# data[].attributes.headline
Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not

# data[].attributes.subject
Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not

# data[].attributes.body
An interesting commentary on what is happening in the USA at the moment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The likelihood that your Black colleague lost a family member to COVID-19 is painfully high. The chances that your Black colleague was triggered by the viral video of Amy Cooper because a white woman used her race and privilege and weaponized it against him is incredibly likely. The possibility that your Black colleague is afraid to go for a run, or terrified when her husband leaves the house, or just simply enraged by the incessant lies this country keeps telling us about equal liberties is so high you'll need a ladder to get it down.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dear White People, Your Black Colleagues Aren't Okay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The likelihood that your Black colleague lost a family member to COVID-19 is painfully high. The chances that your Black colleague was triggered by the viral video of Amy Cooper because a white woman used her race and privilege and weaponized it against him is incredibly likely.

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting podcasts:)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NPR's home to showcase all of the podcasts from the NPR family. You can listen to recent episodes of your favorite podcasts and subscribe using your app of choice. Looking for more great listens? Browse our entire catalogue by topic or, on each podcast's page, discover similar podcasts.

# data[].attributes.body
Choose - explore - share

# data[].attributes.headline
Best articles from farnamstreetblog :) 50 articles  with more than 1,000 shares

# data[].attributes.subject
Best articles from farnamstreetblog :) 50 articles  with more than 1,000 shares

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/best-articles/

# data[].attributes.headline
James Corden welcomes philosopher and "The School of Life" co-founder Alain de Botton who talks about our collective emotional state during a global pandemic.

# data[].attributes.subject
James Corden welcomes philosopher and "The School of Life" co-founder Alain de Botton who talks about our collective emotional state during a global pandemic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Alain de Botton - It's OK to Feel NOT OK Right Now

# data[].attributes.headline
A New World Through My Window   by Olga Tokarczuk

# data[].attributes.subject
A New World Through My Window   by Olga Tokarczuk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At a cafe in Taipei, a surgical-masked waitress brought a young man a menu and a glass of water, then took a no-contact thermometer from her apron and scanned his forehead. With no fever detected, he settled in and she gave him time to consider his order.

This is everyday life in Taiwan now, a country that has been priming itself for this kind of scenario for years.

I've just walked into a cafe in Taipei, where I was immediately asked to sanitize my hands and my temperature was measured. Seems to be a common procedure during #coronavirus times, here in Taiwan. Same scenario happened upon my hotel check in last night. Follow their lead! pic.twitter.com/Ul4VbI24ax

- Beata Komarnicka ???? (@komarnicka_com) March 12, 2020

As COVID-19 has traversed the globe, each afflicted country has formulated a response. In China, the central government has restricted the movements of over 760 million citizens. In the U.S., efforts have been more ad hoc, with state and local governments instituting their own rules with little national-level guidance. European nations, meanwhile, are now beginning to regulate the movements of their residents, too, though they waited longer than China did, and enforcement seems more relaxed.

Taiwan is an outlier. The island nation 81 miles from the coast of China has mounted a response that blends social collectivism with high-efficiency governing. It's something to behold. Gyms and restaurants are open for business and bustle with customers. Schools and offices are operating, and individual movement is largely unrestricted. If China is heavy-handed and America is hands-off, Taiwan is hand-in-hand, displaying an enviable level of civil and governmental synchronicity.

Even as work and life there continues unabated, Taiwan has largely contained the virus. As of Saturday it had reported a mere 53 cases and only a single death. "Taiwan is sort of a positive deviant," Jason Wang, director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention at Stanford University, . "It did really well when they were not expected to do so well."

How it did so well has been the subject of effusive reporting . The same day that China alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) of a mysterious pneumonia spreading in Wuhan, Taiwan began screening arrivals from that city. (It would be another three days before the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services was even told about the Wuhan outbreak.)

