To Make Cities Climate-Proof, We Need to “Transform the Culture of Proximity”
June 23, 2022
“We need to transform the culture of proximity,” says Carlos Moreno, a professor at Sorbonne University. “People live with loneliness, anonymity and stress. This situation exists because [they] don’t have the time to develop local social links because of a hectic urban life.”
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Rewilding Urban Permaculture
June 16, 2022
Habitat loss, pesticide use and (of course) climate change are all causing a perilous dearth of insect biodiversity. And with populations of creepy-crawlies in steep decline, the future could very well hold “massive crop failures, collapsing food webs, [and] bird extinctions,” according to biologist Thor Hanson. Or even worse outcomes, as species loss and ecological mayhem spiral out of control.
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Israel’s Dirty Propaganda Trick Worked — Again!
May 13, 2022
Veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh wasn’t murdered by the Israeli Defence Forces while covering an IDF raid in the occupied West Bank. No: according to Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the army “cannot determine by whose fire she was harmed.” Hell, it may even have been a stray shot from a Palestinian firearm. But rest assured, we’ll get to the bottom of it: the IDF is “investigating.”
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A New Social Media Paradigm
May 3, 2022
We just have to say that a business model that’s premised upon discovering the weaknesses in your attention in order to hack it and sell it to the highest bidder is fundamentally immoral and we will not allow it.
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Will We Ever Reach Financial Herd Immunity?
April 27, 2022
Speculative money is spreading the virus of capitalism. The financial pandemic is out of control — because there are no borders or governors or effective laws to stop the money-begets-money-begets-money algorithm. The speculative traders are like superspreaders, and the whole world is vulnerable.
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A Word to Help Us Survive the Next Ten Years
April 19, 2022
As she was in a hospital bed dying of cancer, my mother got a message from a friend with the words, “remember sisu.” It’s one of those untranslatable exotic Scandinavian words that marketeers misuse so they can sell us multivitamins. Crudely speaking, sisu is a Finnish concept for reckless bravery in the face of unimaginable odds.
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We May Not Win the Planetary Endgame
April 14, 2022
Too many of us are wallowing in our virtual playpens while ecosystems crash outside. We say: “Ahh, I don’t really care that much about the physical world, I’m happy here in my metaverse. Whatever this dream turns out to be — rocket to transcendence or evolutionary blind alley — I’m in.” What could very well happen then over the next few decades, is that the mercury keeps rising, our planetary systems collapsing, and we’re driven to live more and more in our private little digi-cocoons whether we like it or not.
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How much plastic is coming out of the Industrial bunghole annually?
April 5, 2022
The cost of living will go up, and that’ll hurt. But plastic packaging will gradually disappear from our lives.
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The “Ripening Beast” Has Left the Building: RIP David Hickey
March 28, 2022
The smartest guy in the room was also the biggest smartass. Harvard and Yale — both places he taught at – were the kind of clubs he wasn’t sure he wanted to belong to. He accepted a MacArthur “genius” grant while remaining deeply suspicious of the word. Nothing in life matters more than beauty, he insisted — even while scarfing hamburgers and living in Vegas. He pissed off people on both ends of the political spectrum, calling himself, at various times, a “bleeding heart libertarian,” and an “egalitarian elitist.” He said what it wasn’t safe to say until everyone else was saying it too (or at least thinking it).
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Think Big, Graeber's History of Humanity!
March 25, 2022
David Graeber didn’t live to see the fruits of his decade-long labor: the anthropologist, anarchist and Occupy Wall Street kickstarter died suddenly last year. It fell to his co-author, the archaeologist David Wengrow, to finish their collaborative tour-de-force and get it out into a world right when the world needs it most.
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The Catalytic Moment of Truth
March 22, 2022
Five years ago, as survivor after survivor of sexual abuse stepped forward, a phenomenon bloomed in front of everyone’s eyes. A random cop in Minneapolis does something heinous and gets caught by chance — and the people are like, how much of this shit is happening under the radar?
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Opting Out: Antiwork and the Great Resignation
March 7, 2022
Americans quit their jobs this summer at rate never seen before. Gen Z led the charge. The children of Occupy Wall Street — footsoldiers of the Third Force — went full Johnny Paycheck on their crappy minimum-wage employment.
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GEN Z — Will You Chart a New Course?
February 28, 2022
Gen Z is our last best hope for a sustainable future, but can they muster the gumption to chart a new course for humanity?
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Damage to Your Soul?
February 3, 2022
What's the real cost of our smartphone addiction? Study after study has shown that using Facebook all the time makes people feel moody, anxious, and depressed. And that's just the start.
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Why are you so anxious all the time?
January 31, 2022
Social media platforms are trapping us in Skinner boxes. We keep swiping up and up, hoping for some connection to appear in notification-red that gives us a hit of temporary dopamine. But that endless loop is no accident — we're addicts by design.
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