial[at]badidea.co.uk; if you’d like to receive irregular newsletter updates too, you can submit your email at the top of the page for the full B.I. experience. 

Otherwise, keep going boldly readers, and we’ll see you in the digisphere!

The political struggles around meeting emissions targets, the future of sustainable energy, electric and low emissions cars, geoengineering, carbon capture, the policies of the developed versus the developing world, climate activism – everything to do with the future of the planet will be examined. The technology being developed to combat climate change and the companies working on it will also be a major focus, and always looking at the UK innovators that are making the most of their meagre public investment. Opinion blogs will back up investigative features to provide constantly incisive commentary on green issues.

Kieron Bryan, our writer who bleeds green when you cut him, will also be attending the Copenhagen climate conference, aka The Last Chance To Save The Planet, so look forward to blogs and videos seeing whether a reasonable set of agreements gets thrashed out. 

The new site should be up and running – fingers crossed – on November 2nd. 

Photo: phualt

But while we’ve enjoyed trying to blog the recession in an informative, jargon-free and enjoyable way, it’s time to move on from wallowing in the bottomed-out graphs. The world is on its way up (in GDP terms at least), and so we want to document the successes, the ideas, the action that is changing the planet and our daily lives.

Next month, Bad Idea is getting a makeover, both in design and content. As well as an elegant, more readable interface, the site will have more interactive features, such as a live Twitter feed, podcasts, video, maps, and sign-in through Facebook Connect. But more importantly, our editorial direction is shifting. Our new tagline is “Creative and Economic Innovation” – we want to look at the people and companies that are innovating during this downturn, and whose work is going to make a real impact. Whether its a UK nanotech startup, a young fashion designer with a new business model, a revolution in the financial services industry, or an assessment of post-carbon technologies, Bad Idea will bring you the most exciting, game-changing industrial and creative developments.

And rather than collate and repackage the news, we’re shifting back to our original ethos of quality original journalism. As well as blogs featuring opinion from Bad Idea regulars and industry experts, we’ll be running original features every day on subjects that haven’t been covered in depth elsewhere in the media. We’ll also be providing a variety of ways to access and read all this material.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be explaining in more detail the five new subject areas that we’re getting ready to cover, as well providing the usual diet of blogs and commentary. So keep your eyes peeled as we get ready for the changes that will transform Bad Idea into an indispensible daily dose of quality writing about innovation.

He turned a decade of alcohol and substance abuse, and his subsequent stint in rehab, into A Million Little Pieces, a memoir that turned out to be part-fictionalised. That revelation led to a live talk-show excioration from former champion Oprah Winfrey, and a lawsuit that meant readers could get a refund on the book if they felt cheated by it. Frey was also forced to insert a disclaimer at the beginning of the book outlining any potentially misleading sections.

Since then he’s moved towards pure fiction, with the interlaced Los Angeleno vignettes of Bright Shiny Morning. He’s currently on a speaking tour of the UK, and BAD IDEA caught up with him in Glasgow over the phone, to talk about everything from the nature of memoir to Christian intolerance, Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama.

BAD IDEA: Since the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces, you’ve had a long time to reflect on the nature of memoir. How do you think people perceive it as a genre?

James Frey: Memoir is whatever you want it to be, it’s a book based on your life. Obviously I’m not a guy who believes it should be factually perfect, and frankly I don’t think any of them are. Any book that has a disclaimer in front of it means it’s not factually perfect, it means they made shit up, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have a disclaimer, and 100% of them have disclaimers.  

It also depends on what kind of book you want to write. I don’t think of my books as memoirs – I set out to write works of literature, and the tag “memoir” got slapped on the side of it by the publishers.

I think it depends on what you want to do. If you want to make a perfect history of your life, then make it factually accurate, if you want to tell an entertaining story and you want it to be readable, and you want to take some risks in terms of how it’s written, then just write the book you want to write, and fuck the rest of it. 

BI: Did you find it got co-opted as a self-help book?

JF: I don’t think anyone tried to sell my book as self-help, I wouldn’t have participated in doing that. If anything that book was designed to be a gob of spit in the face of the self-help industry. It counters everything they say, everything they hold holy it basically spits on.

BI: So was that your main impetus for writing, to rail against the self-help industry?

