Los Angeles: Swag Town USA

...beat on the bottom of the UFO. Even then, the doves left slowly, one at a time, for what seemed like a half hour while all the cynical types in attendance stood around trying not to laugh. Similarly today’s Bike Town USA event ended not with a bang but with a whimper – the thirty or so contest winners who bothered to attend shuffled off to load their bikes into their SUVs and drove home where, we suspect, many of the bikes will just sit in the ga...

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24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

...nvolve an off-line engagement with the natural world. We’ve done this at a time of the explosive growth of social media. Early on there was a line of thought that social media could be used for positive social movements. I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, only the most fervent Silicon Valley cultists still have any faith in garbage products like Facebook and Twitter. My own ideas about the internet have whipsawed over the years from an...

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

...perhaps, to the discomfort I suspect many people were experiencing at that time, as the world rushed into modernity. We don’t hear much about that discomfort, because Progress is our modern religion, and those who once held out some concerns about its cost don’t tend to get much stage time in our cultural narratives. This little story is like finding a message of dissent in a dusty old bottle. Now, to be sure, the dystopic themes he’s working on i...

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New Phoebe Update/Question

...maybe even angry with us. She’s given me a few baleful looks with those yellow eyes. This behavior is worrisome to us because while we’re willing to do whatever we can to give her time, we want her time to be good. And so far, it’s been really good time. But we don’t want to be instrumental in keeping her alive in a frail, zombie-like state. That’s no life for a cat....

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Saturday Tweets: Ancient Bread, Wild Horses and High Metabolism Money

...ing bread from dormant, 4,500-year-old yeast extracted from Egyptian bread-making ceramics https://t.co/BWGlliA50q — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 8, 2019 Wild Horses of Nevada by Maynard Dixon , 1927. pic.twitter.com/LsmjluOrwn — Mordecai (@MenschOhneMusil) August 6, 2019 High Metabolism Money https://t.co/Z7Z27lpnJF via @wordpressdotcom — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 10, 2019 Become immersed in the sights and the sounds of the forest as y...

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