Less than two weeks later, Taiwanese infectious disease experts in China's Hubei Province were calling hospitals back home to tell them they should start testing for the virus. Identified cases were isolated and their contacts traced. By the time Taiwan confirmed its first case in mid-January, it had an epidemic command center and a nationally coordinated response up and running.

The speed with which these systems were implemented was breathtaking. Taiwan was the first country to ban arrivals from Wuhan and one of the first to implement mandatory 14-day quarantines. In the time since, it has ramped up longer-term efforts. Last week, the government announced that people isolating at home were entitled to monetary compensation, and made the rule retroactive to January 15.

Many other measures have helped, as well: public service announcements educating people on how to stay healthy, hand sanitizer in virtually every establishment, free masks at pharmacies for anyone who wants one. Taiwan has accomplished all of this even though it's one of the few countries that has no access to the World Health Organization's resources. (Its membership is blocked by China.) Much of the residual health infrastructure from the country's 2003 SARS outbreak is also still in place, including temperature monitors and quarantine facilities at its international airports.

The seamlessness of Taiwan's response has earned it well-deserved praise, particularly because it has been accompanied by such a high level of public cooperation. The temperature-taking scene in the cafe plays out thousands of times a day at hotels, temples and schools. Virtually every mass transit rider wears a mask. "People don't feel like this is a pain," says Beata Komarnicka, a dual citizen of Poland and Australia who is visiting Taipei and had her temperature taken twice at the airport. "They seem to be aware that this is the only way to contain the virus."

Why Taiwan?

Taiwan's success in fighting an infection that has overwhelmed other places can be credited to its solutions-driven, outcomes-oriented approach to problems large and small.

After four decades under martial law, the country took its first steps toward democracy only in 1987 and held its first direct presidential election in 1996. As a country with no democratic past, "Taiwan has no 'legacy systems' of representative democracy (to use the language of technology)," the country's Digital Minister Audrey Tang in the last year. "This means we can experiment with new modes of democracy."

In Taiwan, those new modes tend to prioritize successful results over democratic ideals - a 2014 found that only 19 percent of Taiwanese believe democracy is more important than development. This doesn't mean that the Taiwanese don't practice democracy, they just expect it to improve people's lives in concrete ways - an effective bulwark against populist revolt, not to mention a virus.

"The Asian technocratic mindset is that delay in getting things done is itself a form of corruption," author and political analyst Parag Khanna in a South China Morning Post op-ed in 2017. "Because Asian societies are modernizing, they will evolve towards better governance that balances political openness with goal-oriented technocracy." In a country like Taiwan, Khanna concludes, "for democracy to be taken seriously, it has to deliver."

In Taiwan, this expectation has led not only to world-class infrastructure, schools and medical systems, but innovations that bring people and government closer together. For instance, the online platform allows citizens to directly participate in national-level policy making. In 2016, vTaiwan effectively crowdsourced Taiwan's "Diversified Taxi Services Plan," which regulates Uber. These kinds of outcomes-focused public service systems are built, Tang writes in the , "on an historic practice of community associations that used collaborative action to find common solutions."

UPDATE: Woke up to the news that #Poland is closing its borders from tomorrow for 10 days (with a possibility of extension). We won't be able to get back on time, hence we're locked in Taiwan at least until March 25th. Actually it's safer here anyway. Let's keep calm! ??‍♀️ https://t.co/iSreXN7zZT

- Beata Komarnicka ???? (@komarnicka_com) March 14, 2020

That's good news for Komarnicka, the Polish-Australian traveler - she is currently trapped in Taipei. When she woke up on March 14, she learned that her home country of Poland was closing its borders, complicating her efforts to return home. "We won't be able to get back on time, hence we're locked in Taiwan at least until March 25th," she tweeted before heading out into the bustling city. "Actually it's safer here anyway. Let's keep calm!"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At a cafe in Taipei, a surgical-masked waitress brought a young man a menu and a glass of water, then took a no-contact thermometer from her apron and scanned his forehead. With no fever detected, he settled in and she gave him time to consider his order.

