Nature Is Intentionally Beautiful
In his essay “Darwin’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: What’s Musical About Biology and Why Does That Matter?”, Bob Labaree posed four questions about music and nature, which I could summarize as: Are the virtuosic inventions of a virus on...
Vicki’s Answers: What Could Possibly Go Right?
Is it too weird to say that, as bad as the first half of 2020 has been, it’s been a relief? A tiny virus has achieved what decades of activism could not: stop us in our self-destructive tracks. She...
Doom or denial: Is there another path?
I was recently asked to comment on a dustup between some members of Extinction Rebellion (see Thomas Nicholas, Galen Hall, and Colleen Schmidt, “The Faulty Science, Doomism, and Flawed Conclusions of Deep Adaptation”) and Jem Bendell, founder of Deep...
Sherri Mitchell on decolonizing the mind
The recent surge in Black Lives Matter protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, along with growing evidence that COVID-19 is disproportionately hitting communities of color, have raised urgent questions about structural racism and...
Avalanche
How bad could it get? For the United States, it seems there is no bottom. Back in March, I wrote that the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic would likely shape its economic, political, and geopolitical fortunes for years or decades...
Pandemic, Protest, and Profit
So, here we are, at it again. For me the chaotic progression of these last months is a reminder of my introduction to America, fifty years ago, as a graduate student in North Carolina: National Guard troops, riot gear,...
What Could Possibly Go Right?
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we...
Tis but a Scratch: the Insanity of Returning to Normal (Episode 31 of Crazy Town)
Asher Miller Jason Bradford Rob Dietz
In the season finale of Crazy Town during this upside down year of 2020, it’s only fitting that a return to “normal” actually means a return to “crazy.”
When the Chickens of Imagination Come Home to Roost
In ‘From What Is to What If’, I suggest that we are living in a time in which our collective imagination, our ability to, as John Dewey put it, “see things as if they could be otherwise”, is in...
United States: An Obituary
The United States of America was problematic from the start. It was founded on genocide and slavery, and, while frequently congratulating itself on the rights and freedoms it granted its citizens, never managed to confront the demons in its...