Jeff VanderMeer investigates Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, and our devastating realities. "Just as the inhabitants of Winter have dozens of words for snow and ice, we need as many words for ecocide. If fiction can be useful here, it is rendering the crime more visible." - Orion
Studying the imagination is the most exciting and accurate way to heal the terminal divide between the sciences and the humanities. But, more importantly, Imagination Studies, or imaginology, also promises to reunite the body and the mind, reintegrate emotion and reason. - Aeon
Excellent sheephood is inherently competitive. Its purpose is to vault you into the ranks of society’s winners, to make sure that you end up with more stuff—more wealth, status, power, access, comfort, freedom—than most other people. This is not a pretty project, when you look it in the face. - Bari Weiss
The scientific revolutions of the last four centuries took place not just at the same time as political and religious conflict, invasion and enslavement, but because of these things. - New Statesman
Philanthropists rarely make the large, unrestricted gifts that the receiving institutions really want, and so the two parties bargain: over the purpose and the control of a gift, over the form of credit, over how much the institution has to raise from other sources as a condition. - The New Yorker
We can at least say of the oil economy that its environmental damage, and consequent destruction of the human world, is only an epiphenomenon, whereas for the internet, the destruction of the human is itself the source of value. - LA Review of Books
I too grew up imbibing common technotopian fantasies of the late-20th Century zeitgeist, of a belief in humanity’s manifest destiny of multi-planetary spread and dominion. I just didn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together until I tried to understand climate change. - 3 Quarks Daily
Research from the University of Canberra found that heavy news use dropped from 69% in April 2020 to 51% in January 2021, while those expressing high interest in the news fell from 64% in 2016 to 52% in 2021. - The Guardian
You may not agree with everything Aristotle says, but consider his ideas, and see if you don’t think they’re as fresh and brilliant today as they were 2,000 years ago. - Aeon
Rather than the “death of the author” heralded by French novelist and philosopher Roland Barthes in the 1960s, are we now witnessing its counterpoint—a cultural sphere where nothing remains but a cult of celebrity being played out on digital platforms? - LitHub
The comedian-turned-president's video dispatches "have done more than win Ukraine moral and military support. They have created a serialized manifesto—one that makes the case for liberal democracy over oligarchic autocracy." - Wired
The problem with the cutesy Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks Nora and Delia Ephron-penned You've Got Mail has always been that the person warning about the Internet is the boring old boyfriend (sorry, Greg Kinnear) instead of new, sexy gazillionaire Tom Hanks - LitHub
This seems almost hopelessly idealistic. But given a country that seems to be nearing some forms of civil war, "it’s tragic that no politician or party has made either conscription or national service the heart of their agenda." - LitHub
Memorizing can become a highly specialized act, based on regular practice and rehearsal. A singer, though fully capable of performing the role of say Aida, is unlikely to be able to memorize an epic poem that is similarly long. - The Baffler
