Review of The Case for a Job Guarantee by Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Polity Press (2020) NJFAN
What was it like when the cosmic dark ages ended?Big Think
Disney used to touch our hearts, now they touch us inappropriately
– “Just a turtle“
British life-style: People increasingly turning to food black market International Affairs
A century after Van Gogh exulted in risk as the crucible of the creative life and a decade after David Bowie urged young artists to “always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in.”
Christian Wiman’s religious vision. God is more than us, more than we can ever know, and in that unknowing we find freedom... more »
Allen Ginsberg seems to have kept everything, even letters to the American Nazi Party. “I heard you want to kill me, can we meet and discuss it?!?”... more »
Why these homes in the hottest places don’t need AC.
All of these technologies have their contemporary equivalents: Electric fans, swamp coolers and insulation. But throughout the Earth’s hot zones, many of them in the Global South, the new technologies are expensive, and create dependence on erratic electrical grids and networks of production, commerce and transportation that are alien, and unsustainable.
The old technologies are also a resource: They offer a way forward, architecturally, culturally and climatically, not just for torrid zones in Egypt or Turkey, but for heavily populated regionsthroughout the world that rely on precarious sources of power. From Cairo to California, there are architects who are already incorporating these technologies in contemporary buildings. But there are multiple challenges: overcoming skepticism among people long dependent on modern systems, recalibrating what it means and feels like to be comfortable, and recovering and preserving the wisdom of vernacular systems.
The last of these challenges — undoing erasure and forgetting — is urgent. The few remaining houses from Fathy’s original plan are crumbling in New Gourna. In the searingly hot Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, civil unrest and oppression has led to whole swaths of the ancient town, full of historic stone homes with complex fountain systems, being demolished. And in Cairo — where some of the world’s most sophisticated passively cooled houses were built centuries ago — decay, neglect and government sponsored demolition threaten to erase invaluable heritage.
There are moments in life when we are reminded that we are unfinished, that the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are and where our life leads is yet unwritten. Such moments come most readily at the beginning of something new.
To begin anything — a new practice, a new project, a new love — is to cast upon yourself a spell against stagnation.
Beginnings are notation for the symphony of the possible in us. They ask us to break the pattern of our lives and reconfigure it afresh — something that can only be done with great courage and great tenderness, for no territory of life exposes both our power and our vulnerability more brightly than a beginning.
How to leap into the thrilling and terrifying unknowns of the possible is what the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008) explores in a chapter of his parting gift to the world, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (public library), which also gave us his luminous meditation on kindling the light between us and within us.
He begins by telescoping into deep time, reminding us that we are but a small and new part of something ancient and immense — a vast totality that holds us in our incompleteness, in our existential loneliness, in the vulnerability of our self-creation:
There are days when Conamara is wreathed in blue Tuscan light. The mountains seem to waver as though they were huge dark ships on a distant voyage. I love to climb up into the silence of these vast autonomous structures. What seems like a pinnacled summit from beneath becomes a level plateau when you arrive there. Born in a red explosion of ascending fire, the granite lies cold, barely marked by the millions of years of rain and wind. On this primeval ground I feel I have entered into a pristine permanence, a continuity here that knew the wind hundreds of millions of years before a human face ever felt it.
When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.
[…]
Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.