For a religion without a god (not even a benevolent one, never mind one filled with malice), and certainly without a devil, Buddhism has an unseemly preoccupation with torture. Buddhist hells—and there are many of them—are filled with pain, and Buddhist writings...
It would seem so. Even parts of the Bible think so. Like the Book of Job, for example, where Satan is far from (or at least not yet) the scaly-tailed horned Fiend of later centuries. Quite the contrary – he was just one of the guys, almost family. One day (this...
The word “hip” seems to have lost favor as a descriptive of cool, which I can’t help feeling is just as well. For me, at least, the word has taken on a darker connotation, or at least evokes a darker memory. Hip can also mean pain and near death, surgical incompetence...
This is a brief talk I gave at a symposium sponsored by The Walrus magazine late in 2015, on the topic of Innovation. I chose the not very glamorous subject of sewage; it refers to a theme introduced in my book, Back to the Well: Rethinking the future of water. I had...
Who owns culture? Who owns language, science, art, the accumulated genius of technology? Who owns history? Who owns the collective intellectual heritage of the human species – culture, broadly defined? Who owns, in short, the human library? Who owns it, and who has...
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