Blog
When we don’t have Twitter, we’ll enjoy books again
Reading ‘Melancholic Parables’ as a parable of Twitter. Flash fiction by Dale Stromberg. One way to read it: who we are when we’re tweeting, who we think we are when we’re tweeting, and why we keep tweeting.
Gilbert Highet on censorship, 1954
A collage of his words. Cave man painting a running stag? Standards of good and evil? Transmuted into living flames? I’m in. Then I realize it’s an argument for censorship.
When you claim that experts don’t know their stuff
Jordan Peterson says climate scientists don’t define their terms. When a troll accuses someone else of bad-faith rhetoric, they’re usually only describing how they themselves operate. It’s spin. And it’s pure projection.
Climate change, predicted (three decades ago)
Returning to an environmental classic: ‘The Ages of Gaia’ by James Lovelock. We don’t yet know what it will be like when the forests are gone. But we should live in a way that prevents this outcome. We must support our own survival.
The Industrial Revolution: All of it has to change again
Trains represent where we’ve been & where we‘ll go next. Steel, aluminum, concrete; fossil fuels; electric light; transportation, communication, refrigeration, medicine. Do we know what we have to change?
Tadpoles teach us in Kern’s ‘Real Sugar’
Stories for those who feel ‘fragile about frogs’. We can grieve “all the frogs that aren’t.” Some of our stories going forward, though, have to be about the frogs that are. Which will those be?
How we’re here now: Poems of California
Poems in ‘Rift Zone’ and ‘Last West’. We know in our bones what being is. Because we are. ‘To be’ is to exist in a place, to grow, to break off, to feel how this ties us to past and future.
We know who’s responsible for orange sky
We need to hold them accountable. It’s Exx-smog and Shell-smoke. The big orange cats must be held accountable, and there’s more than one. Each of us has a role to play.
Designing a town people can get around? Repeat this exercise.
Anna Zivarts reminds us how we can take an hour to try harder. Sometimes we lack empathy for each other’s transportation needs and preferences. We have no idea because we haven’t stopped to try.