Author of Sheila Says We're Weird and Defenders of Dirt. Promoting creativity, craft, cooperatives, and communities of care. I believe ideas can inform and inspire positive actions.
In my last post about avoiding technologic overreach, I introduced ethics and philosophy professor Shannon Vallor's 2024 book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. I also added to some lines of questioning I'd broached in my November 7
I need to go outside. To remind myself of the sky. To admire clouds and trees, their shapes and surfaces, and to think about how they come to be. I need to walk. To feel my muscles moving in relation to earth and air, and to sense the rhythms of
Well, we're in month eleven now, and it doesn't get easier, does it? How are you coping? What's helping you get through your week? What do you need help with? These essays have been helping me structure and track my experience of this time.
"I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood" George Takei In How the State Creates Enemies (Post #13, June 13) I discussed They Called Us Enemy, George Takei's graphic memoir as I wrote about
"The concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands is arguably the single greatest threat to social and personal well-being. And the most effective remedy to this is the equalization of wealth and power by extending democracy in our economies. Not by a top down process of government command
"Regardless of how we choose to grieve or cultivate hope, we know that we are living in disastrous times and that we will need one another. We are wading through hell and high water, tasked with dreaming new worlds into being while the worlds we have known fall down
"America's free speech tradition is predicated on the idea that fact and falsehood will meet in the marketplace of ideas, that both will be heard, and that good ideas will overcome the bad. However, our current communication ecosystem actively stymies that process. We have not a public
"Now, as the propaganda machine and the rumor mill have violently smashed together like two ancient galaxies, something fiery and perilous has emerged. And what has emerged is still growing, even as we struggle to accurately define it" (41). Renée DiResta In my post of May 9, "
The chaos machine spun out so rapidly this week, I gave up on trying to read books to understand what's going on. Searching for in-depth news analysis, I ran across way too many videos in which people—especially women—were being assaulted by uniformed men. And when
As I write this, my tiny habitat garden already shows autumn's encroachment. Only the asters, goldenrods, and brown-eyed susans are still in bloom, while the echinacea and yarrow flowers look like burnt toast. Over the last few years, I've been learning to garden more for
The yoga teacher had guided us into one of my favorite restorative poses, balasana. Commonly known as child's pose, it involves folding into yourself like a pocket knife. Rest is the operative word here: your torso rests on your thighs, which rest on your calves. With any luck,
"One of the greatest struggles of our time will be to cultivate a life-affirming political culture that can be enacted in the everyday, a counterculture of rebellious care." Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You It is easy to despair when we focus on the