Christianity commands love, including love of enemies, and forgiveness without limit. Then it says none of this can be done by effort alone. From the Good Samaritan to a Charleston courtroom, an essay on a command that follows a gift
In 1943 a Muslim family in the Albanian mountains hid a Jewish family from the German army, and the whole neighbourhood knew. The code they kept took no interest in what they felt. Judaism and Islam build kindness the same way: as a debt, owed before it is felt, and tested at its edge.
To understand Accra’s ecological metabolism is to trace the flow of water, air, and humanity through a rapidly shifting coastal topography. Positioned on the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana’s capital is a delta city grappling with the intersecting forces of breakneck urbanisation, compound flooding, and a warming equatorial climate.
Adelaide is the driest capital city in the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and it has known this about itself for long enough to have developed some genuinely instructive responses. Its investment in recycled water infrastructure, its early and serious engagement with urban heat as a public health emergency, and its stewardship of one of the great metropolitan parkland systems in the Southern Hemisphere all represent hard-won lessons rather than inherited advantages. Whether those lessons are being applied at the speed and scale that a warming Mediterranean climate demands is a more complicated question — and one the city is still in the process of honestly answering
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.
As regular readers of this blog know I have an abiding interest in Artificial Intelligence, and, in particular, it's potential to develop proto-consciousness, or,...
On January 3, 2009, an anonymous programmer mined Bitcoin's Genesis Block, embedding within it a newspaper headline: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of...