All of us exist within a world of deep forces that we navigate at a level that is not what we term rational. All of us exist within a context, a late capitalist world, that is by no means rational. And in such a world, are untapped, unharnessed, undirected energies and longings going to be funneled and directed by those who figure out how to do so? Absolutely. And we’re not above that.

‘Reason’ isn’t just ‘trust scientists’ and ‘check your sources’; it is a deep re-evaluation of what life is for…

Where our individual perception meets the external world: that point of focus is the juncture between inner and outer space. It’s where we and nature find union. It’s the home of the muse, of inspiration, even of what have been called ‘angels’ which the visionaries saw shining in that meeting place between the eye of the observer and the light of the observed.

At all those locations stood former temples/shrines that gods and ghosts used to occupy but were demolished to make way for urban infrastructure. Despite repeated banning and purging of deities and temples, worshippers burn incense and paper money, make offerings, and become possessed in those places. The gods’ agency seems to be exercised even after their temples and bodies are destroyed.

You needed rails and these huge engines. You needed timetables and organization. That encompassed everything that industrialization was about.

That’s the last war you’ll ever fight. So we need to find a way of avoiding total war. ‘And here’s the way,’ Clausewitz says. We can avoid it if we allow the political rational to govern war.

How the Napoleonic Wars rewrote the rules of warfare and on how Clausewitz’s two, very different takes on what he saw defined warfare before—and after—World War 2.

Air conditioning relieves us of having to think about the air, so that we can think about other things.

How climate control created and sustains the dualistic thinking underlying climate change and its inequities.

In a large cross-national statistical study of risk factors for democratic erosion, we establish that economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy erodes.

A systems perspective teaches one to focus not only on the various components of the system but also on their interconnections and interactions. Demography, production processes, government, economy, and environment cannot be seen in isolation from one another. There are feedback loops that are as important for studying social structure and change as are the various components themselves.

An introduction to macrosociology and how modern societies operate.

An abridged, ten-minute version read by John Lithgow can be watched here.

poverty and hunger, racism and sexism, drug use and violence, and climate change, to name just a few: Why do these problems exist? What are their effects? What can be done about them?

Now over a decade old and mostly from the U.S. perspective, the text is still an adequate introduction to various problems in modern society and the ways that sociologists tend to think about them.

If a real democracy is going to thrive, if the real values of human nature are to flourish, it’s an absolute necessity that groups form in which people can join together, share their concerns, articulate their hopes, and discover what they think, what their values really are. This can’t be imposed on you from above: you have to discover it yourself

Part two can be seen here.

It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came back home a little afraid for my own country: afraid of what it might want, and get…

An American journalist befriends ten Nazis after World War 2 in order to understand what drove so many Germans to The Party.

This four-minute clip from the podcast captures its most important insight. For the full interview, see Writ Large on the NBN.

I interpret the fin de Siècle through concepts and experiences of time and space that were reinterpreted in high culture, reworked by new communication and transportation technologies, and palpably manifest in everyday life.

After intensive logging in the 17th century nearly wiped out Akita Prefecture’s native forests, the government undertook various programs in the 18th and 19th centuries to encourage trees be replanted and preserved for us future generations.

This document has inspired human rights movements around the globe and gave the world something tangible to strive for.

A short discussion on the history and importance of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This essay examines consumption patterns in various regions in [sic] the world during the Fin De Siècle, with an organization by region.

National identity was frequently an important context of consumer culture in the 1870–1914 period.

Texas Longhorns wore the most unruly, belligerent cattle. And so the idea that this little piece of barbed wire could keep them out of anywhere was just laughable.

The story of how barbed wire enclosed the American West

Inventions do not simply emerge in a particular setting and spread gradually and uniformly across the globe. The common notion of one-way “technology transfer” only rarely describes accurately the relation between various nations or continents. Whereas people in one region may adopt innovations willingly, inhabitants in other regions may reject them outright. History teaches us that technologies can be later discarded. As I will show in several chapters, new technological solutions and long-established technologies are often employed in synergy.

