Itzswanson

Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No. 4 “Except for my less than two years at Stony Brook, I’ve never been in any scene or community, ever.”

www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8...

ALAN GREENSPAN served as Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve . This essay is adapted from his most recent book, The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI By the time he published Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), barely in his forties, was the w…

www.themarginalian.org/2025/08/31/a...

How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time A composer details how music works its magic on our brains.

nautil.us/how-music-hi...

Creative Agencies’ Most Unexpected Gold Rush: The New AI Search Era - The Trust Web Times For decades, the world of search engine optimization (SEO) was the domain of keywords, search volume, and technical precision. Success was measured by ranking for a specific term, and the playbook was...

trustwebtimes.com/creative-age...

Judy is saying something important here.

YouTube video by Jared Henderson "You Will Own Nothing"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIhW...

YouTube video by Fretboard Journal Bill Frisell - "Isfahan" | Fretboard Journal

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gwx...

How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk …

www.themarginalian.org/2025/06/21/s...

Trump just weakened one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws The Interior Department suspended a legal opinion holding companies liable for accidentally killing ducks, cranes, pelicans, owls and other bird species.

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/26/kurt-vonnegut-on-the-shapes-of-stories/

vimeo.com/53286941

Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and…

"In human conversation, in live, actual communication between or among human beings, everything “transmitted” — everything said — is shaped as it is spoken by actual or anticipated response."

www.themarginalian.org/2015/10/21/t...

The Hog Industry's Great Biogas Boondoggle CAFOs are jumping on the renewable energy bandwagon

Barry Yeoman's writing is one amazing example after another of why journalism is so important.

www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2024-...

The Path to American Authoritarianism What comes after democratic breakdown.

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

The Unnatural History of Bird Flu H5N1 is a human creation

A century ago, the average American chicken flock contained 70 birds. Nowadays the 9 billion chickens slaughtered for meat each year in the U.S. are raised in buildings containing, on average, 20,000 or more birds, with roughly one square foot of space apiece.

nautil.us/the-unnatura...

The New Aesthetics of Slop Or what happens when vulgar technocrats control the arts

This is excellent.

www.honest-broker.com/p/the-new-ae...

The counter-elite gambled on Trump and won The energy in politics is with the populist right – and the left doesn’t know how to respond.

This post from December is aging pretty well.

www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person There may be no more contentious an issue at the level of local U.S. government than education. All of the socioeconomic and cultural fault lines communities would rather paper over become fully expos...

www.openculture.com/2025/01/noam...

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of un…

..a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes...
People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind…

-Leonard Cohen

www.themarginalian.org/2024/07/18/l...

A planet parade of Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars shines in the skies this month All month, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars will appear to line up and be bright enough to see with the naked eye in the first few hours after dark. This weekend, Venus and Saturn get especially cozy.

All month, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars will appear to line up and be bright enough to see with the naked eye in the first few hours after dark. This weekend, Venus and Saturn get especially cozy.

Why Gregory Bateson Matters Or what a counterculture might look like in the 21st century

This is excellent.
open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia...

The Prophet of the Revolt Martin Gurri and the ungovernable public

This is a timely piece.

www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-prophe...