Imagination itself is a socially creative process

Across two studies, we find that co-imagining a shared future with a novel partner cultivates feelings of social connection, to a greater degree than individually imagining a shared future or engaging in a collaborative or shared experience in general.

Because sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, producing this text has required bringing together over twenty experts from a variety of fields….

By covering a wide range of topics with a uniformity of style, and by including glossaries, review questions, case studies, and links to further resources, the text has sufficient range to perform as the core resource for a semester course. Students who cover the material in the book will be conversant in the language and concepts of sustainability, and will be equipped for further study in sustainable planning, policy, economics, climate, ecology, infrastructure, and more.

The underlying idea of improving and extending through time (xiū 修) linked renovations and rituals. Managers viewed both as ways to renew the temple community, to protect temple buildings, and to pass liturgical and craft knowledge to future generations.

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley

Two English professors discuss this ode to new beginnings.

The danger in utopian thinking is that it can easily turn you into a pointless vandal. The more useful thing is to think of betterment as a process rather than thinking that we just have to get rid of the bad people and then everything will be okay. If you could have enough utopianism to question the world as it is and imagine how it could be better, I think that’s a wonderful thing, but if you take it too far, you actually undermine yourself. So, I would say, a like “homeopathic utopianism” I will support.

A sweeping interview about Silicon Valley and the possible shapes of the future with the man who coined the term “virtual reality.”

Decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality reveals the fragility of Buddhist care structures and highlights growing concerns about how religious activity generates waste. The management of religious materiality in the world’s fastest ageing society has extensive spiritual, moral, and practical implications.

This article examines how inherited Buddhist objects in rural Japan, such as altars and tombs, become burdensome due to depopulation and fragmented kinship. It highlights how temples like Fudōin in Hiroshima Prefecture serve as custodians for these spiritually charged items, navigating the moral and practical challenges of preserving cultural heritage amidst demographic decline.​

Standing on the top of Mount Everest, a person can literally look at places where plants and animals happily grow and live and reproduce, yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population on the upper slopes of Everest.

In spite of all reports
Accusations
Predictions
We aren’t gone

… 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.

around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house…

For more about this famous poem, you can also hear Pádraig Ó Tuama’s take on it in Poetry Unbound. (I particularly appreciate the way he reads the final lines of the poem).

Farming uses 50 percent of [Earth’s habitable land] and what you find is that around 75 percent of our agricultural land is grazing land. […] We are using a huge portion of usable human land to raise cows.

A realistic picture of what building a “green economy” would require.

If anyone could see into the future of the British economy it was John Maynard Keynes.

The secret of super-forecasting? It’s a willingness to change your mind.

I do not exist and yet I am everything. You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good.

… and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

All these indexes are attempts to portray civilization in our time using the terms of the hegemonic discourse, which is to say economics, often in the attempt to make a judo-like transformation of the discipline of economics itself, altering it to make it more human, more adjusted to the biosphere, and so on. Not a bad impulse!

But it’s important also to take this whole question back out of the realm of quantification, sometimes, to the realm of the human and the social. To ask what it all means, what it’s all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.

A novel attempting to imagine civilization coming through climate change stronger for it.

Without the pressure of a life cut short, Keith Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was. Yet that would have been a good trade.

On recognizing that “the nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism.”

All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around 11°C–15°C mean annual temperature (MAT).

… in the absence of migration, [by 2070] one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29°C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.

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.

Though it wasn’t the only time that I went home and cried during that week.

[Three] stories where people are like, ‘oh, I’m going to be the one to fix that.’ And only later did they really discover, to their surprise, what that can really entail. Even when you think you see things coming, you’ve got it under control, that’s who you are, you do not see things coming.

Mendicants, there are these three searches. What three? The search for sensual pleasures, the search for continued existence, and the search for a holy life.

Ka awobi owero (ber)
If the young men sing (it is well)

A traditional Lango prayer for rain in a time of drought arranged by a Cantonese-American composer and performed in grand style by Jimmer Bolden, Allie McNay and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London.

We have a billion years to fine tune our plans without missing too much of the universe.

In days I hope will come…

It’s a very sobering thing to think about the long future.

… 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.

In the future
many dangers will arise in the world.
Idiots will defile
the Dhamma that was taught so well.

A prophetic poem about the decline of the sāsana.

… in a future time there will be mendicants who won’t want to listen when discourses spoken by the Realized One—deep, profound, transcendent, dealing with emptiness—are being recited.

… that is how the discourses spoken by the Realized One—deep, profound, transcendent, dealing with emptiness—will disappear.

As an ancient drum has disintegrated, so too will the true teachings eventually be forgotten.

Museum of Nonhumanity calls for the deconstruction of the categories of animality and humanity in order to enter a new, more inclusive era.

… in its profit-driven, medicalised, de-ritualized and patriarchal form, modern death care fundamentally distorts humans’ relationship to mortality, and through it, nature. In response, the New Death Movement promotes a (re)new(ed) way of ‘doing death’, one coded as spiritual and feminine, and based on the acceptance of natural cycles of decay and rebirth.

In the morning when the Sun returns, it’s possible for us to hope.

… there is no viable future for civilisation that does not include a radical change in the nature of our educational systems

… madness itself is not a role that can be played any old how. In every generation are quite firm rules about how you should behave when you are crazy.

A meditation on the impact of biotechnology on society.

…and maybe because of the boiling April sun, he thought about water and ice. Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably a little different from the corrupt people around him. Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of. He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice.

A haunting and beautiful portrait of humanity, Behind the Beautiful Forevers reads more like a novel than nonfiction. But journalism it is. Of the highest order.

Written after three years of observations and interviews in a small slum of Mumbai, the book follows a few locals as they build their lives amidst the devastating poverty just behind the Beautiful Forevers.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

A classic of modern psychology, Stumbling on Happiness explains in detail the cognitive biases that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy.

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end.

Frase imagines a two-by-two matrix of possible post-capital economies and leaves us to imagine which future we want to work toward.