Following the January wildfires in Los Angeles and the inauguration of President Donald Trump, many people once again turned to the writing of Octavia Butler for comfort, guidance and reflection.
Butler, who grew up in Pasadena and has been called “the mother of Afrofuturism,” was a speculative fiction writer who authored numerous books and short stories from the 1970s until her death in 2006 at age 58.
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Mar
26
2025
Philanthropy by the numbers
by Aaron Horvath in The Hedgehog Review…If the question is how to do more good with your giving, then the answer MyGoodness provides comes with crisply quantified...
Mar
18
2025
Octavia Butler on creativity, the power of our obsessions, and how we become who we are
by Maria Popova in The Pocket…“Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest,...
Jan
16
2025
How jazz shaped the civil rights movement
by Lesley McClurg in interview of Larry Tye on KQED.org…He profiles the trio in his new book, “The Jazzmen.” In it, he pieces together over 250 interviews,...
Dec
26
2024
Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute
by Tom Ough in Asteriskmag.com…The rise and fall of the influential, embattled Oxford research center that brought us the concept of existential risk.
Jan
16
2024
An ancient Chinese text that’s surprisingly relevant today
by Richard Heinberg in Resilience.org….I’ll leave the last words to the Old Master, this time from the Bahm translation: Whenever someone sets out to remold the...
Oct
10
2023
‘I couldn’t believe the data’: how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
Research shows people who speak another language are more utilitarian and flexible, less risk-averse and egotistical, and better able to cope with traumatic...
May
01
2023
The Desert of the Anthropocene: An ongoing installation from artist Ravi Agarwal
The long engagement is a part of an ongoing investigation into the current state of the nature, both as a crisis which traverses a political realm, but also a cultural...
Apr
20
2023
The surprising thing A.I. engineers will tell you if you let them
by Ezra Klein, The New York Times…This is an example of “alignment risk,” the danger that what we want the systems to do and what they will actually do could...
Apr
15
2023
This changes everything
In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly...
Apr
15
2023
Regular old intelligence is sufficient–even lovely
Precisely twenty years ago, I published a book called “Enough” that outlined my fears about artificial intelligence and its companion technologies like advanced...