Last night President Obama announced that 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden had been killed in a compound near the capital of Pakistan. I’m a little taken aback by the jingoistic […]
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In his new book, 1493, Charles Mann gives us a rich, nuanced account of how the Columbian Exchange continues to reunite the continents and globalize the world.
It has been a while since we’ve had what I would consider a “busy” Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcanic Activity Report – but this week, there is a ton of […]
If you read as much about art as I do, things that seem unrelated on the surface tend to pool together in the eddies of my consciousness. Two unrelated concepts […]
As car ownership rates drop in urban areas, B.M.W. has a foreword thinking business idea. The company will rent its cars by the hour to customers in Munich, Germany.
This week is Children’s Book Week. In honor of the event, I thought that I’d highlight 21 interesting e-books for kids. Collectively, these give us a glimpse into what the future […]
This semester, 22 undergraduate and graduate students from a diversity of majors at American University have participated in a new course that I created titled “Science, Environment and the Media.” […]
“We might ask ourselves,” writes Noam Chomsky about the Bin Laden mission, “how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped […]
I’m not quite sure what to make of this Shocking Economics 2008 video but it’s definitely thought-provoking. Sources are available at the American Freedom University web site. Happy viewing!
It is that time a year again – final exams, Christmas music and the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. All this does make the end of the […]
[cross-posted at The Gate] Defamation can be either written (libel) or spoken (slander) and is generally defined as false statements of fact that harm another’s reputation. The United States Supreme […]
Like the banshee of Irish and Scottish legend, Scottish artist Susan Philipsz keens songs of lamentation and loss that haunt those within hearing of the “sound sculptures” centered on her […]
My latest roundup of links and tools… When did the IT staff get promoted above the superintendent? Will Richardson notes: [A] school superintendent I spoke with … lamented the fact […]
If you dnate to the relief effort in Japan, you can enter a chance to win this new book about the past and present of Japanese art.
Jeff Utecht says that innAmerica (as opposed to China): n n [W]e focus on getting students to think different, we encourage them tonthink, to analyze, to question their findings. We […]
Now we are hearing about the memoir. Now, just as we stand shocked and awed before another chaotic call for revolutionary change in leadership, a moment some have claimed confirm […]
We’ve been reading a lot lately about the rediscovered remnants of the Pink and White Terraces (also known as Te Tarata and Otukapurangi) near Mt. Tarawera in New Zealand, but […]
Katrin Bennhold of the New York Times has a heartwarming piece for anyone planning a New Year’s Eve hookup. According to Bennhold’s friends, consenting to any sex with a dude […]
I remember vividly an 8th grad English class taught by Mrs. Raymond and Blach Intermediate School. She was instructing us on how to use quotes in a persuasive essay. Now […]
Long gone are the days when Clapham was a small, rustic village well beyond the gates of medieval London. Also gone, but less long, is the era of Clapham as […]
Obesity is a growing global health problem, and we all know why, don’t we? It’s the fault of corporations that sell corn syrup, and a starkly unequal society (why would […]
Last week I vowed to pay more attention to replication in psychology experiments. Repeated experiments are an important test of whether a finding is “really out there” or an accident, […]
Almost 200 years later, you still have to just be awestruck by the magnitude of the “Great Eruption” of Tambora that produced the “Years without a Summer”.
Unhappy with his art, Richard Wright destroyed all of his paintings in the late 1980s and gave up painting altogether for two years. Returning to the art world from that […]
My goal for June: 30 days, 30 book reviews. This post is a review of The Future of Management by Gary Hamel (and Bill Breen). My short recommendation? This book […]
[This is a guest post from Doug Green. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, drop me a note. Happy reading!] Update: see also Don Watkins’ response to this […]
A little over seven years ago, an unmanned US drone killed the head of al-Qaeda in Yemen, Abu ‘Ali al-Harithi, and with his death it effectively destroyed al-Qaeda in the […]
The Czech dissident Jan Prochazka was spied upon for years by the Communist government in Prague, but he didn’t let this inhibit his conversation. He spoke to his friends as […]
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth).
Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay.
Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.