Of Mushrooms and Capitalist Ruins

...ed both the biology and our complex social relationship to fungi. The last book we read was one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The book begins with the stories of matsutake pickers in the Pacific Northwest, a heterogeneous group of recent Southeast Asian immigrants, middle class Japanese Americans and white survivalists. Beg...

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The Man Who Exorcised the Bermuda Triangle

...um exorcism opus, the entirety of the Bermuda Triangle. I had expected the book to be more absurd and unbelievable than it actually was. By the end of the book, Omand’s project seemed sensible as a purging of the psychogeographical bad juju that we all intuitively feel in our desecrated landscape of parking lots and freeways. Omand comes off as careful, kindly and sincere, a man with a sense of humor and not the attention seeker you might expect a...

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A Cluttered Life: Middle-Class Abundance

...nits? The book is worth reading (ironically, I just sold my copy to reduce book clutter). While I no longer own the book I was happy to discover the short, three part video series on the project which I’ve embedded for your weekend enjoyment. Part II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyHS_-Umv4E Part III https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJWOWksT1x4&t=11s What was especially interesting for me about these videos is that they address the complex inters...

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Stoicism Today

...academics and non-academics alike and is about the varied ways in which the 2,300 year old philosophy as a way of life remains relevant to the concerns and needs of the present day. The book is available as a paperback and Kindle e-book. The Stoicism Today website also has a free handbook and online course, well worth checking out....

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Book Review: The Machine Stops by E.M. Forester

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the a...

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