# data[].attributes.headline
Coronavirus offers "a blank page for a new beginning"

# data[].attributes.subject
Coronavirus offers "a blank page for a new beginning"

# data[].attributes.body
I wonder what you think.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The coronavirus epidemic will lead to "a global recession of a magnitude that has not been experienced before" but will eventually allow humanity to reset its values, according to trend forecaster Li Edelkoort.

Edelkoort told Dezeen that the virus was causing a "quarantine of consumption" and would have a profound cultural and economic impact.

People would have to get used to living with fewer possessions and travelling less, she said, as the virus disrupts global supply chains and transportation networks.
"A quarantine of consumption"
"It seems we are massively entering a quarantine of consumption where we will learn how to be happy just with a simple dress, rediscovering old favourites we own, reading a forgotten book and cooking up a storm to make life beautiful," she said.

However, the virus was also showing how economic disruption could have environmental benefits, she argued.

"The recent pictures of the air above China showed how two months without production cleared the skies and allowed people to breathe again," she said, referring to the fact that carbon emissions and pollution from Chinese industry have declined since the virus first hit the country.

"This means that the virus will show how slowing and shutting down can produce a better environment which will surely be visible on a large scale."
"I am hopeful for a better system"
"And this is where I am hopeful for: another and better system to be put in place with more respect for human labour and conditions."

Edelkoort, who runs New York City forecasting agency Edelkoort Inc, wrote to Dezeen via email from South Africa, where she is in "self-imposed auto-quarantine" following her lecture at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town last month.

Salone del Mobile to evaluate situation as Milan, Venice and much of northern Italy sealed off due to coronavirus

Her comments came as the Italian prime minister signed a decree locking down much of northern Italy including Milan and Venice, jeopardising the fashion and design industries located there.

The outbreak in northern Italy has already led to the postponement of Milan's Salone del Mobile and the Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as the MIPIM property fair in France and Light + Building in Germany, among many other events.
Events should "stop organising today"
Edelkoort said that other event organisers should follow suit. "Anyone still planning public events in the coming months might as well stop organising today and find innovative ways to communicate and relay the information differently," she said.

"Unfortunately in this disaster there is no immediate cure," she added. "We will have to pick up the residue and reinvent everything from scratch once the virus is under control."

Tom Dixon, Ross Lovegrove and other leading designers respond to Salone postponement

Born in the Netherlands in 1950, Edelkoort is regarded as one of the world's most influential trend forecasters, advising fashion companies and consumer brands around the world. In 2003, Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential people in fashion. She was director of Design Academy Eindhoven from 1998 to 2008.

In 2015 she declared "the end of fashion as we know it," saying the industry has become "a ridiculous and pathetic parody of what it has been".

Here is a transcript of the interview with Edelkoort:

Marcus Fairs: What do you think the impact of coronavirus will be?

Li Edelkoort: The impact of the coronavirus will be layered and complex, going from disbelief and social reassurance to the progressive perception of the impact on our lives to an eerie apprehension of what the scenarios might be, to the realisation of eventual solutions by self-separation in society and self-contained offices, ateliers and retreats.

It is hard to understand the math with the numbers jumping so quickly in short periods of time, hence the continuous disbelief. For now only China, Korea and Italy have introduced the measures other countries will have to follow.

Anyone still planning public events in the coming months might as well stop organising today and find innovative ways to communicate and relay the information differently. This may be very sad news for all the graduates-to-be who might have to throw their caps into the air towards their own ceilings.

Marcus Fairs: You told Quartz magazine: "I think we should be very grateful for the virus because it might be the reason we survive as a species." Do you stand by that and what do you mean?

Li Edelkoort: The Quartz article was taken from a short interview between breaks at the Design Indaba conference and the virus wasn't the main subject matter, but I do stand by what I said.

