Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Every myth matters. Each one reveals how people once understood their place in the cosmos. Most have been lost, their meanings erased. The story of Marduk and Tiamat survives—and that alone makes it worth examining.
New York Times bestselling author Christopher Ryan joins the odyssey to discuss human nature. What’s universal, what’s cultural, and what’s personal? Can we really change the culture we live in? And are some societies better suited to human well-being than others?
In this episode we travel in time to the year 2125, to visit the Crazy Town museum, which showcases today’s world of wanton consumption and profligate waste. How will humans in 2125 – if there are any of us left – judge the things everyone sees as normal today?
From here I can return to my old country, neither prodigal nor victorious, but someone unexpected, without history, without illusion, appearing beside a silvery bush whose bitterness frees the spirits of this haunted earth and colours everything green.
Now, the ILR invites anyone to traverse The Line (accessible by Google Maps) by foot (or boat, bicycle or other human-powered method) and document the landscape. The documentation—called “linear research”—is collected in the Atlas of Remoteness, an ongoing research project that is archived on the Atlas of Remoteness website and in books that explore The Line globally.
In this episode, Nate is joined by social neuroscientist Taylor Guthrie to delve into the neuroscience of identity, exploring how the brain constructs a sense of self and the implications for our modern societal challenges.
In an era when climate breakdown demands radical alternatives to endless growth, we might find unexpected wisdom in a largely forgotten experiment from the periphery of Europe’s recent past. For over four decades (1945-1991), Yugoslavia pioneered a unique form of economic democracy that shifted power from political elites to working people – anticipating many principles that today’s degrowth and post-growth movements advocate.
Pull Einstein out of his artificial context and plop him (with colleagues, sure) into a wild place and you’ll quickly find out who the real geniuses are. Humans are certainly capable of such genius survival, but only if loaded with the appropriate cultural software—as vanishingly few are today. Not genius.
In this conversation, Nate is joined by Stephen Jenkinson, a cultural activist and author on the topic of grief, loss, and dying, to discuss his extensive work on grief literacy and the shortcomings of the dominant cultural attitudes towards death.
Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding. But the recipe for converting an overbuilt network into a safe, sustainable transportation system is still being worked out in countries and cities around the world.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on a moment of unexpected insight during a morning bike ride, which catalyzed a larger meditation on the modern human predicament.
Yet if the value of the commons remains always partly mysterious to systems which can only deal with the legible, so too does their capacity for endurance and the strength which they give to those who live and work with them, and the process of enclosure is never quite as total as its promoters would like us to believe.
