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By the loading dock of Seattle's downtown library, librarian Jared Mills checks his tire pressure, secures his iPads and locks down about 100 books to an aluminum trailer the size of a steamer trunk. The scene is reminiscent of something you'd see in an action movie, when the hero is gearing up for a big fight, but Mills is gearing up for something very different.

"If you're not prepared and don't have a lot of experience hauling a trailer, it can be kind of dangerous," Mills says, especially when you're going downhill. "The trailer can hold up to 500 pounds."

Mills is part of Seattle Public Library's "Books on Bikes" program, which aims to keep the library nimble and relevant by sending librarians and their bicycles to popular community events around Seattle.

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Randonneurs Are In It For The Ride, Not The Race

At a time when much of the world is mired in economic torpor, China still enjoys enviable growth rates. And yet there's no question that its economy is growing more slowly these days.

Just ask Yan Liwei, a salesman for a construction materials company, who was visiting a park in Shanghai this weekend.

"The number of new construction projects is declining somewhat. It's taking longer for many of our clients to pay us what they owe," Liwei says. "Many small and mid-sized developers are feeling a cash crunch."

This slowdown is partly due to the global economic downturn. But economist Michael Pettis of Peking University believes there's something more fundamental taking place. Pettis says China is at a stage in its economic growth that every fast-growing country eventually reaches.

Three decades ago, China was badly underdeveloped and to catch up with other countries. It had to pour vast sums of money into roads, bridges, office buildings and factories, and this meant dizzying rates of growth. But eventually Pettis says all this building reaches a point of diminishing returns.

"When that happens the investment ends up becoming not so much wealth creating, but in many cases wealth destroying," Pettis says. "In other words, the increased productivity generated by that investment is less than the cost of the investment."

At this point, Pettis says countries like China need to fundamentally change their growth strategy. They need to stop building all those roads and shopping malls.

"So if you want to rebalance the economy, you have to sort of kill the engine of all of that growth," he says.

Pettis says that if China is to keep growing, its growth has to come from consumption. It needs to make a whole lot of policy steps that will make it easier for Chinese people to spend money — like raising wages — or eliminating residency laws that penalize people who move.

Pettis says this kind of fundamental change in economic direction is very difficult to pull off.

"The transition period for every country that's gone through [this] process has been politically very difficult," he says. "And quite frankly very few countries have gotten through this phase successfully."

The good news is that China knows it has a problem, and is trying to do something about it says economist Eswar Prasad of Cornell University and the Brookings Institution.

China has tightened credit to slow down the construction of all those office buildings and shopping malls. But Prasad says that with the global economy so vulnerable China can't afford to try anything too risky.

"The Chinese government is facing this very delicate balance," Prasad says. "They know that the way they're growing right now is creating some problems, but if they slow down the growth all of those problems come and hit them in the face right away."

Prasad says there's another problem. A lot of Chinese companies depend on the flow of easy credit to stay afloat, and he says they're likely to fight any effort to change the system. In fact, the reform efforts have led to vicious infighting among political and business interests.

"The system as it is structured right now works really well for the large state-owned enterprises, the large banks and for many provincial governments," he says. "These are all politically very powerful. So they have every incentive to maintain the status quo and not change anything."

In the face of this opposition, China seems to have backtracked a bit and recently eased credit conditions again. Economist Todd Lee of IHS Global Insight doesn't believe China's leaders have shown the resolve they need to tackle the big problems.

"What they really need to do is push through the next wave of significant structural reforms and they haven't done that," Lee says.

Still, China has navigated its way through the global economy with considerable success in recent years. Now it needs to find a way to change course and do so once again.

D-Day soldiers landing on Omaha Beach. A naked Vietnamese girl running from napalm. A Spanish loyalist, collapsing to the ground in death. These images of war, and some 300 others, are on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in an exhibition called WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath. Pictures from the mid-19th century to today, taken by commercial photographers, military photographers, amateurs and artists capture 165 years of conflict.

One of the best-known war pictures of all time was taken by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal in 1945. Five Marines and a Navy corpsman, raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima.

"It's such an important and historic photograph, but I don't know who any of those guys are," says documentary photographer Louie Palu — who found inspiration in the iconic Rosenthal image. "I wanted to meet the guys in that photograph. I wanted to know the name, the age, how young or how old they looked. I didn't want it to be an anonymous set of people raising a flag."

So when Palu was embedded with troops in Afghanistan's Helmand province in 2008, he made close-up portraits of the men. One of Palu's portraits became the signature image of this war photography show:

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[General plot/premise discussion within; no major spoilers regarding big developments.]

One of the great threats to any film is that the people who are making it live too much inside it. Just as you learn to navigate a city without looking at signs, they learn to navigate the world they've built so well that they forget to make it comprehensible and important for people who have just arrived.

