Human beings are in a state of denial about the calamity of calamities our economy is actively engineering. Unfortunately, we needn’t look far to find one of its major sources, namely, the modern study of economics (in particular, Economics 101). Each year, millions of students have their noses forced into textbooks that investigate or illuminate no causal connection extending from the economy to the ecosphere.

Ordinary life was suspended during the epidemic. When it finally ended, about 12 per cent of the population of Florence had died. This was a considerably lower mortality rate than other Italian cities: in Venice 33 per cent of the population; in Milan 46 per cent; while the mortality rate in Verona was 61 per cent. Was the disease less virulent in Florence or ...

Does the contagion have a silver lining? "Today’s emerging pandemic could help catalyze an urgently needed tipping event in humanity’s collective moral values, priorities and sense of self and community. It could remind us of our common fate on a small, crowded planet with dwindling resources and fraying natural systems."

At its start, the internet was still relatively scarce, in the sense that we generally wanted more of it everywhere. iPhones were new; we were still excited about carrying portals to that utopia in our pockets and finding new ways to integrate two domains that were previously separate. Ten years ago, I could sit in a bar and wish that it better reflected the future I was experiencing.

Brutal days, to be resisted, often demand brutality inkind.
In such times, marked as they are by the fear anduncertainty that naturally metastasize out of truth’s debasement, there is but one bold act from which all other acts of dissent may precede. That is to tell — with utter, brutal frankness — the truth.

Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it, caught in the shining jaws of a limestone bedding plane first formed on the floor of an ancient sea.