Cyberpunk emerged as both a literary movement and philosophical intervention in early 1980s America, crystallizing anxieties about technology, consciousness, and corporate power into a...
News in brief — 10 October 2025
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has officially declared the Christmas Island shrew (Crocidura trichura) extinct,...
The Age of Overwhelm
The feeling is now familiar, a low-grade hum of anxiety that accompanies the morning scroll. A headline announces another record-shattering heatwave,...
Abstract
A cautionary tale for our times, this essay examines the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest lake, which has lost...
1. Introduction — The Genesis of a Trustless Architecture
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, trust in centralized intermediaries—banks, clearinghouses, rating agencies—shook to...
Buddhism treats kindness as something you practise rather than something that visits you. On mettā as a trainable skill, Buddhaghosa's near enemies, and what happens when the most developed doctrine of loving-kindness in the world is set beside its own record
The satellites have named the mountain — the same massif that destroyed Langtang village in 2015. K.J. Parker sorts a month of evidence into fact, inference, contested and speculation, states the Langtang hypothesis, and sets out how it could actually be tested
Melbourne's liveability rankings measure the compact, tram-served inner city. They do not measure Tarneit on a 45-degree day. On 27 January 2026 the western suburbs ran three degrees hotter than the centre — and that gap, not the weather, is the story of a world-class urban forest, a sprawling metropolis, falling reservoirs and two cities under one name.
"Is kindness merely a feeling, or is it a load-bearing structure for society? Kevin J Parker, author of 'The Backbone of Kindness: Restoring Our Oldest Virtue', explores the profound intersection of Theosophy and modern ethics, examining how compassion functions as the 'Law of laws' and the essential backbone of human arrangements."
Explore the empirical reality of global warming right now. Uncover accelerating ocean heat, temperature overshoot pathways, and critical planetary tipping points.
Hawkins's computer was too literal. But his instinct — that Stonehenge handled information — survives every test the sixty years since have thrown at it. An investigation through stone provenance, isotopes, ancient DNA and landscape archaeology, ending with a named, testable hypothesis: the Gathering Engine.
Cities ran sewers and traffic computers long before anyone sold them the word. Around 2008 “smart” acquired an owner. Four product cities show what it cost.