JF: My main impetus for writing was to write a book. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to create literature. In creating that book, I thought of it in line with [Henry Miller's] Tropic Of Cancer or [Jack Kerouac's] On The Road, the work of Charles Bukowski, some of the work of Norman Mailer. I tried to write a book that took radical steps in terms of sentence construction and how pages were laid out, how paragraphs were built, how the story was told. I didn’t care about the factuality of it or not, and later everyone wants to pick it apart, and that’s fine if they do… 

I draw parallels with fine art a lot, and when Picasso painted self-portraits in a Cubist style people didn’t freak out and say “My God! It’s not perfect!” When artists take liberties with visual art, people don’t freak out, but people freak out about this. But y’know, I’m happy that my books aren’t considered memoirs any more.

And I thought it was ironic that the media in the US picked my book apart while allowing every politician, including the one currently in office, to lie their fucking asses off pretty much every time they open their mouths. 

BI: So do you get riled by other memoirs that haven’t had to print a disclaimer? 

JF: Everyone. Every one. 

I hate the disclaimer, but the disclaimer’s coming out of all the books. It’s already out of all the European editions, and comes out of the American edition in June.

BI: After the revelations about the book came out, you appeared on Oprah, and you seemed penitent and apologetic about what happened. Do you still feel sorry for writing in a way that misled people?

JF: No, I’ve never apologised about how I wrote that book and I never will. I made some mistakes in the marketing of it and I said some things on TV talk shows I probably shouldn’t of, and I’ve apologised once, on a talk show. I haven’t apologised since and I won’t. It’s a book – people read it and it moves them and it affects them and it entertains them. Maybe it changes the way they think about books, the way they think about how things can be written, and that’s a good thing, and I don’t really care about the other stuff. 

BI: Would you say you’re deliberately working in a grey area between memoir and fiction? 

JF: I don’t think memoir and fiction, just in the grey area of what is truth. Something doesn’t have to be factually accurate to be true, and I think especially in America today if you pick up a newspaper and you think that it’s perfectly factually accurate then you’re kidding yourself. And I think so in the UK too, probably – how can you read a newspaper from a conservative point of view and from a liberal point of view, and read stories about the same thing and have them be radically different stories?

Truth is all subjectivity and perspective and I don’t see why people are shocked that that is bled into literature. We watch reality TV, and there’s nothing real about it. You watch a documentary and there isn’t necessarily any factually accurate presentation of anything, it’s a documentarian’s thesis and their effort to prove their thesis. 

BI: There are TV shows like The Hills that work in the space between fact and fiction that are feted, and yet your books have got savaged. Do you get exasperated by that? 

Yeah I do, I think it’s bullshit a lot of the time. All I can do is keep writing books and do what I do. I don’t talk a lot about A Million Little Pieces when I’m living my day-to-day life and I’ll talk about it this time and probably after this I won’t talk about it any more.

All I care about is that the book is still read, and it is, people still buy it, people still read it, and that’s what matters to me, not what someone on an American TV talk show has to say about me.  

BI: So what are you working on at the moment?

JF: I’m writing another book, my idea of what it would be like if the Messiah was walking the streets of New York City right now. 

I’m still playing with the ideas of truth. People spout off about the Bible being true, but the idea that they are is a joke. The idea that these books that were written 40 to 120 years after this guy was alive are somehow perfectly factually accurate, and that tell these fantastical stories – the Earth created in 7 days, Moses parting the sea, I mean there are thousands of examples – are somehow true, to me it’s just laughable. So I’m writing a version of what the Bible would be like if it were written today. 

I think if the Messiah were walking the streets right now most Christians would be revolted by him; most of the so called holy people would find him repugnant the way most people found Christ when he was alive. The dude didn’t get strung up on the cross because they loved him. He won’t be crucified [in the book] but he won’t meet a happy ending.  

BI: Do you find a lot of hypocrisy in Christianity then?

JF: There are powerful hypocrisies in any major institution whether it’s religious whether it’s the media, whether its political institutions, there’s hypocrisies everywhere in the world. I mean, I’m a hypocrite, you’re a hypocrite, we’re all hypocrites in some way. But I’m going to go after Christian hypocrisy and Christian intolerance.

BI: Do you think there are still things in your own life that you want to write about?

JF: I won’t write anything about me where I’m the protagonist ever again. I’m just not interested in it right now; there are plenty of other things I’m interested in. There are plenty of other stories I want to tell or issues I want to tackle than writing about some version of myself. 

BI: Would you ever try your hand at journalism, or non-fiction writing? 

