For this titan, the Kindle and iPad are merely two more items in an increasingly unmanageable cesspool of shiny distractions.

FORBES: I Can't Read Anything Longer Than This Headline

So a decade after the boom, incubators are seen by many as a cesspool of amateur entrepreneurs and poorly executed startups.

FORBES: Incubators Are Usually Dumb, This One Might Not Be

Untreated sewage and the 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls that General Electric dumped in the Hudson River turned the harbor into a cesspool.

FORBES: Magazine Article

But they also point to a new cosmopolitan cesspool, where a similar set of worries beset every strata of society, uniting and dividing it along new lines.

ECONOMIST: The capital as inspiration for novelists

Take the Aral Sea in Central Asia, now a shrunken, poisonous cesspool of pesticide residues and toxic chemicals that are causing an explosion of chronic bronchitis, cancer, typhoid and hepatitis, kidney and liver disease.

FORBES: The Story Of Eau

Could Dante have walked beside me across that dreadful place, which had been transformed by human agency from a peaceful countryside to a garbage heap, a cesspool, and a charnel-house combined, he would never have written his 'Inferno, ' because the hell of his imagination would have seemed colourless and tame.

WSJ: Reflections on Champagne