Ironically, activist faculty and their conservative critics share the same nihilistic vision of the future of higher education: Both believe that the only valuable forms of research and teaching are those that accomplish something obviously useful. Such views are born of austerity, and they are utterly foreign to me. When I fell in love with…

You can use some of these questions as a guide (and ideally journal around them): • Where am I saying I want to do something or make a change but am not taking any action? • If I am not taking action, is it because I truly don’t want to do it, or because I…

Decentralizing social media can sound like a sort of kumbaya anti-capitalist manifesto: “It’s about openness and sharing, not capitalism, *man*!” In practice it’s the opposite: it’s a truly free market approach to social networking. Mastodon may not be interested in becoming a trillion-dollar company, but there’s no reason there can’t be plenty of those built…

19th December 1995 Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much…

Here are 10 of the most popular health questions of 2023. Note: I did a dive on the articles of interest to me: – arthritis: stay active and not overweight (doesn’t help my hand problem though) – no food will shorten duration of a cold. Soup will make you feel better though – caffeine has…

This article pairs well with “What AI Means for Buddhism.“ Implemented ethically, AI could become a valuable tool for helping people improve their results when seeking mental health care. But Stade noted that the reasons behind this crisis are wider-reaching than the realm of technology and would require a solution that is not simply a…

A question worth asking: ‘What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?’ – from Mary Oliver’s *Long Life*. Source: 269 / ’Tis the Season… For Tending to…

> If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes. *Source: Nathalie Robin Justice Gravel on X* We evolved *because*…

During the 1960s, for example, the average American person bought fewer than 25 garments every year. Fast forward 60 years, they’re purchasing nearly 70 pieces of clothing annually, or more than one new item per week. Source: Overconsumption Is Killing the Planet. What Can We Do? – Richa Syal