Herman Cain may have very limited political experience and lack policy depth, but so far, he’s proven to be a master at branding himself. When asked to use one word to describe the candidate, voters’ top answer for Herman Cain is 9-9-9. This is an impressive messaging accomplishment.

Joe Biden is your cable provider screaming that they are better than the phone company, and you know they are better than the phone company, and if you don’t know that, no matter what your experience, then it is your problem, you fucking idiot.

Carjacked joins a hefty body of literature critiquing our automotive transportation system, including my own work Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, released in 2000. Do we need another critique of car culture? My answer is a resounding yes. While such books all tell us about the problems cars cause and about better, greener, more economical and socially just approaches to transportation, what they say gets swamped by the ongoing tsunami of marketing messages that coax us to embrace automobiles. As the authors of Carjacked write, this relentless marketing leads us to “take the car for granted as a social good, which renders it nearly invisible as the source of a range of problems.”