"Every City Is Either Vibrant These Days or Is Working on a Plan to Attain Vibrancy Soon"

"History is more than a conflict between bogue millionaires and cool millionaires, however, and once you grasp this, you realize that it doesn't take a whole lot of 'creativity' to come up with real answers to the big problems. You just need to change the questions slightly. How about, instead of serving some targeted fraction of the master class, we chose to give an entirely different group of Americans what they wanted? Even if those Americans weren't cool? What would that look like?"

In a 2012 Baffler article, Thomas Frank takes on efforts by cities to promote their "vibrancy."