As a prime target for this virus, because of my old age and history of respiratory illnesses, I am aware of the immediate dangers and threats this represents for people all over the world. And I am very sad for the families of the people that already gave their lives to this new illness. Hopefully, they did not die in vain as the world will strive to resurrect human dignity and survival.

The impact of the outbreak will force us into slowing down the pace, refusing to take planes, working from our homes, entertaining only amongst close friends or family, learning to become self-sufficient and mindful. Suddenly the fashion shows look bizarre and out of place, the travel ads that enter our computer space seem invasive and ridiculous, the thought of future projects is vague and inconclusive: will it even matter? Every new day we question each system we have known since birth, and are obliged to consider their possible demise.

For several years we have understood that in order to survive as a species and to keep the planet going we need to make draconian changes to the way we live, travel, consume and entertain. There is no way we can continue to produce as many goods and the many choices we have grown accustomed to. The debilitating mass of information about nothing at all has numbed our culture. There is a growing awareness amongst younger generations that ownership and the hoarding of clothes and cars is no longer even attractive.

But somehow the human psyche is resistant and wants to test if things will just dissipate by themselves, waiting and biding our time while we are doing business as usual. Therefore the sudden stop on all of this by the virus takes decisionmaking out of our hands and will just slow things down to another, frightful pace in the beginning. We are no longer used to doing things without rushing, waiting for answers, searching for solutions nor producing in our backyards. Improvisation skills and creativity will become the highest assets.

Not many people understand what is happening to our world and economy right now. Often in companies, up to 90 per cent of all goods are made in China from oil-derived substances such as plastic and polyester. We will soon see shelves empty of shoes, phones, clothes and even toothpaste. We will have a shortage of medical supplies and will see a stop in the endless production of ugly souvenirs and useless goody bags.

We already know that the design processes for fall/winter products are not happening as they should be. Skype and DHL help but we will have a lot of mediocre goods coming our way, just relying on former success formulas. That is if people actually will still have the desire to buy something like a cashmere scarf or an object for the home.

The endless Chinese exports of synthetic saris to India and plastic household objects to Africa, which have severely disrupted local economies there and created a lot of joblessness (and pollution) over the years might also come to a halt, possibly bringing new opportunities for making locally.

We will be in a position of having a blank page for a new beginning because lots of companies and money will be wiped out in the process of slowing down. Redirecting and restarting will require a lot of insight and audacity to build a new economy with other values and ways of handling production, transport, distribution and retail.

Marcus Fairs: What impact is the virus having already on the design and fashion sectors?

Li Edelkoort: The true cost of the shut down in Italy and Japan, as well as Korea and China, will lead to a global recession of a magnitude that has not been experienced before. This is not a financial crisis but a disruption crisis. People stop moving around, stop going out, stop spending, stop going on holiday, stop going to cultural events, even to church!

The postponement of the Salone del Mobile, the Venice Architecture Biennale, of the Hadj, of Papal prayers, possibly of the Olympic Games and more to come, are all economic disasters in their own right; their accumulation will stop money circulating. All sectors will be shaken, especially luxury brands, airlines, hospitality, electronics and imported foods.

Unfortunately in this disaster, there is no immediate cure. We will have to pick up the residue and reinvent everything from scratch once the virus is under control. And this is where I am hopeful for: another and better system, to be put in place with more respect for human labour and conditions. In the end, we will be forced to do what we should have done already in the first place.

Marcus Fairs: What do you think will happen over the next few months?

Li Edelkoort: For now we see the further shutdown of society, country by country. The warmer southern hemisphere seems to be better conditioned but we don't know that for sure yet. We will have to come to terms with living with fewer news feeds, less new merchandise, fewer newsletters and pop-ups. We will have to kick all our habits off as if we are going off drugs. Going cold turkey over shopping.

It seems we are massively entering a quarantine of consumption where we will learn how to be happy just with a simple dress, rediscovering old favourites we own, reading a forgotten book and cooking up a storm to make life beautiful. The impact of the virus will be cultural and crucial to building an alternative and profoundly different world.

