En-‘chanted’ land is not only land that has been sung to, but land who has had its own song listened to and sung back to it: land that is understood for its own specificity. And through that understanding, the land radiates back in true expression of itself, the same way a child beams when understood—or, when sung to.

Despite the fact that over 80% of parents reported teaching their children how to use chopsticks, a mere 9.7% of children exhibited correct chopstick-holding technique.

While chopstick education is predominantly conducted within Japanese households, the increasing prevalence of nuclear families and dual-income households suggests a decline in intergenerational transmission of chopstick education.

… the massive increase in demand for cheap, subsidized autonomous vehicle rides will result in an increase in the number of cars in our cities. AV companies will then lobby for some roads to be designated as ‘autonomous only.’ This will be pitched as a way to increase safety and efficiency but the ultimate goal will be to eliminate public transit and human driving in order to force people to sign up to an AV subscription.

The distopia self-driving car companies are trying to build and what we could do to design our cities for people instead.

An inability to engage with our communities hurts everyone

While the article is a bit parochial (focusing on the pandemic-era United States) its conclusion is broadly true under advanced, global Capitalism.

Time is now currency: it is not passed, but spent.

The joint creation of social life is the very basis of all economic activity.

A compelling argument that “fauxtomation” is more about convincing people that they are economically superfluous than it ever was about actually removing people from the equation.

The mind of man is capable of anything.

A British novel about the “horrors” of colonialism and what Europeans thought about them.

For more about this classic novel, see (for example) the Writ Large Episode on the book and its history.

all those bodies in Departures
are naked under clothes and scarred

Buddha-branded advertisements cater to all socio-economic classes not just the elite. Buddha is used as a spiritual resource to promote desire, reinforcing rather than challenging consumer culture. Buddha-branded advertisements are shaped by American cultural principles, and in return, the advertisements reshape various facets of identity and everyday American life.

… even consciousness is shared, to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, so death stops seeming like the enemy and starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining. And to go from the terror [of death] into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social, economic, and cultural things.

A passionate defense of the importance of Buddhist philosophy in charting a path out of the Anthropocene.

… mindfulness is being used to reinforce the capitalist system

Cynthia wasn’t just any old mannequin from New York. This wasn’t even her first social event. By the time Jeanne’s mother-in-law met her, she had already attended balls, graced the front pages of magazines and appeared in Hollywood movies. Cynthia was a celebrity.

I was just beginning
to wonder about my own life
and now I have to return to it…

… although objects manufactured in factories for profit are not made or handled according to Buddhist tradition, the “aura” can be produced in different ways and at different points of an object’s life

Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work as cheaply as possible.

You can read the introduction to his book online here.

… what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?

… how the art world’s hunger for ancient artifacts is destroying a culture

… the belief that we humans occupy a realm of being separate from the rest of nature encourages what he all-too-politely refers to as “environmentally irresponsible behavior.”

A history of modern conceptualizations of “nature” and an early defense of the so-called “first/second nature” split—a concept we now call “the anthropocene.”

Notice in particular how the looting was worse during the Cold War than during the colonial period, with American-backed militias instrumental in the efforts on both sides of the border.

The rate of change is visibly unsustainable. The profiteers call this process “disruption,” while commentators on the left generally call it “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” Millennials know it better as “the world,” or “America,” or “Everything.” And Everything sucks.

Explaining the economic moment we are caught in, its tangled roots, and the challenges of trying to fight our collective, exponential momentum.