World on the Brink: Will History Bring Us Full Circle?
Each New Year prompts us to think about hope. As we enter 2026, how might we think about our prospects for hope?
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Growing the Nourishment We Seek
The garden is a profoundly simple setting for reconnecting with the earth, with one another, and with ourselves.
The Western Mythos – Our Monster’s Spawn: Part I
Yes, the West has been subjected to extensive critique. But I will show that such critiques rarely reach its core nature and are more often absorbed, neutralized, and ultimately survived by the system itself.
Rising to the Challenge of the Sociopolitical-Environmental-Economic Polycrisis
None of us gets to choose the era we live through or to control a whole lot about the world we live in. But we should strive to rise to the challenge of the situation we are confronted with, by doing what we can to make our communities, our country, and our world as livable (and worth living in) as we can.
The Obscenities of Inequality: Trading Game, by Gary Stevenson
The link between income inequality and democratic erosion has been well established but little policy action taken to address it. Fortunately. Gary Stevenson has thought a lot about what’s more important than the few winning, and is among those doing something about the gap.
Weak signals of the Venezuela war
Like Russia’s frontline blood banks, the Venezuelan bond trade signalled that the preceding furore was headed in a specific direction. And in the increasingly chaotic, ill-defined mess of multipolar politics and climate chaos, reliably finding which ‘weak signals’ matter—and which signals are just noise—will be vital for navigating what comes next.
Autonomous vehicles: Is necessity really the mother of invention?
What “necessity” is really driving the autonomous vehicle push?
Ditching Dualism #6: Maybe Monism?
The idea that we are stardust, and made of the same stuff that all the plants, animals, and Earth itself contain is a very unifying truth. Everybody plays by the same rules.
Behavioral Thermodynamics Part 1: Beyond the 4th Law?
In this week’s Frankly, Nate takes thermodynamics out of the physics classroom, utilizing its principles to explain the invisible forces behind growth, competition, and complexity in our world.
Managing Water Differently: Algeria Facing Hydrological Extremes
What if, in Algeria, water were no longer seen solely as a scarce resource to exploit or a threat to control, but as an ecological and economic capital to preserve and develop?
The tyranny of beer
Even among those that seem to agree that this growth-addicted system is doomed to fail and collapse, there seems to be quite different perspectives on how fast that will happen. Equally important is of course how deep the collapse will be and what will collapse.
The end of 2025 must be the end of the inane rule of climate ‘optimism’
We should admit that widely-mandated climate optimism has been actively harmful to the needful acknowledgement of reality – and to the active collective self-protection that we now desperately need to get serious about making happen.