JF: Absolutely not, I’m not a journalist. I have no interest in it. I want to create pieces of literary art, I’m pretentious enough to believe that’s still possible and that it might still matter. I grew up and wanted to be a writer, a book writer. So that’s what I’m going to do. In journalism you’re constrained by a lot of rules. I mean, if you read a page of anything I’ve ever written I don’t follow formal rules or writing. I don’t use normal systems of grammar, normal systems of punctuation, I don’t use paragraph indentation, I don’t use quotation marks, I don’t set my words down the page like most other people do. The couple times I wrote for magazines they just fuck my shit up. They change it all to take every individual stamp I place on it away from it.  

BI: How is the editing process for you? Writing in such a free style must leave you with a lot to cut out. 

JF: A Million Little Pieces got cut, we cut about 70 or 80 pages out of it, but the last two books I’ve written have hardly been edited at all. I write very clean, I’m pretty precise the first time through. 

BI: Does that come naturally to you? 

JF: No, it’s very laborious. I try to make what I write read like it’s effortless, but it takes a lot of effort. 

BI: What do you think you’ve learnt about writing since you sat down to write your first book?

JF: I think that I’m a better writer than I was when I started, but again, “better” is just a word, it’s a subjective term. I’m just trying out different things, trying to tell a story in different ways, playing with structure, playing with larger architectural issues related with building a book. Before I wrote the first book I didn’t even know if I could do it, now that’s not even a question. It’s not “can I do it?”, it’s “what’s it going to be?” It’s not “will it get published?”, it’s “how will it be published?”  

BI: That’s quite a luxurious position for a writer to be in.

JF: I mean, I feel really lucky that I get to write whatever I want, and that I have really supportive publishers, and that things have gone really well for me in many ways. When I sit down to actually write the book, I don’t really worry about those issues in the future, I worry about a word at a time and a sentence at a time and paragraph at a time and a page at a time, and I believe that if you worry about what you need to do at the moment then all the other shit will sort itself out when it needs to.

For sure I feel really fortunate I get to go what I do and travel and do interviews, I feel really fortunate that people read my books and are interested in them – it’s a great position of luxury. But when I’m at home the attitude is the same as it’s always been: I just try and write the best book I can.  

BI: What other people or areas of society are in the back of your mind, that you might write a book about?

JF: I’ll probably write a book about American society in the 20th century, like a 1000-page book that spans most of the century. So about a lot of things – it would cover economics, race, class and politics.

My wife and I – one of our children died last summer, so I’ll probably write about death, and loss.

At some point I just want to write a detective book, sort of a perverted hard-boiled detective book, just because I like PI books. We’ll see, when I’m finished with this book I’ll start trying to figure out what the next one is. 

BI: What about politics?

I don’t give a shit about politics, it has no weight on what I do.

Although I do think it’s hilarious that Obama’s [memoir] has been embellished and certainly no one cared about that. You can find stuff on the Internet about that if you really want…

*     *     *

James is appearing at Miller’s Academy in London tonight, at the ICA in London tomorrow, and then Waterstone’s in Dublin on Friday. Full details here.

Each are published writers in their own right. Mittelmark has penned a thriller entitled Age Of Consent and undertaken another careers’ worth of ghost writing and book doctoring. Newman has published two works of fiction; her first, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, was nominated for the Guardian’s first book award on its release in 2002, and she has also taught writing at numerous American colleges.

The idea, they say, was an obvious one which they executed efficiently – it went from from the drawing board to the bookshelves in two years, with a little help from established contacts in the publishing industry. Bad Idea spoke to them about advice they’d give to those chasing a publishing deal and their experiences of the industry.

Bad Idea: What are the key things an author needs to do to get published?

Sandra Newman: Two things, one thing is that aspiring writers just don’t send things out nearly enough. I see this over and over with my students. I once gave an entire class the address of my agent because they were such a good group, but not a single one of those people ever used that address. 

People hear stories about how many times Harry Potter got turned down, but they use that story to cheer themselves up, rather than to remind themselves to send things out to 25, 30 agents, before concluding there’s something wrong.

The second thing is that when an editor or an agent tells you something is wrong with your manuscript, unless everyone is saying the same thing, then they may very well not be true, and your novel may still be published to great success. People have their idiosyncrasies, and they find something to criticise, so you have to keep going. 

Howard Mittelmark: The temperament that makes a writer doesn’t always make a marketer, but you’re marketing your book, so look into who you should be sending it to, as not every agent is going to be suitable – don’t send your science fiction epic to an academic publisher! 

