Music: Matt Bianco ft. Basia — ‘Golden Days’
Zeynep Tufekci: We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads
How New Zealand became a new Ararat for Silicon Valley’s misanthropic billionaires
Mark O’Connell writes: Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the…
Mass shootings highlight nexus between masculinity and gun violence
Laura Kiesel writes: The year 2017 brought the deadliest mass shooting in modern history to the United States, which has become home to more gun massacres than any other country in the world. The response offered by many of our political leaders, both Democrat and Republican, has been to focus on the role of mental illness in such shootings. The day after Stephen Paddock took to a hotel room in Las Vegas with 23 firearms and murdered 59 people this…
As climate change intensifies droughts, Cape Town’s water crisis may signify a new normal
Laura Poppick writes: Last June, Piotr Wolski began transforming his Cape Town swimming pool into a water storage tank for his home. By September, he had directed all gutters from his roof to flow into the pool and had installed a pump to transport water into the house where he lives with his family of four. Wolski works as a hydrologist studying regional rainfall patterns at the University of Cape Town, but his retrofit was no research experiment. Rather, he…
Music: Jazzanova — ‘Behold These Days’
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…
Music: Arve Henriksen — ‘Groundswell’
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
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…