Music: Jazzanova — ‘Behold These Days’
Quinn Norton and how anti-fascists are helping bring fascism to America
How fascism is coming to America: It’s happening when people decide the ideal society is one where everyone thinks the same way. And it’s happening when people who know better, kowtow to the dictates of social media instead of doing the right thing. I didn’t know the New York Times hired Quinn Norton until I saw news they’d parted ways. Without question, this is a greater loss to the Times and its readers, than it is to Norton — although…
Cosmopsychism explains how the Universe became fine-tuned for life
Philip Goff writes: In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is…
Why people love animals
When Yashar Ali tweeted this elephant video recently, the comments it solicited bemoaned the lack of love that humans show one another. Pets, on the other hand, are generally experienced as fountains of unconditional love. Is this why people love animals: because, to some degree, they make offset a love deficit? No doubt that’s part of the picture, but just as important is the role animals have in allowing people to express their own love. In a world filled…
Music: Arve Henriksen — ‘Groundswell’
Paleolithic parenting and animated GIFs
The creation of the moving image represents a technical advance in the arts comparable with the invention of the steam engine during the industrial revolution. The transition from static to moving imagery was a watershed event in human history, through which people discovered a new way of capturing the visible world — or so it seemed. It turns out, however, that long before the advent of civilization, our Paleolithic forebears figured out that movement seen in living creatures around them…
We’re killing our lakes and oceans
Eelco Rohling and Joseph Ortiz write: On January 5, 2018, a paper published in the journal Science delivered a sobering message: The oxygenation of open oceans and coastal seas has been steadily declining during the past half century. The volume of ocean with no oxygen at all has quadrupled, and the volume where oxygen levels are falling dangerously low has increased even more. We’re seeing the same thing happen in major lakes. The main culprits are warming and — especially…
On the need for viewpoint diversity
Plants, people, and decision-making
Laura Ruggles writes: Plants are not simply organic, passive automata. We now know that they can sense and integrate information about dozens of different environmental variables, and that they use this knowledge to guide flexible, adaptive behaviour. For example, plants can recognise whether nearby plants are kin or unrelated, and adjust their foraging strategies accordingly. The flower Impatiens pallida, also known as pale jewelweed, is one of several species that tends to devote a greater share of resources to growing…
Johann Johannsson dies at 48
The Guardian reports: The Theory Of Everything composer Johann Johannsson has died aged 48, his management has confirmed. The Icelandic musician and producer, who won a Golden Globe for his score to the 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic starring Eddie Redmayne, was found dead in Berlin on Friday. His representatives, Redbird Music Management, announced the news on Facebook, writing: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the passing of our dear friend Johann. “We have lost one of the most…
With the very best technology, humanity is digging its own grave
Technology is generally thought of as extending human capabilities by facilitating everyday actions more easily or allowing us to do things that would otherwise be impossible. From this expansive perspective, technological advance has become synonymous with human progress. Conversely, the less technology populations possess, the more they are viewed as developing or even less evolved. What these views mask are the multiplicity of ways in which technology feeds human regression. The regressive mechanism built into technology in most of its…
Music: Trio Chemirani with Omar Sosa & Ballaké Sissoko — ‘Azadeh’
Britain First and the first Britons
The white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” (borrowing this phrase from the Nazis’ Blut und Boden) think white-skinned people have a special claim to the lands of Europe and North America. This is an arrogant and ignorant belief to hold on this side of the Atlantic where every white person has immigrant ancestry originating from Europe, but European whiteness in terms of origin (not superiority) is a less controversial notion. That is to say, even among those of…
A new year — a new direction
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn Is just to love and be loved in return. “Nature Boy” by eden ahbez “I don’t think she’s getting the attention she needs,” a nurse told me as my wife remained in the Emergency Room six hours after doctors said she needed to be transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. On Christmas Day I almost lost the love of my life, Monica — we’ve been married for 17 years. Over the holidays we were…