Marcus Fairs: What do you think will be the longer-term impacts on society and the environment?

Li Edelkoort: The recent pictures of the air above China showed how two months without production cleared the skies and allowed people to breathe again. This means that the virus will show how slowing and shutting down can produce a better environment which will surely be visible on a large scale. If we include air and boat travel, holiday travel, business travel and transport, the clean up should be considerable.

Therefore, if we are wise - which sadly we now know we aren't - we will start up again with new rules and regulations, allowing countries to get back to their knowhow and specific qualities, introducing cottage industries that would flourish and grow into an arts-and-crafts century, where manual labour is cherished above everything else.

A regulated shut down of production plants for two months a year could be part of this concept, as are collective creative studios that would produce ideas for several brands at a time, bringing about an economy of scale with a much lighter environmental footprint.

Local industries and activities would gain momentum and people-based initiatives will take over with bartering systems and open tables, farmers markets and street events, dance and singing contests and a very dominant DIY aesthetic. My future forecast for the Age of the Amateur seems to come much faster then I anticipated.

Photo is by Koen Hauser.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coronavirus offers "a blank page for a new beginning" says Li Edelkoort

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The coronavirus epidemic will lead to "a global recession of a magnitude that has not been experienced before" but will eventually allow humanity to reset its values, according to trend forecaster Li Edelkoort. Edelkoort told Dezeen that the virus was causing a "quarantine of consumption" and would have a profound cultural and economic impact.

# data[].attributes.headline
Carol Dweck: A Summary of Growth and Fixed Mindsets

# data[].attributes.subject
Carol Dweck: A Summary of Growth and Fixed Mindsets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Carol Dweck: A Summary of The Two Mindsets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A summary of Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, which explores our two mindsets (fixed and growth) and how they impact not only our attitudes and learning but also our outcomes.

# data[].attributes.headline
Carol Dweck: When a Fixed Mindset is Better than a Growth Mindset

# data[].attributes.subject
Carol Dweck: When a Fixed Mindset is Better than a Growth Mindset

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
***

"So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called growth mindset," writes Angela Duckworth. "It is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. That it can change with your effort." Carol Dweck's insights about "fixed" vs. "growth" mindsets are the key.

Below find a talk Dweck gave at Google, with some excerpts that I found particularly interesting. She talks about what keeps her up at night, how to encourage children, the role of shame, and whether a fixed mindset can be more beneficial than a growth mindset.

When asked what keeps her up at night in regards to the thought of someone challenging, disproving or using her theories.

Yes. I always had this attitude of challenging my ideas and my theories because if you're wrong you want to know it as soon as possible. You don't want to spend your life on it. So... what keeps me up at night in a good way are different areas where it could be applied. So we have a whole program of research on peace in the Middle East where we're using Mindset principles, I'm not minimizing the hugeness of the problem but we're using Mindset principles to try to build some greater understanding. So I love to think of ways that we can extend it into areas we never thought of before. I love to think of ways to implement it so that more kids who need this way of thinking can benefit from it. And something that also keeps me up at night is that fear that people are developing what i'm calling a 'false growth mindset'.It's this idea 'if it's good I have it'. So a lot of people are kind of declaring they have it but they don't. They think it just means open-minded or being a nice person or maybe they are saying it for fixed mindset reasons, I want you to judge me as being the right kind of person. So developing a growth mindset is really a journey, a lifelong journey of monitoring your trigger points and trying to approach things and a more growth mindset way of taking on the challenges, sticking to them, learning from them. Right now I'm writing something for educators that I'm calling 'false growth mindset' to tell them 'no, you can't just say it, you have to take a journey' because we're doing research now showing that many teachers and parents that say they have a growth mindset are actually responding to kids in ways that are creating fixed mindsets for kids. So that's kind of the array of things that keep me up at night. But that said, I do sleep pretty well.