BI: There’s a myth that great novelists are great novelists from the word go; that they sit down and write, rattling off brilliant novels on their first try…

SN: Some of those beautifully written first novels were actually written by an editor at the publishing house who received a manuscript that was unreadable, but was by somebody who had a story to tell and who was 21. I’m not going to name any names, but some surprising people have had their novels rewritten from beginning to end, either by someone in the publishing house or by an editor outside.

HM: You get this very disproportionate sense that successful writers publish their first novel in their twenties from the media; if it wasn’t an unusual thing it wouldn’t be a news story.

BI: What’s the best way to go about getting useful feedback on a manuscript?

SN: You can’t necessarily get it from an industry professional who’s considered it for publication or to take on as an agent. That’s not the place to look, its comparable to the fact that only your family will tell you if you’re ugly. It’s an emotional investment to give someone honest criticism; somebody who doesn’t know you and who isn’t getting anything out of it is very unlikely to realise that.

HM: As far as constructive criticism goes a writing group or a class is the place to look for criticism, unless you have trusted friends whose opinions you respect and who know what they’re talking about. 

BI: Should you have a cut off point for how long you tout your novel before giving up?

HM: You don’t have to, because you should be working on your next book while you’re trying to sell that one.

SN: You can tell if any book that you’re writing isn’t good enough if nobody has a ‘fan’ response to it: have as many of your immediate friends read the book as you can stand, if you find those people are passing your manuscript onto each other, then you should never give up trying to get it published. But if people are obviously dragging though it out of politeness, you need to rethink. 

BI: Do you think that if a book is good enough then it will eventually get published?

SN: There are always going to be some books that don’t get published that deserve to, but there aren’t that many. There is definitely a correspondence between how good a book is and how successful it is. It’s not a one to one correspondence but you can usually tell when you’ve got a book that’s going to sell, even if it’ isn’t beautifully written – there’s something you respond to. 

BI: It seems you both have faith in the publishing industry to get good books published. 

HM: Now that you put it so starkly I don’t know. 

SN: I think basically we’re trying to encourage writers not to assume that the publishing industry is at fault, because there’s nothing you can do about it, whereas there is something you can do about your own writing, which is a healthier attitude to take.

HM: A lot of people like to think they’re not understood. And although that’s possible, the chances are you can do better. 

How Not to Write a Novel is out now on Penguin. Come along to the Butcher’s Shop tonight for a chance to win a free copy!

I’ll bet it was lots of fun at first. The Obamas look so sweet in that photo of them walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, and it had to feel pretty neat to take a girl from Chicago’s south side in your own helicopter around Maryland. But whatever warm glow enveloped Barack Obama seems to have been now blown away by Washington’s cold winds.

His stated intention to do things differently got torn to shreds by the appointment of some cabinet members with ethical lapses that looked kind of District-textbook. His bipartisanship ran into the Republicans (oh yeah, those guys are still here). And his much-awaited rescue plan for the financial system, announced by his treasury secretary on Tuesday, sent the markets into free fall. We thought Obama was so cool, he could do anything; but Tim Geithner looked like something off stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.

Critics have been queuing up. On the editorial pages, even some of the president’s friends have grown lukewarm. So has Barack Obama’s day in the sun turned into the shortest political honeymoon in memory?

Things might not be so bad. My guess is that the person least perturbed by the quick resumption of panic and anger is Mr. Obama himself; not because he will have retreated into a “don’t-worry-be-happy” shell of denial, but because, from election night, he has always signalled that the start of his ride was going to be a bumpy one.

Second, if support for his stimulus package is tepid, his own approval ratings remain sky-high. His principal mistake in that respect appeared to be to let House Democrats set too much of the stimulus agenda. Message to Democrats: find that abandoned mineshaft in which you’ve hidden Bill Clinton, and have him invite Nancy Pelosi for a barbecue.

On the bailout, my guess is that Wall Street optimists had been hoping for some kind of magic wand to whisk away their woes, restore their profits, and take toxic assets off their balance sheets. Yeah, right. There’s about as much chance of that happening in the near future as of the Italians playing exciting football.

The problems confronted by the Obama administration are enormously complex. As the Economist put it, Tim Geithner wasn’t ready for prime time. But as the details are fleshed out, it may take shape as the most reasonable solution. And while the stimulus package is not perfect, anything which gets money into the hands of US consumers will be better than something which does not.

