The great Lawrence Wright (he won a Pulitzer for his The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, a book I highly recommend) has lived in Austin for a long time. In this long essay he surveys what’s happened as the city became a hub for tech and it became the 11th largest city in the U.S. [As always, if you’re pay-walled out and want to read this, direct message me; I’ll provide a PDF or other access.]
World population is thought to be on a trajectory to top out sometime in the next 50 or 70 or so years—something I didn’t imagine was likely, just a few years ago. In this article, some basic facts but no solution to the implications (economic, social) are presented. The link is a gift, so you should be able to click through, even if not a subscriber.
Do you gripe about food prices? The price of eggs? “In 1901, the average family spent 42.5 percent of its budget on food, and, according to economist Deirdre McCloskey, a typical middle-class household devoted about 44 hours per week to preparing food. By 2021, U.S. consumers were spending about 10 percent of their household income on food, and less than 10 hours a week preparing it.” But read the whole article.
“What a gift unlearning is! To see that God is so much bigger. So much more abundant than our scarcity containers.” So says Aimee Byrd. And this: “What if part of the cost of growth is unlearning?”
“By doing something specific, by supplying arms to Ukraine, the United States has assisted the Ukrainians in decreasing the chances of nuclear war.” This is Timothy Snyder, the best expert we have (I think) on Ukraine and Russia. In his current essay, he argues that the U.S. and the free world in general should not give way to anxiety, to “nuclear blackmail,” because doing so will only cause its proliferation.
If you’re one of those interested in just who was “censoring” whom on Twitter, and whether any of that had any effect on the 2020 elections, you should read this post by Jay Kuo summarizing Feb. 8 House hearings on the matter. If not, just move along.
What to do for electricity when you don’t like the appearance of solar panels? Make the solar panels look like local architecture, even if you’re in an ancient context. This is a really cool, innovative idea.
Translation is always a contextual thing. That’s why translations not just into various languages but into various cultures are needed. I highly recommend that you click not just on this link but also on the embedded 3-minute video for some sense of what this means in a First Nations/Indigenous Peoples (here in North America) context.