Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Across Sudan, women are resurrecting nafeer, an ancient practice of communal solidarity, adapting it into a decentralized network of survival that functions where the state has collapsed.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate outlines four bifurcations that are likely to underpin the human experience in the near future.
In this episode, Nate is joined by Sheldon Solomon, a psychologist and co-developer of Terror Management Theory, which posits that while all living beings strive to survive, humans are unique in knowing that death is unavoidable.
The African Peace Village is envisioned as a place to host gatherings, workshops, and retreats — where people come to recover their sense of belonging, exchange knowledge on food consciousness, mental health and experiment with new economic and educational paradigms. Once developed, the blueprint could be replicated and adapted to local contexts across the world.
In Ladakh, we learned that localisation looks a million different ways and sings in a thousand different keys, but it always gives back more than it takes and is humble enough to listen.
A horrific zombie apocalypse has ravaged the world—but hardly anyone seems to notice. One lone podcaster sets out to document this strange new reality: from mindful zombie retreats, to those fortifying shotgun bunkers, to others disappearing into the woods to build something entirely new.
While the practice of skateboarding may seem at first glance as completely arbitrary in the fields of existential ecological and social threats, in the example of Skateistan it has already demonstrably provided a foundation for community efforts supporting health, environmental education, and resilience in the midst of the extreme chaos of war, serving as a positive example of progressive social growth within chaotic conditions.
Only by seeing immigrants in their full humanity—beyond simple legal categories—can we develop responses that serve both immigrant communities and rural America as a whole.
It is the modernists, not the villagers, who are the “narrow provincials.” It is the believers in Progress who have chained daring and dynamism to petty purposes and passive self-absorption. That belief has bloodied the past and will do the same in any future built to its specifications.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate considers the ways in which our social species overvalues false confidence rather than the more honest and inquisitive response of “I don’t know.”
The United States is broken. We should consider a more decentralized democratic order as what comes next.
Presently, the major currents of thinking on both the mainstream political left and right seem fatefully enraptured with the centralized politics of the nation-state, believing that if the correct government is in place it will deliver what the people really want. If people were to stop thinking that, we may be at the start of a politics equal to present times.