However, the ride will continue to be bumpy. Having a rough start is not a problem. The literature on the political business cycle in the US suggests that the president does well to do unpopular things early in his presidency, in the hopes they begin to pay dividends at the next elections. 

Things may really start to get rough for Mr. Obama after the 2010 mid-term elections, though. There’s a good chance that a real turnaround will not have yet begun, while national debt will soar. If his party suffer setbacks next year, the period which follows may prove particularly difficult.

In the meantime, though, when one compares Mr. Obama’s start with that of his immediate predecessors, it hasn’t been all that bad – at least, not yet. At this stage in his presidency Dubya was still wondering how they managed to make his office that shape; Bill Clinton was chairing night-long committee meetings deciding what committees he should chair.

Nonetheless, this is a nail-biting time. We’re only just now learning how very close the world financial system came to outright collapse last autumn. If the world economy is being besieged by the barbarians of bad credit and mistrust, Washington may be the last bastion from which a rearguard will be mounted. If the US stumbles its way into a Depression – and it still can – the rest of us will go down. If Washington manages to restore confidence, the world economy still faces a difficult couple of years. But it will not collapse, and can then start groping towards recovery.

So these are tense days and weeks, and all eyes are on the White House, and on the US Treasury. Nobody cheered encore at Tim Geithner’s debut; they were all trying to figure out why the curtain had closed. But everyone’s faith in Barack Obama may buy him a bit more time. Now more than ever, we’re hoping Michelle is pestering him not to screw up, buddy.

Film premiers are usually the arena for dull, self congratulatory speeches and some cinema theory babble.

Not so the Frost/Nixon Q&A premier last night (apart from the abominable Philip French), at Haymarket Cineworld, which turned into a wonderful 400 strong group analysis of the autistic ‘Nixonian’ qualities of PM Gordon Brown.

Martin Bright, recently resigned political editor of the beleaguered New Statesman, asked Q&A panelist John Humphrys what he thought about Brown’s relationship to the Mad Monk. After detailing a number of shared features – their bovine jowls and evasive, stonewalling answers – Humphrys concluded confidently that Brown’s strongest Nixonian qualities were his autistic lack of charm, and desperate need to be loved. 

It’s not the first time the Nixon-Brown connection has been made. Last weekend the Telegraph’s Mandrake column quoted Frost/Nixon’s screenwriter Peter Morgan attributing to Broon many of the emotional flaws of Tricky Dick: 

“They are people who are hard to like, people who have complicated emotional inner landscapes, and somehow have had trouble accessing them.”

Or is it just that they both have really fat, odd looking faces? As far as lying, crooked, megalomaniacal power freaks go, I’m not sure good old Gordon is really having a seat prepared for him in hell’s parliament next to Nixon and Pol Pot.

It’s sort of unsurprising the comparison is being made by Morgan though, given his fetish for powerful leaders with bloated, jowly mugs: he also scripted the Brown/Blair telemovie The Deal, chronicling Brown’s fatal Labour leadership deal with Tony Blair in 1994, the Oscar award winning The Queen, and The Last King of Scotland, about the enormous fat-head Idi Amin. I predict a Yeltsin biopic next.

Surprisingly, the Nixon-Brown comparison was also drawn when Brown took over from his be-hated leader, Tony Blair (even though Blair is more likely to have matched Gloomy Gus in his elaborate use of make-up), in a Robert Harris piece for the Sunday Times:

“Gordon Brown is Labour’s Richard Nixon. That is not to suggest for an instant that he is a crook — far from it — but he has Nixon’s combination of immense political talent and utter clumsiness. The buttoned-up suit, the mouth slightly agape, the physical awkwardness, the alarming smile which seems to appear from nowhere as if a button marked “smile” has been pressed in his head, the nocturnal brooding on imaginary grievances encouraged by a group of chippy cronies — Brown, like Nixon, suffers from a kind of political Asperger’s syndrome.”

So shall we soon see Broon being whisked from Number 10 in a helicopter, a smile fading from his face, his hands raised in peace signs, as he is evacuated in disgrace to exile and retirement in Blackpool?

“This is the price and the promise of citizenship. The republic is our duty and our destiny, and for all the highest calling. No diversions from service and leadership will be tolerated.

