“The privilege discourse says, “White people, you have a seat at the banquet table, and others do not. Furthermore, you are directly benefiting from the deprivation of others.” True as far as it goes, this narrative leaves out whether the banquet is really worth having. Blindly holding it to be a consummate feast, we assume that justice, equity, and advancement means to make room for everyone at our table, with its menu of modern medicine, free markets, mass schooling, and neoliberal democracy.”
science
Mutiny of the Soul Revisited
It is time to stop fighting the invitation into the unknown that depression offers on a personal and collective level.
The Need for Venture Science
As in politics, the economy, and the ecosystem, what once seemed incontestably true is coming under question.
A Miracle in Scientific American
That this spontaneous and numinous experience happened to one of the world’s most prominent debunkers of such experiences may, like the dot of yin in the fullness of yang, portend a fundamental transition.
TED: A Choice Point
Originally, the thesis of this essay was going to be that TED, contrary to its reputation for promoting innovative ideas, excludes ideas that are truly radical or disruptive, contributing instead to a slickly packaged narrative of “Gee whiz, thanks to these nifty ideas, the world is getting better all the time.” TED is, I thought, […]
Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer
The great historian Lewis Mumford once described a patent as “a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention”. He was pointing out that we do not produce inventions ex nihilo, but rather draw on the totality of the […]