Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a […]
When I decided to move back to Humboldt after returning from Japan in summer 2013, I was motivated by several different factors. One of the most influential was my growing trepidation about the problem of climate change, which birthed in me a desire to settle myself in a strong community and start learning about sustainable […]
Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is a radical book penned with a lot of passion and the best of intentions. This treatise on alternative economics serves up some very worthy ideas that are compromised by a handful of the author’s less rigorous tendencies and intellectually insupportable positions. As a whole, the book had a decidedly divisive effect […]
We are living through the most overpopulated, wasteful, and polluted moment in human history. In response to the increasing data and alarm regarding the problem of climate change, many people have begun searching for philosophical and practical frameworks to illuminate how we can reduce our participation in environmental destruction and start healing Earth’s depleted ecosystems. Moral […]
Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future is an outgrowth of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Since the project was inspired by a Neal Stephenson essay (one of my favorite authors), I figured it would be an enlightening and worthwhile collection of speculative fiction. And while that turned out to […]
Throughout his distinguished career, Edward O. Wilson has brought a vast wealth of interdisciplinary knowledge to bear on some of humanity’s most complex and pressing questions. The Meaning of Human Existence is his most philosophical work, and contains many worthwhile insights about humanity’s origins and possible futures. Wilson’s method, best characterized as a kind of […]
This is definitely the best resource I’ve encountered for a crash course in the root causes of climate change and the potential negative outcomes if the global community continues to ignore the problem. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have condensed years of research into a tiny book––all the better to penetrate the noosphere of a […]
Every human struggle needs an image of a better future for supporters to rally around, but it’s never enough to simply know where we want to end up. The accomplishment of profound societal change, if sought peacefully, also demands a set of linguistic and psychological frames revolutionaries can use to inform, impassion, and ultimately persuade […]
After several years of observing the barrage of praise that’s been heaped upon Cloud Atlas by friends and critics, I finally sat down to read it, convinced it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. One hundred pages in, I’d already dismissed David Mitchell’s well-loved book as nothing more than a garish, sprawling, unfocused coterie […]
A hefty portion of humanity’s uniqueness can be traced back to future projection. We constantly weave narratives that stretch moments and months and millennia ahead, even as we fumble to figure out what to do with today, each day. Everyone needs some kind of intellectual framework to navigate this tricky tension, which is where futurists […]