“Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin Fighting for a system built to fail Spooning water from their broken vessels As far as I can see there is no land” So sings Ben Knox Miller in The Low Anthem’s “Charlie Darwin,” one of the best songs I discovered during my college years. The track [...]
One can only gush so much about a series before things get ugly, so I’ll try to keep this brief. Magic Breaks is proof that a creative and heartfelt narrative populated with memorable characters can keep evolving in fresh and meaningful ways, long past the point where lesser stories founder. This particular installment of Kate Daniels’s story [...]
In the last decade, the twin topics of technological unemployment and the automation revolution have found their way out of esoteric discussions between specialists and into the public consciousness. Plenty of good books are coming out every year to help us analyze these issues and gauge the degree of impact and pace at which they [...]
If humans want to survive and flourish in the Anthropocene, we will need to overcome the habits of thought that have wrought destruction on our collective psyche and the natural world. One of our most misguided and longstanding myths is the notion that humanity’s mental faculties should be considered qualitatively different from those of nonhuman [...]
“Hunger is the best seasoning.” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 939 “We don’t have much time. Because our mind predisposes us to think of trends as linear, we often fail to grasp the urgency of the situation. The demand we place on the planet grows, like our economies, not linearly [...]
“The walls of a cathedral had to be not just good, but perfect. This was because the cathedral was for God, and also because the building was so big that the slightest lean in the walls, the merest variation from the absolutely true and level, could weaken the structure fatally. Tom’s resentment turned to fascination. [...]
“Fear breeds fear and trust breeds trust. Traditional hierarchies and their plethora of built-in control systems are, at their core, formidable machines that breed fear and distrust. Self-managing structures and the advice process build up over time a vast, collective reservoir of trust among colleagues.” ––Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the [...]
“Our way of conducting business has outgrown our planet. Our organizations contribute on a massive scale to depleting natural resources, destroying ecosystems, changing the climate, exhausting water reserves and precious topsoils. We are playing a game a brinksmanship with the future, betting that more technology will heal the scars modernity has inflicted on the planet. [...]
Two hundred or so pages in, I had high hopes for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The novel grabbed me right from the start, showing all the signs of another brilliant yarn from one of the UK’s most talented living authors. Mitchell has a unique gift for inhabiting the minds of different narrators, and for [...]
“Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the [...]