Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Hélène Duranton Three leading cities – London, Paris and New York – have all seized on the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to make improvements to their cycling infrastructure to improve mobility, reduce congestion and cut pollution. While these cities are distinct, how do their cycling infrastructures compare?
Recently, we Earthlings have been seeing amazing images from the surface of Mars courtesy of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Meanwhile, here on planet Earth, much of the high-tech production system that helped to produce the rover is in a spot of trouble.
When someone says that humans are on a course to extinction, it elicits a yawn from most people. Epidemiologist Shanna Swan has projected the date it will begin and can tell you exactly why
The news is full of stories about a system whose rivets are about to pop en masse. Disparate calamities are arising out of a system that applies certain “principles” across sectors of society. Those principles have their origin in rigid economic ideology. Let us take Texas utility customers who shivered through rolling electricity blackouts last week.
If you are trying to prove something is true and certain facts get in the way, it’s almost always useful to exclude them. This is apparently what technology cheerleader Andrew McAfee has done in his recent book “More from Less,” which claims that advanced economies have been dematerializing for something like the last 40 years.
A society knits itself together through the stories it tells itself. A rigid uniformity in those stories leads to stagnation and a suffocating of creativity and needed change in society. However, if the stories are too divergent, we will be unable to find common ground.
Small investors, emboldened by an online Reddit group called WallStreetBets, have so far inflicted nearly $20 billion in losses on their arch short-selling foes as the stock price of GameStop has rocketed from about $17 a share on January 4 to $325 a share on Friday. Will WallStreetBets show itself to be a liberating force? Will it spawn a worldwide movement that demands a rethinking and restructuring of our financial system?
PFAS, a toxic group of industrial chemicals, are now pervasive in the environment including in the bodies of nearly every human tested.
We are having worldwide fight not over our view of “the facts”, but over what constitutes “the facts.” It has ever been thus, philosopher Paul Feyeraband tells us. It’s just that now that fight is breaking out into the open and disrupting our lives and our institutions without a clear way to resolve it.
It’s not just to hide clutter anymore – add “saving the planet” to the reasons you leave the camera off during your next virtual meeting.
Those of us who understand the systemic crises we face have a special responsibility to build our own emotional resilience and to be open-minded so that we can help others in our communities, who don’t have that same clarity, to navigate the craziness to come. It’s a crazy world out there, and it’s getting crazier. Don’t add to the insanity.
I am a Linux ambassador of sorts. I’ve been using the Linux computer operating system since 2013. I can still remember the light feeling I had the day I broke free of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