Our songs and airs, then, will not need instruments of large compass capable of modulation into all the modes, and we shall not maintain craftsmen to make them, in particular the flute, which has the largest compass of all. That leaves the lyre and the cithara for use in the town; and in the country the herdsmen may have some sort of pipe.

For it was not for no reason that our fore fathers gathered in the blood covered snow, dressed in their beaver-skin underpants, roasting buffalo balls over a pit fire. It was to found this republic, which we are all now duty bound to uphold and make immensely powerful and rich at others expense. And do we not all remember their valor? With the darkening clouds of hell approaching, they gathered their servants and delivered this apocryphal line:

‘We’d better win this bloody war, otherwise we’re screwed’. 

And so they did. And you too can win your own battles with such hope and virtue. Just as our soldiers, running hands through the barley of foreign fields, their spears and arrows aimed at the throats of young maidens, negotiate their fulfillment and uphold our republic in all corners of this earth.

To the frontier my friends! Ride with hope in your saddle, harness the wind, the sun, the moon, and other celestial bodies, and make your destiny that of the gods.

Yes we can.”

As if a dam of frigid air burst on the northern border, a bitter cold front has spilled down from Canada and into Washington, DC: the kind of skin-drying, blister-making, crinkling cold that you have to experience to appreciate.

Perhaps it is a fitting way to prepare the Obama administration for its inauguration: a warm and festive greeting to what is sure to be a challenging presidency. For now, though, the miseries of job losses and collapsing asset values have been shoved aside for a week-long party. Washington’s restaurants are doing a booming, reservations-only trade as hundreds of thousands of the great and good pour into the capital, hoping to score prime seats to the events. The hotels are tripling their rates and sending away any guests booking less than three nights.

With the city’s streets girding to close on Monday, at the same time that the bars and nightclubs are allowed to stay open all night, taxi and limo drivers stand to do their best business in years. They will be among the few Washingtonians cheering the cold front, since ladies in ball gowns with drunken, cash-laden husbands or boyfriends will snap up rides faster than they can drive.

Why all this excitement for a few words and a hand on a Bible? Americans bristle if you suggest that they are crowning their president. You’ll get a civics lesson on the glory of their republic. But the truth is, Americans like royals; just listen to the accents outside Buckingham Palace. And they want their president not only to be a capable administrator, but a good family man with a distinguished wife.

Back in the days of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, whenever foreign journalists snickered at the prudery of Americans (a favourite pastime), I thought they missed the point. The notion that the sexual behaviour of a government leader has nothing to do with his job may be true of a prime minister. But Americans, I suspect, saw Bill Clinton’s transgressions rather as Britons regarded Prince Charles’ phone conversations with Camilla Parker Bowles.

Sure, loads of presidents kept mistresses on the side, and it took a hugely willing suspension of disbelief to buy into the idea of the Kennedys as an ideal family. But JFK was boning movie stars and doing it with such a degree of discretion that we’re still trying to figure out where and how he got it off with Marilyn. In contrast, Bill Clinton humped trailer-park trash – at least, that’s how the Clintonites always described them whenever their boss got caught with his pants down – then went onto Oprah to talk about it. Ah, noblesse oblige.

America, I think, has fallen in love with the Obamas. They are understandably impressed by the man they have chosen to be their leader: charismatic, super-bright, and blessed with remarkably good judgment when it comes to taking advice – after all, his campaign was nearly flawless. But I think they have also been smitten by the grace of his wife and the lovability of his two daughters. They are all a far cry from the patrician remove of the Bushes or the too-obvious ambition of Hillary Clinton.

Americans may not believe in the Mandate of Heaven, but they feel good about their country when their president looks like he could be on ABC Family. “Post-racial” the Obamas may be, but they have the home-spun charm that “Middle America” loves. Good luck to them; they will need it.

First, the facts: most of the planet’s people still believe in some form of deity or supernatural, justice-rendering power. Most of the planet’s people also live in conditions of poverty and oppression. Draw a Venn diagram of the two groups – poor, and believers – and you’d likely be left with close to one circle.

This probably isn’t accidental. Marx wasn’t the first philosopher to notice it, but his description of religion as an opiate for the masses was both critical and fatalistic. A belief in a just god maintained order in an unjust world, by enabling life’s less-privileged few to look to an ultimate rendering.

Curiously, given the contempt in which Darwinists have long held religion, this may have been an evolutionary development. Recent research has shown that people are less likely to cheat on exams if they believe someone is watching over their shoulder. A watchful god was socially useful.

