Anne Lutz Fernandez
Anne Lutz Fernandez is a former corporate executive with experience in management and marketing of consumer brands such as Weight Watchers frozen foods and Bufferin pain relievers. She also spent a decade as an investment banker in New York and London where her work included marketing the firm's services to multinational corporations and advising clients on strategic mergers and acquisitions. She left her position as Director at Credit Suisse to become a writer and teacher. She currently teaches English and lives in Connecticut with her husband, who is also a teacher. She co-authored her first book, Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives, with her sister, anthropologist Catherine Lutz.
Recent Posts
High Anxiety: Good Parents and Bad Parents on the Road
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America’s roads have suddenly become dangerous places for America’s children. At least, that’s what’s suggested by a flurry of viral stories involving kids and cars. In May, an inebriated Florida couple made news when they took their granddaughter for a joy ride, pulling her behind their SUV in a toy car. Then came the story […]
The Auto Industry Wants Your Thanks
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Feeling warmer and fuzzier about the auto industry bailout? With the help of the Obama reelection campaign, the industry is convincing more Americans that the $80 billion they forked over to save it were dollars well spent. In the latest Pew poll, the public responded more positively toward the bailout than ever before, with 56 […]
Pitchfork-Wielding Consumers Hold Auto Industry Hostage!
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It’s sad, really. Tremendous gains in vehicle fuel efficiency have been squandered, MIT’s Christopher Knittel demonstrates in a study published in the American Economic Review. Knittel’s analysis quantifies how, while automakers have applied meaningful fuel economy innovations over the past several decades, these have produced only modest gains in miles per gallon, because at the […]
Getting Young People Back Into Cars Is Auto Industry Job #1
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While the choked parking lots at many suburban high schools might mislead you, young people today are less interested in driving and owning cars than their counterparts in previous generations. This is happy news for environmentalists and complete streets advocates, who see fewer vehicles on the road as key to a healthier, wealthier society. For […]
Time to See Older Drivers Through Dry Eyes
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“Have you cried at your desk at work yet today? Would you like to?” Time Magazine asked last week, inviting its readers to indulge in emotion on behalf of an Iowa couple whose story went viral last week. Gordon and Norma Yeager died as the result of a car crash, the same way about 630 […]
Five Media Myths That Perpetuate Car Culture
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Another day, another news story, another media outlet wielding an old saw like this one: high gas prices are a political problem for the president because Americans “love their cars.” American car culture, fed by everything from our sprawled out landscape to a daily bombardment of car ads, is kept alive by journalists’ use of […]
This Is Your Brain on Cars—Oh, and Your Lungs and Heart and Gut, Too
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Gerontologists in a laboratory at the University of Southern California exposed a group of mice to the same atmospheric conditions that humans encounter when driving along the freeway. Horrifyingly, they discovered that the mice’s brains showed the kind of swelling and inflammation associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The researchers didn’t super-dose to get these […]
How Ad Dollars Help Explain the Media’s Bike Backlash
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The media loves drama, of course. As your high school English teacher explained it, if Hamlet doesn’t get pissed about his dad’s murder or if Atticus Finch doesn’t step up to defend a black man falsely accused — that is, if somebody doesn’t say no, you’ve got no story. So the vociferous opposition of a […]
Driving While Human
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Our local paper recently ran the story of Edith Cameron, killed in a car crash on a road we sometimes use. We anxiously scanned the column looking for that something that one of the drivers involved must have done wrong—the thing that we surely would never do, like hit the road without a seatbelt or […]
Creative Crusaders Who Inspired Us in 2010
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Travelling the country this past year promoting our book Carjacked, we met some pretty remarkable people who are working to reduce the price Americans pay for mobility. In the book we detail how our car dependent transportation system offers an awesome array of downsides, though they are often obscured by the auto industry’s relentless marketing […]
Ad Nauseam 2010: The Year in Car Commercials
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Car sales are up, auto shows are packing them in, and the GM IPO was oversubscribed, but there may be no surer indicator of the auto industry’s recovery than the renewed avalanche of car ads rumbling across every medium. And there’s no better way to get a glimpse of what a born-again car culture might […]
Driven to the Poorhouse: How Car Title Lenders Prey on Americans
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The cheerful come-ons seem more cheesy than sleazy — “Looking for a New Way to Borrow?” “Apply Now-Get Cash Today!” “Go From $0 to Cash in Less Than an Hour” — but these are not the friendly offers of local diversified banks. They are the insidious pitches of companies that do one thing very well: […]