Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Chris Smaje What I mostly want to do on this site over the next few months is resume exploring the alternative world of my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex. But there’s a case for taking a step back, putting that exercise into a wider context, and laying out something of a programme for the year – especially in the light of some comments I’ve recently received. So that’s what I’m going to do here.
On its way to fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promises and the Republican Party’s longing desire to limit congressional delegation of rule-making authority, the House passed two pivotal pieces of reform legislation: H.R. 5 (Regulatory Review Act) and H.R. 26 (Regulations of the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act).
It is rare for a report to hold the potential to change the world, but one study published last month may do just that. The Recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD — a group of experts assembled by the G20’s Financial Stability Board) aims to give investors, lenders and insurers visibility of how climate-change risk will affect individual businesses, and a road map for reacting to it.
Into the Ruins is a rare breed of magazine. Unlike most other science fiction periodicals, its attitude toward the future charts a refreshing middle ground between mindless cheeriness and unremitting apocalypticism.
Never assume the next 4 years are lost to us. They may well be the making of us, and the turning point we so desperately need. This is our time. Let’s get to it, and create something appropriate to the scale of the challenge.
One of the oddest features of contemporary industrial society, it seems to me, is the profound ambivalence it displays toward the future. It’s hard to think of any society in human history that has made so much noise about the future, or used images and ideas of the future so relentlessly as rhetorical ammunition in its political and cultural controversies.
When a local organizer for a new adult education project in Austin, Texas, asked me to teach a course on politics in January, it was tempting to focus on the potentially disastrous short-term consequences of the election. Instead, I decided to frame the course around the disastrous long-term forces that shape the contemporary United States, no matter who is in office.
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. Image from Wikimedia. Lafayette, Louisiana, has a population of around 125,000. That makes it about the 200th largest city in the country; not really big but not really all that small either. It has a unique culture and geography, but the layout and design of the … Read more
Environmental risks, steadily rising in importance, are recognized as authentic and relentless obstacles to peace, wealth, and health, according to the World Economic Forum’s global risk report, an annual survey of business, academic, and political leaders.
Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space.
To me, that’s the big question when it comes to film. Is such a thing possible, or does making a film – even one about Berry – not have a net effect of legitimizing film even more, spurring the making and watching of even more films (eco-type films in this case), rather than inspiring viewers and filmmakers themselves to “turn the television [and camera] off and go outside”?
Not since the Civil War has an American presidential Inauguration Day been so fraught with fear and dread (on February 23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln traveled to his inauguration under military guard, arriving in Washington, D.C., in disguise). The incoming president is the most unpopular of any to assume office since modern polling began.