The scientific advances of the nineteenth century, at which heart Darwin himself lay, removed the metaphysical necessity for a god: existence could be accounted for without a divine source. But the social function of a divinity did not disappear so readily, which is why Nietzsche found its death so troubling. Without a god watching over them, who or what would maintain order over society?

In developed societies, the state rose to the task. However, the state has sunk shallow roots in most of the world. In vast stretches of the planet, the state is a partial construct at best, a fiction at worst. Its claim to assure justice is laughable. Indeed, as the state has fragmented in many poor societies, religion has proved a resurgent means for citizens to find a sense of purpose and justice.

Ah, but just imagine the poor, ignorant chap from the Indian subcontinent, labouring in Dubai’s heat all his life to build indoor ski-slopes for the super-rich, separated from his family for years at a stretch, denied basic rights, crowded into zinc shacks with his peers, all to send a dowry for his sister.

He may have once consoled himself with the thought that a better life awaits him in the future. But now, hurray! a bus-cavalry will ride to the rescue and proclaim “Relax Ahmed! There’s no god to save you from this!” Or as campaign organiser Ariane Sherine put it to the Guardian, the message will “brighten people’s days and make them smile on their way to work.” Ahem. I’m beginning to understand why the crucible of so much religious terrorism is found in the world’s Dubais (or Londons, or Madrids) where these two cultures – poor immigrant believers, rich agnostics – clash, leaving the former convinced that their gentle god ain’t worth a bucket of warm spit after all, and that more, er, direct tactics are required.

Philosophers long grappled with this challenge. Sartre spoke of the burden of freedom, the responsibility that accrued to humans of making a now meaningless existence meaningful (not to mention just). Meanwhile, Nietzsche wrestled – however disturbingly – with finding one’s way after the death of god. Will a box of Haagen-Dazs and this week’s X Factor really now do the trick?

The truth is, most folks in the rich world should probably take greater comfort in the slogan “Most people still believe in god, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Those of us who really think the world will be better off when that first line changes, would do well to stop relaxing and resume the philosopher’s work.

Tania Khadder was recently laid off from her job as a TV producer, and started the blog unemploymentality.com with her similarly laid off friend John Henion. In this, the second of their guest posts, she tells us about Obama’s latest wheezes to get America back on track.

In a play that would make John Maynard Keynes proud, president-elect Barack Obama is now talking about a minimum $800bn stimulus package to inject life back into our struggling economy. He’s asking that a big chunk of that money go to bolstering unemployment benefits. And his job growth target appears to escalate with each new, increasingly bleak unemployment report.  He now aims to create or save four million jobs – a million more than he promised just two days prior. A huge part of this is to come from a major public works initiative. A man with a – gasp! – logical plan. While the Bush administration poured trillions of dollars into senseless wars, America’s infrastructure continued to crumble.

Yes, after eight years of asinine policy, it’s kind of exciting to look forward to a leader with half a brain. Obama to the rescue… or so we hope. 

Of course, hope alone does not a healthy economy make, and I refuse to buy into the hero worship our president-elect seems to evoke (though it’s kind of hard not to worship a man with such rock hard abs). The new administration must make good on its ever-growing promises – and fast. More than half a million Americans lost their jobs in December. And so far, January is looking just as dire. Even normally recession-proof sectors – like legal services – are suffering. And analysts, as well as fellow Democrats, say that Obama’s newly upgraded $800bn package is still not enough to rescue our economy-in-shambles – at least not in the short term.  

It comes as no surprise then that unemployment offices nationwide are overwhelmed, some of them to the point of total meltdown. And in what seems like a case of the WORST TIMING EVER, California unemployment offices are scheduled to shut down two Fridays a month due to budget cuts. Although, if my own maddening experience with them is any indication, these closures will have very little impact; it really is impossible to imagine a less efficient, more antiquated service. Though they will likely give it a good try, and I will likely eat my words.  

In other bailout news, we still don’t know where the first $350bn of the financial rescue plan went; “there hasn’t been enough oversight. We found out this week in a report that we are not tracking where this money is going”, Obama said over the weekend. Not unlike Iraq war funding, much of the bailout money appears to be unaccounted for. George Bush and his cronies sure have a knack for this sort of thing. Luckily, Obama plans to overhaul TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Programme) for the remaining half of the package – with plans to increase oversight, and to ensure that more of the funds directly reach homeowners and small businesses.  

Here’s hoping.