What is civilization and how did it begin? What’s wrong with it? And what can we do to fix it?

These are the questions Druid and philosopher Brendan Myers contemplates in his new book Reclaiming Civilization. As with all of Brendan’s books (that I’ve read, anyway), Reclaiming Civilization explores deep topics in an accessible manner. There’s no philosophy jargon and references to famous philosophers include enough context for ordinary readers to understand why they’re being quoted.

Link:https://www.patheos.com/blogs/johnbeckett/2017/10/reclaiming-civilization-case-optimism-future-humanity.html#Pdrwjy4peKklytyc.99

AFROTOPIA uses the theories and aesthetic of the arts movement Afrofuturism as a vehicle for psychosocial healing in Detroit and beyond. Afrofuturism is an international multi-disciplinary cultural aesthetic that discusses the Black experience, identity, and history using speculative modalities such as magical realism, fantasy, science fiction and surrealism. Afrofuturists incorporate ancient history, African mythology, technology, biology, genetics, African cosmologies, spirit science within their work.

Link: http://www.afrotopiaisnow.com/project/

This one day workshop will take place at the Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Montréal, Canada as part of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI 2018) on 21st April 2018. To attend the workshop, participants were required to submit a short piece of work detailing their motivations and ideas.

Link: https://hci.post-capitalist.com/

During WWII, when Richard Feynman was recruited as one of the country’s most promising physicists to work on the Manhattan Project in a secret laboratory in Los Alamos, his young wife Arline was writing him love letters in code from her deathbed.

Link: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/11/code-girls-liza-mundy/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=5ab98a43db-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_12_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-5ab98a43db-236388809&mc_cid=5ab98a43db&mc_eid=01fa247c60

Begun by user “BackForward24” and crowdsourced through Reddit, this map of the world illustrates the most beloved/popular book of each country by pasting a scan of the book cover over its space on the world map. For book lovers who want to read themselves around the world, it will prove invaluable.

Link: http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/the-favorite-literary-work-of-every-country-visualized-on-a-world-map.html

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain.

Link: https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html

These are some thoughts about utopia and dystopia. The old, crude Good Places were compensatory visions of controlling what you couldn’t control and having what you didn’t have here and now — an orderly, peaceful heaven; a paradise of hours; pie in the sky. The way to them was clear, but drastic. You died.

Link:https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-explains-how-to-build-a-new-kind-of-utopia-15c7b07e95fc

John Bradshaw and his colleagues had to invent a new word—and the new field of “anthrozoology”—to describe their work studying the interactions between animals and humans. In his new book, The Animals Among Us, Bradshaw now demolishes a few myths about the pets that increasingly crowd our homes. [Find out if your dog would eat you if you died.]

Link:https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/pets-animals-john-bradshaw/

For his first 107 years, Richard Overton lived in relative anonymity. A World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific, he could usually be found post-retirement on the porch of his Austin, Texas, home, smoking cigars and chatting up his extensive circle of family and friends. Then, in 2013, he visited Washington, D.C., and was referred to in the media as the oldest living U.S. veteran. (In actuality, that would not become true until 2016.)

Link: https://www.history.com/news/meet-the-oldest-living-u-s-veteran