A “snapshot” history of modern technology from the perspective of everyday people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The modern appetite for bingeing on box sets and multi-episode podcasts makes it clear that we are not losing the ability to concentrate, merely directing it towards different media. We concentrate when we want to.

As a user, it is essential to realize the possibility that interpersonal messages may be shared widely. As media professionals, it also helps to realize that you cannot force a message to go viral…

A high-level overview of contemporary media.

At the same time as we have become more civilized, the state has extended its formal reach, multiplying law and punishing us for transgressions. We have learned to delay gratification, moderate our impulses, resist our instincts, and act with a restraint, forbearance, and self-abnegation unknown in the early modern era. Yet the more we discipline ourselves, the more law the state trains on us.

A history of the state from premodern to modern times with a particular emphasis on how uniquely ubiquitous the modern state is in controlling the life, affairs, and even thoughts of its subjects.

Eight thousand years of human civilization and here we are: still trying to bring the rain back with an animal sacrifice.

On the fake, and real, causes of California’s water crisis.

The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value is one of the enormous trends over the last 200 years…

During the second World War, radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn’t paying attention you’re totally screwed. So an intense set of classified experiments took place to assess this new problem: how long could people pay attention to screens and what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time. […] We see the legacy of that work to this day in the way we think about attention.

From The Twelve Theses on Attention: ‘Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now but they are endangered and many are in hiding: operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms.’

As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.

The idiot [however] does not exist as a subject – he is more like a flower: an existence simply open to light.

This is the story of the deadliest infectious disease of all time…

… one of the most interesting things Open Philanthropy does is the way you intentionally divide up your giving portfolio into buckets based on really different ethical, arguably even metaphysical, assumptions. So tell me about “worldview diversification.”

… confrontations and collaborations between the traditional and the modern, the particular and the global, were emblematic of the world between 1870 and 1914.

A collection of short essays giving a snapshot of world history around the turn of the century.

The truth is
money is in war, not poetry…

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.

A meditation on what was lost when Japan rapidly modernized and traded in its traditional aesthetics for Western appliances.

The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

A journalist gets an inside look at the people, machines, and ideology behind the world’s most advanced computer chip manufacturer.

… because Cura first fashioned the being, let her possess it as long as it lives.

This existential insecurity is the kind that comes from being dependent on others for survival; from being vulnerable to physical and psychological illness or wounding; and, of course, from being mortal. It’s the insecurity of randomness and risk, of a future that is impossible to control or to know. It is a kind of insecurity we can never wholly escape or armour ourselves against, try as we might to mitigate potential harms.

Yet however unknowable the future may be, there is no doubt our fortunes will remain interlinked. Risks proliferate, time passes, and things fall apart. But even amid the rubble, we can always reimagine, repair, and rebuild. Accepting our fundamental insecurity—the gift we all share—is the first step toward escaping our fear-filled burrows and ensuring our collective freedom, safety, and well-being.

Oh if I’d only live as long as it takes to breathe out after breathing in, or to breathe in after breathing out, I’d focus on the Buddha’s instructions and I could really achieve a lot.

Various mendicants practice mindfulness of death, but do so inadequately. The Buddha explains how to do so with proper urgency,

We make ourselves in our own scientific image of the kinds of people it is possible to be.

A series of case studies on the interaction between mental illness and modern society.

It used to embarrass me when my father talked back to the TV.

Whatever the hardship, one should never abandon their land or their animals.

On how the modernization of the Kashmiri economy is experienced as a moral disruption by the agropastoralists of Ladakh.

It’s better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture.

People think “Sesame Street” teaches children to love learning, but what it teaches them is to love television.

90 percent of Canadians [say they] will tell the truth in court. Whereas in other places, it would be crazy to tell the truth. Aren’t you a good friend? How you trade those virtues off has a big effect

On parochialism versus universalism in human societies and how Western culture became so WEIRD.

Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes.

Never was a scene more desolate. The trees in these regions were incredibly large and stood in scattered clumps over the white wilderness. The vast expanse of snow was checkered only by these gigantic pines and the poles that marked our road.

An exploration of some of the effects caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, and a reflection on how humans respond to disasters.

This is something of a sequel to Tim Harford’s earlier episode on the unplayable piano.

In 2009, an [anonymous] RFA cameraman followed the Mekong River from its source in Tibet to Vietnam and the South China Sea. Traveling more than 2,700 miles through six nations, they gathered stories from the local people as the river faced radical change.

when the day calls i will answer

Maureen and Sonam had an instinct that there must be a connection between the common gastric pain that Tibetans call Phowa and Helicobacter Pylori. With the backing of a specialist medical team in Australia, they’re here now to test that theory.

… digital technology often seems to make it harder for us to respond in the right way when someone is suffering and needs our help

Imagine my first moon
wasn’t a moon at all
but a crescent incision
in my mother…

I wanted to take it home, but in order to do so I’d have to carry the globe.

To contend seriously with the problem, you first have to let it in. And when I say “let it in” I mean “drag it towards you, press it down and sit with it.” Sit with it past the point of discomfort and pain and dispair until you can observe it without blinking, until its weight is just another thing about about you. In a way, “letting in” is too passive. What I’m talking about is fitting a hyperobject into your heart without it breaking.

A conversation about hope and despair as the effects of climate change bear down upon us.

You never begin by saying, “I’m going to be a tyrannist dictator, and I’m going to ruin your life.” You don’t start out that way. You start out by saying, “I’m going to make things so much better. And you want that, don’t you, Ezra?”

… the present feels as if it is constituted by emptying out the future to sustain a looping version of a past that never existed

A collection of philosophical essays by a celebrated artist grappling with our current, global predicament.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

An expansion of Graeber’s 2013 essay on the same subject, exploring the “spiritual violence” of modern employment.

If the fragmenting forces of late modernity have shattered the illusion of a fixed self, anātman provides a way of rethinking subjectivity in its absence.

Even today it has been estimated that nearly half the population of India defecate in the open, a major cause of […] water born disease.

… slender citrine lip onto which I place, gently, this first handful of hair

The law of sacred centers imagines space from the inside out.

A fascinating meditation on the way modern culture thinks about space and sovereignty and what is lost, even by the state, when local communities are disrupted.

Furtwängler’s Bach is no smug or mindless adaptation of Bach to the style of Wagner. It is a reaffirmation of the presence of Bach in Wagner and the simultaneous, reciprocal presence of Wagner in Bach.

A forceful argument against the modern trend of “historically authentic” musical performances.

Nearly incontrovertible in its conclusion, the book inspired a revolution in charity in the West and encouraged many (me included) to donate more to charity than they ever had before.

The tenth anniversary edition is available for free online.

It regards our planet and the life upon it. It stands outside of historical time. To another race, it would communicate: This is what you would see if you came here.

~ From Roger Ebert’s review

The world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession

The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers’ elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative…. Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers’ outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.

A classic of anthropology and world history, this book answers the simple historical question: Why was Europe able to conquer the world during the Early Modern / Colonial period?

The short answer to this question is the book’s title and the long answer, its contents.

… ask whether it is necessary–or wise–to abandon the field of the emotional sublime to the fascists

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.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

A classic collection of essays on the relationship between ideas and society which draws heavily on Huxley’s engagements with Buddhist philosophy.

The product of a bygone era, Ends and Means diagnoses modernity without the despair or self-promotion characteristic of later engagements. One instead feels the vitality and honesty that animated Huxley’s life and continue to inspire readers nearly a century later.

Freud in particular developed the concept that freedom means acting on one’s desires. … From a Buddhist standpoint, this notion is totally twisted

Buddhism has a lot to contribute to the pressing problems of modernity. In this article, Powers briefly explores four such domains: individualism, science, freedom, and morality.