Blog

War may change how we rely on big oil
Energy companies’ reactions to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Often, a catastrophe forces a business to change by hitting it in its wallet. This is an ethical crisis too. Businesses have to change. Today.

What we can’t conquer, we destroy and deny
A mindset that rejects wilderness will also reject people. Wilderness is the unknown. Much in the human is unknown too. A mindset that rejects wilderness will also reject humans who don’t fit social norms.

Talking to climate skeptics
Reflecting on ‘How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate’ (2015). Most USAmericans are scientifically illiterate. It’s not that they don’t memorize scientific facts; they don’t even know how scientific reasoning works.

The ‘undecidability’ of life
Freedom and despair in Will Eaves’ ‘Murmur’, about Alan Turing. The novelist directs our moral scrutiny not at the innocent man but at the state that victimizes him. The state destroys him, politically and existentially.

Trans and nonbinary kids talk about identity with Daniel Radcliffe
Sharing Space is a video series with the Trevor Project. Each of us has allyship and activism that we can do because of who we are. There’s something each of us can do especially well to make a real difference.

Butler on ‘imagining alternate futures’
Judith Butler’s 2021 interview in The Guardian. So-called gender-criticalism is ‘a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism,’ Butler says. This interview is one I keep coming back to.

‘The story of my untangling’ through gender transition
‘Pageboy’ by Elliot Page. Page realized he was trans when he was about 30. He says it ‘seems like more people step forward to defend being unkind than…to support trans people.’

The definition of possibility was inadequate
Conundrum, a memoir by Jan Morris. Being a woman ‘is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction’ that ‘has never seemed ignoble or even unnatural to me,’ Jan Morris wrote.

Little-known transgender memoir: ‘Reborn’ (1955)
Reborn: A Factual Life Story of a Transition From Male to Female by Tamara Reese. After her 1954 transition, Tamara says she’s ‘serving society in a useful and worthwhile manner’ and is ‘one of the happiest persons alive today.’