Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Yollocalli helps young people in Chicago discover their talents and expose them to careers in the arts. Using a model without standardized content or grading, Yollocalli emphasizes creativity as a tool for youth to learn to express their needs, share their ideas, and influence their environment—all while learning 21st-century skills.
Thanks to the Steves, you’ll graduate with a solid handle on the process, principles, history and practice of artistic activism and how this can move us towards a better (utopian!) future.
I do not know if this is a book for the ages, but it is certainly a book for our own apocalyptic times.
Like Dante in the inferno, for humanity in the first decades of the 21st century, the only way is through. In The Ministry for the Future, writer Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that path, telling the story of a world that somehow manages to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
How can one celebrate heroic individualism in response to a film that shows how stupid that is (in the first comet deflection attempt) and how deadly it can be (in the abortion of that attempt to allow an entrepreneur’s greedy dream of risking the human race to mine the asteroid)?
I just watched Don’t Look Up! on Netflix. While the movie has a number of flaws, on the whole I recommend it for the insights it contains in its parody of human attention deficit disorder.
And the suspicion arises that, behind all these manifestations of extraction, lies the same emotional and metaphysical vacuum – a hole in the heart as long and wide as the Berkeley pit: unappeasable, irrational, and ultimately incapable of ever being filled.
It’s really weird, I know, to want to draw lessons from this repeat lockdown to the point of turning it into an almost metaphysical experience.
We can only ally and build stronger coalitions for change with the world around us (and not just with humans). Postactivism is the opening to this.
A conversation between National Academy of Sciences fellow Dr. Sarah Myhre and National Poetry Series winner Teresa K. Miller on bearing witness to the climate crisis through science and storytelling.
Visionary fiction-writing is a practice we can use to imagine and prepare for the future together, to generate the ideas that we want to see more of in the world
For example, why do women retire with significantly lower Social Security benefits, after a lifetime of gender prejudiced earnings?
