On necessary heresy

With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response?

Harris. . .   Read More

Categories go nova

It is fortunate that the leading thinker in “social software” is one of the best speakers in the high-tech world, a hot ticket at any conference that can get him. CLAY SHIRKY gave one of his dazzling presentations Monday, Nov. 14, examining a new dimension in one of the most vexed. . .   Read More

Finessing the future

Instead of one podium there were four chairs on the stage of Wednesday’s seminar. In three seats, three Dysons: Esther, George and Freeman. They were appearing together on stage for the first time. The fourth held Stewart Brand who led the three through an evening of queries. The questions came from. . .   Read More

Escape velocity

Attempts to think long term, Ray Kurzweil began, keep making the mistake of imagining that the pace of the future is like the pace of the past. Pondering the next ten years, we usually begin by studying the last ten years. He recommends studying the last twenty year for clues about the rate. . .   Read More

The culminating human right

What does it take to change human habits of cruelty (such as slavery, genocide) and humiliation (racism, sexism)?

What do past and present efforts for human rights tell about their future?…

Robert Fuller is author of the ground-breaking SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES: OVERCOMING THE ABUSE OF RANK.

“Personal is political,” Robert. . .   Read More

On failing to think long-term

Sophisticated societies from time to time collapse utterly, often leaving traces of a civilization that was at a proud peak just before the fall. Other societies facing the same dangers figure out how to adapt around them, recover, and go on to further centuries of success. Tonight the author. . .   Read More

World squatter reality

Humanity is urbanizing at a world-changing pace and in a world-changing way. A billion squatters are re-inventing their lives and their cities simultaneously. One of the few to experience the range of the phenomenon first hand is Robert Neuwirth, author of SHADOW CITIES: A BILLION SQUATTERS, A NEW URBAN. . .   Read More

Time capsule secrets

High school classes and world’s fairs do it. Universities and builders and companies and municipalities do it. They bury little hoards of things they think people in the future will treasure— the future being ten years or ten thousand or never (most time capsules are immediately forgotten). Something strange, deep, and. . .   Read More

A world made of cities

Cities are the human organizations with the greatest longevity but also the fastest rate of change. Just now the world is going massively and unstoppably urban (governments everywhere are trying to stop it, with zero success). In a globalized world, city states are re-emerging as a dominant economic player. . .   Read More

The rainforests of home

SPENCER BEEBE is founder and head of Ecotrust, the Portland-based organization that is setting in motion a permanently prosperous conservation economy for the entire Pacific Coast from San Francisco north to Alaska— the temperate rain forest also known as “Salmon Nation.”

SPENCER BEEBE began his Seminar About Long-term Thinking. . .   Read More