That's particularly true with a film like Elysium, which is intended to serve as a diorama inside which writer/director Neill Blomkamp – whose 2009 first feature, District 9, was a surprising Best Picture nominee – will comment on income inequality. There's nothing wrong with science fiction to make a point; it's quite standard. District 9 itself is a politically charged film about the abusive segregation of disfavored populations and the inevitability of their rebellion — not a surprising topic for Blomkamp, who was born in Johannesburg. But when an entire world is constructed to make a point about a filmmaker's vision of social justice, what ultimately matters is not the sociological parallels of the world that's constructed, but what then happens inside it.

In Elysium, Blomkamp constructs his mid-22nd-century Earth, perhaps not post-apocalyptic as much as post-laissez-faire, in which unchecked overpopulation and disease exacerbated by economic collapse have devastated the entire planet, but the very wealthy have retreated to a space station called Elysium. There, they live in splendor without having to have day-to-day contact with the impoverished suckers they left behind. They get their labor cheap back on Earth while being waited on by pliant robots, and they fiercely guard the borders, which in this case means that they beef up their air defenses against undocumented shuttles. Perhaps most important, they hoard access to magically evolved medical care pods, which can mend the broken and heal the sick. Down on Earth, the poor crowd into hospitals where harried doctors tell them this is not Elysium – people can't just be cured.

Are you picking up what Neill Blomkamp is laying down here? Because he's laying it down with a trowel.

And that's okay. Blomkamp doesn't lack ideas about building a world with parallels to what he understands to be the modern Western economy. He constructs the spinning Elysium, full of perfectly manicured lawns (the robots do the mowing, it would seem) and mysterious marks that distinguish and guard the privileged. He throws in interesting details about what has happened in the next 150 years in his Los Angeles, including that it's a primarily Spanish-speaking population and that contact with the government has almost entirely eliminated the human element – as seen in a fine, creepy exchange with a mechanized parole officer.

There are a million stories to tell about Elysium, and about the structural impossibilities of segregating the rich and protecting them forever. Hearing this setup, all kinds of questions leap to mind: Is there resistance on Earth? Is there guilt on Elysium? Does anyone up there consider coming down here? Do kids on Elysium appropriate the music of Earth? How do these two parallel worlds of human beings relate to each other, beyond the official structure?

The story Blomkamp chooses to tell, unfortunately, doesn't really have anything to do with what's interesting about Elysium. Our protagonist is Max (Matt Damon), a factory worker who finds himself in a medical emergency requiring that he get to one of the pods on Elysium. But getting there means doing a favor for a mercenary, so the movie diverts into a goofy MacGuffin plot that's all about getting the MacGuffin so that he can give it to the guy so that he can get on the shuttle so that he can heal, which means he spends perhaps the central third of the movie doing something he doesn't really care about so he can go do something he does care about. The first act crisis sort of ... goes away, after seeming like it's going to be the driver for the rest of the plot.

Into this, we throw a beautiful woman he knew as a child, who now has an adorable daughter of her own. And you'll never guess: the daughter is sick. The daughter needs help! Help the adorable daughter, you rich jerks!

Meanwhile, up on Elysium, a political plot that wouldn't make the cut on a CBS Wednesday night drama about a mayor's office is unfolding. The president (Faran Tahir) is beefing with his defense secretary, who is unfortunately played by Jodie Foster in a misguided performance that never fastens on a characterization other than a hard-to-place accent. It seems that even though they seem to observe some sort of parliamentary process in meetings, Elysium is run by a computer program, and she can reprogram it to make her the president. (...What?) And the guy who can write that program for her is the rare Elysian citizen dispatched to Earth to make a factory run better (...What?). Also working for her is a mean weaponized dude down on Earth with a samurai sword, who the president has angered her by deactivating. (...What?)

Between Max's medical emergency, the mundane political struggles of the Elysian government, the sick daughter, the MacGuffin, and the guy with the samurai sword, we're in pretty deep, and we haven't even gotten to the part where Max gets guerilla surgery that equips him with a metal exoskeleton.

Essentially, Blomkamp has built a really interesting parallel society, a backdrop in which to tell some kind of a cool story about haves and have-nots and what happens to deprived populations over time. But then the story he actually tells is utterly pedestrian, both incomprehensible and silly, thuddingly obvious at times and totally mystifying at others. By the time you reach the conclusion, you already know everything that's going to happen, almost shot for shot, beat for beat, music choice for music choice.

There's a sharp distinction between the care that seems to have gone into building this world – imperfectly, but thoughtfully, to create a sort of alive, defiant allegorical space in which to make an argument — and the care that went into the story and the characters. The creation of that space is not the story. As fully realized as Middle Earth or the Enterprise or Walnut Grove or Westeros may be, a built world is just a built world. However important the point you want to make, you rise or fall on what happens on the stage you've built, not on how immersive an experience that stage creates. And it's that action that fails this really ambitious, sometimes imposing piece.