A “99% perspective” on history suggests that societal collapse often meant liberation, adaptation, and resilience for the majority.
Here's a tough job. Luke Kemp researches the causes, dynamics, and consequences of societal collapse across history, along with today’s existential risks such as climate change and nuclear war.
“System Change, Not Climate Change!”
Gus Speth has been at the center of the environmental movement for decades. He co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), chaired the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality under President Carter, founded the World Resources Institute, and later served as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. He also spent ten years as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Boomers, let's finish what we left undone.
My cultural lottery ticket—being born white, male, and middle-class in mid-20th century America—gave me the freedom, even the encouragement, to challenge the status quo. This privilege even came with guidebooks.
A “possibilist” believes that what we do matters, even when we cannot predict the results.
john a. powell spells his name in lowercase to reflect humility and interconnectedness. He is director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California Berkeley. Born to former sharecroppers, with a father who was a Christian minister, powell grew up in a large Black family where community and belonging were central.
Art as resistance and repair
Olivia Laing is good at blending memoir, cultural criticism, and biography in their work. In Strange Weather: Art in an Emergency, a collection of essays published in 2020, they remind us that art is essential-especially in turbulent times. Art, they offer, can be both a form of resistance to political and social injustice and a source of healing for individuals and communities.
What if this is neoliberalism’s last gasp—its turning point?
I read this essay with a sense of relief. Yes, it feels disorienting when the federal government dismantles institutions, defunds agencies, and upends social norms. But that unease isn’t just felt by progressives—it crosses the political spectrum. Most Americans, regardless of ideology, want the same basic things: autonomy, security, and a fair shot at economic opportunity. Many of us share a growing frustration with financial and tech elites who extract value from our daily lives.
From 2019 to 2023, all 50 states experienced growth in the economic value added by the arts.
Arts and culture add more value to the economy than sectors such as transportation and warehousing, outdoor recreation, mining, and agriculture.
'The drivers of collapse and renewal are one and the same.'
Nafeez M. Ahmed is the creator of the Age of Transformation, a newsletter offering "systems-thinking for the global phase-shift." He wrote this piece nearly a year ago, before the 2024 U.S. elections, predicting that 2024 would be an inflection point—not only for liberal democracy, but for human civilization as a whole.
Public housing is woven into the fabric of American history. Its policies have shaped generations of families and the communities they call home.
Public housing has often been associated with narratives of poverty, crime, and failure.
The underlying weakness of the very concept of “liberation,” according to Sunsan Sontag
In 1972, Libre magazine—a Marxist journal published in France—invited Susan Sontag to respond to a series of questions on the aims and ideals of global feminism. This post presents her response to one of those questions.
Mothers share the reality of blending careers with caregiving
The creative industries celebrate hustle stories, but for many moms there’s an unseen struggle: balancing parenting with pitching, nurturing ideas alongside children, and building careers while raising families.
“We met as activists, so when we play music together, we also play music for the environment, music for the planet, for saving water … and we are feminists”.
This week my friend and colleague, Emily Miles, and I were sharing weekend highlights. She enthusiastically recounted a Purim party featuring West Philly Orchestra and Mariposas Galácticas at World Cafe in her neighborhood.
This year show your support of gender diversity by buying your Girl Scout cookies from a trans scout.
The Girl Scouts openly welcome transgender and nonbinary individuals into their membership. As waves of anti-trans sentiment intensify, one meaningful way to support trans girls is by purchasing cookies from transgender Girl Scouts.
'The role stories play in redesigning our systems is critical, and we all play a role in their telling.'
In exploring the root causes of our crises, this team found "humility and clarity in ancient wisdom." They offer this website as a gift, a tool, and a reference—a way to discuss the interconnected crises caused by an economic system that fails to prioritize people and the planet.
If women had been the storytellers throughout history our cultural narratives and power structures would be very different.
In this Zoom discussion she talks with Brené Brown about her latest book, Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes.
'Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred, and those of us who oppose this politics are now trying to figure out how we can oppose it usefully.'
In November, 2016, Ursula Le Guin wrote a blog post in response to the election of Donald Trump as president.
If we think of lonely people as a public health crisis then their disease is now twice as prevalent as cancer and growing rapidly.
We have survived for so long because the environmental devastation we are experiencing today is an exception, not a human norm.
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”
This month Macmillan published a new collection of the writings of David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World .
“What can I give in return for the gifts of the Earth?”
We are showered every day with the gifts of the Earth, gifts we have neither earned nor paid for: air to breathe, nurturing rain, black soil, berries and honeybees, the tree that became this page, a bag of rice, and the exuberance of a field of goldenrod and asters at full bloom.
'Gratitude, because it’s so easy.'
"...Gratitude. Such a lovely word. Humble and warm. Humble, because it’s not a word you use if you think you did everything yourself. Humble, because no matter how hard you did work at whatever it is you’re grateful for, you know—and more importantly, acknowledge—there was some luck involved."
'Women have always been writing and advocating against patriarchy and misogyny.'
As to why Americans would vote for a convicted felon and rapist who said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office, I agree with Heather Cox Richardson.
'We all live the same problems and now the world is in the highest peak of interconnectedness.'
This is an inspiring film that represents many voices: "How can we create a society in which creativity is inevitable and becomes really the force through which we build our collective future? The question that we need to ask ourself is really, can creativity change the world?"
Books + ephemera for collectors just like me
Last weekend Debbie and I visited our son Devan and his family in Portland, OR. Devan insisted that we see this store while we were there. I get why. If I were to turn my personal library and collection of ephemera into a store that store would look a lot like Monograph.
Just under a hundred years ago, the Greenwhich Village’s reputation for attracting iconoclastic, subversive and leftist writers began extending to its music scene.
As I was reminded repeatedly during the four years I spent researching and writing Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital, the Village music scene hardly started (in the sixties); in fact, it went back even further than the stories I’d heard of Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit' at the long-gone Sheridan Square club Café Society in the Thirties.
What do historic arts enclaves like Provincetown, Key West, and Taos, and our culture at large, lose when they fail to invest in artists and writers?
“'Bohemia has always been 90% low rent, 10% dream,' wrote Brad Gooch in a prescient 1992 New York Magazine cover story about the budding arts community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
