politics
The future-history we want, and the future-history we deserve
Is it any wonder that we’re lousy at imagining any futures but complete apocalypse or vague utopia?
Solarpunk humanism: How we dream bigger than despair
Solarpunk offers a potent narrative space for imagining secular worlds to come, and how to get there.
Literally building the future: Infrastructure as an act of secular love
When we fix a bridge or give someone better healthcare, we’re saying that this life and this world are worth protecting.
Nuclear panic and the satellite wars
Reading Time: 6 minutes In 1962, the US detonated a high-altitude warhead, with a yield of 1.4 megatons of TNT equivalent, some 250 miles above the Earth. The blast expelled the planet’s magnetic field for nearly half a minute, created a brief cavity in the ionosphere, and damaged
Our secular struggle with medically assisted dying
Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devast
How to spare billionaires from terrorist attack
A radical eco-activist group arises in India after a terrible heat wave kills tens of thousands. The Children of Kali are firm in their declaration to the world: Change with us now, or suffer the wrath of Kali.
So this is 90 seconds to midnight
Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first
Anonymity, privacy, transparency, integrity: Do we even know the future we want?
Reading Time: 8 minutes In the late 2000s, research blossomed around our use of online avatars. Did our videogame icons and social media profiles represent our actual selves, our ideal selves, or something else entirely? And did they have a reciprocal impact, a “Proteus effect” that transformed self
COP27 Climate Conference: The change we need vs. the change we’ll get
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last November, government ministers at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) agreed to The Glasgow Climate Pact. It was both ambitious, in setting key targets for emissions reductions by 2030, and also heavily criticized, including by the Sc
The Scientist Rebellion: What will it take to get the world’s attention?
Reading Time: 8 minutes The Scientist Rebellion calls for more people “on the inside” to take up the struggle against government inaction. But where does the movement fit into broader climate change activism, and is its degrowth message enough?
Study: How most of the 5 billion would die in a US/Russia nuclear exchange
Reading Time: 2 minutes A new study found that a nuclear war between the US and Russia could be the worst catastrophe in world history. But most people wouldn’t die from the exchange itself; 5 billion would perish from the hunger that follows. The study, published in Nature, found that the soot prod
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.