It’s the end of the world, but you might hardly know it. Sure, there’s the inconvenience of being mostly stuck at home, making do with a bit less and rationing a bit more, and foregoing most of our exterior social interactions. But let’s face it: for many people right now, our streaming services are
I’ve noticed a not-too-subtle shift in recent years that seems relatively minor but is perhaps quite revealing of larger trends. People rarely seem to ask the question anymore, “what do you do for a living?” Instead, it’s usually expressed in more transactional terms as, “where do you work?” or “what’s your job?” By itself
Well, it was “fun” while it lasted! Sure, we tried to impose our will on the world and render the biosphere uninhabitable… But everyone makes mistakes now and then. Still, despite the judgment by Blue-Ribbon titans that we fell short of the mark (mainly because we had made so many marks that it was
Wrangling with the Final Frontier There was a time in my adult life that I wanted to be an astronomer, following the usual boyhood dalliances with aspiring to be an astronaut. From my earliest memories I was fascinated with the stars—but more so the concept of them than the studying thereof, which made the
{NB: Reposting this piece from 2011 in memory of my friend Klee Benally, who walked on from this world right before the calendar turned. Klee was an ardent defender of the people and the land, tirelessly dedicating himself to critical causes expressed through an incredible range of living arts and media. Some of the
{NB: This essay originally appeared in the Peace Chronicle among a collection of other writings on the theme of “re-enchantment” earlier this year — you should definitely check out the great array of material in the whole issue (PDF posted by the Peace & Justice Studies Association, which you should join!)} Rekindling Rootedness in
{NB: I wrote this article way back in 2009 for the now-defunct HuffPost contributor platform, following one of the early major climate demonstrations; with another round planned for next week, I realized that I keep trying to get this essential message across but can’t really do so any more clearly than I did in
A long time ago in a classroom far, far away, I had a vision that has shaped my journey in profound ways. It was inspired by a film screened in grade school half a century ago, depicting what reality might look like from the vantage point of the edge of the universe AND from
Just the fact of you being here with (too) many words on the screen makes you a rare breed. In a micro-attention world, you still embrace the long form; maybe you even write things out by hand sometimes, perhaps in cursive (I see you!). If you’ve gotten this far into this essay, you’re already
On the Space Between Quantity and Quality The problem on my mind right now is hard to quantify—in fact, it’s about quantification itself. I recall attending a talk by DJ Spooky way back in 2020 showcasing his work around the notion of “Quantopia,” which looks at trends through the lens of a half century living
On Digitization and Deification Past Prologue Lara T. Singl surfs the web: self-improvement, infotainment, political partisanship, neurotica, fluff. They are rewarded as badges appear and new windows of experience open. Then they adjust their privacy settings, delete cookies, ask not to be tracked, visit sites anonymously, and trade in non-monetized knowledge. Lara is punished with
When the machines take over, it won’t be with a bang but a whimper. Or maybe even just a glitch… Did you ever have the feeling that every time you push a button, it pushes you back? Extrapolating from Newton’s law of “equal and opposite reaction,” we might update this to note that everything
So at Least There’s That… I was listening to a recent podcast where the discussion was about how we value the support structures in our lives, as well as the obstacles put before us. Not surprisingly, the conclusion was that people tend to overstate the latter and underestimate the former. In other words, we tend
As we progress in years, holidays oftentimes can lose some of their luster. Things just don’t have the same spark anymore, the sense of magic and wonder ebbs a bit, and the latitude of a “day off” gets supplanted by a multitude of logistics and preparations. Still, some holidays resonate on a different level
The consensus of climate science has given us about a decade to turn things around. That’s not a literal deadline or doomsday prophecy; this isn’t Y2K or an exact-date apocalypse, but a political and scientific statement. It means that we have roughly a decade (at current projections) to make some hard and necessary changes