When asked what you should say to encourage a child when you can't use words like smart.

The question is if you can't say smart, what can you say? You can say so many other things. One thing is you can just show interest in the process that the child or other person is engaging in and in our research that's what we've shown is effective, focusing on the process or appreciating the process someone is engaging in or has engaged in so just show interest, ask questions, give encouragement if they've been grappling with something and they've tried new strategies or stuck to the strategy. One parent said, 'oh I hate it 'cause I can't appreciate it when my child does something great.' I said, 'well where did you get that from?' Of course you can appreciate it, then tie it to something they engaged in. 'Oh, you couldn't do that yesterday, you made progress, that's so exciting, oh that's great you really stuck to it and learned it. Or, you tried all different ways and look that worked.' So you're really appreciating some outcome where they are and you're talking about how they got there. But if you don't have that information just ask them. Never praise effort that isn't there.

When asked how she thinks shame plays a part in a fixed versus growth mindset?

Oh, that's a great question. We have studied that and we have shown that shame is a big factor in a fixed mindset. You don't want to take on a challenge. It's humiliating to have a setback within a fixed mindset, it means you're not the person you want to be and other people aren't going to look at you in the same way. We've studied it in adolescence, adolescents in a fixed mindset feel incredible shame when they are excluded or rejected and that makes them want to lash out violently. And research for many years, many people's research has shown that shame is not a productive emotion. It makes you want to hide or lash out, both of which are not gonna get you, in the long run, where you want to be. In a growth mindset you can feel very disappointed. You can feel hurt. You can feel guilty. You can feel a lot of things but these are emotions that allow you to go forward and be constructive.

When asked if she sees any context in which a fixed mindset is more beneficial than a growth mindset?

Well, first let me say that a growth mindset doesn't require you to go around improving everything. You can focus and you can say no I'm not gonna do that, no I'm not gonna do that. But research, not my research but research of others has in fact looked at this question and found two areas so far in which a fixed mindset is better. One is sexual orientation. People who accept that this is who they are and this is who they're meant to be seem to be better adjusted than people who think 'I should be changing.' And the other is aging. So, it's nice to feel you can stay young through exercise and so forth but people who run around nipping and tucking and the tummy tuck and the this that and the other and it's kind of a desperate attempt to retain extreme youth that doesn't seem to be so great either. But when it comes to skill areas it looks like a growth mindset is typically more advantageous.

Dweck's book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, is worth reading in its entirety.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Carol Dweck: When a Fixed Mindset is Beneficial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called growth mindset," writes Angela Duckworth. "It is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. That it can change with your effort." Carol Dweck's insights about "fixed" vs. "growth" mindsets are the key.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ten trends that will shape science in the 2020s

# data[].attributes.subject
Ten trends that will shape science in the 2020s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When the 2010s began, private spaceflight had barely gotten off the ground, Google was rolling out early personalized search results and CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology was still in its infancy. By decade's end, artificial intelligence had trounced people at a bevy of board games, SpaceX had become a household name and genetically modified human embryos became a controversial reality.

Clearly, a lot can happen in a decade-but innovation has to start somewhere. Based on what's breaking through now, here are some trends that have the potential to shape the 2020s.

Missions to the Moon, Mars and More

The decade ahead promises an impressive lineup of space missions. NASA's Artemis program aims to land the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024-but will likely be pushed back to 2028- with additional trips each year thereafter, paving a path for future missions to Mars. Landing astronauts on Mars won't happen in this decade, but this summer, a new rover will be headed to the Red Planet.

Also in 2024, Japan plans to send its Martian Moon eXplorer (MMX) probe to Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. MMX will touch down on Phobos, which has a gravitational pull 1,800 times weaker than Earth's, making landing a breeze but is still strong enough to keep the spacecraft ground-based after landing. A sampling device connected to the spacecraft will collect a bit of soil to take back to Earth. MMX will also drop off a rover and then leave Phobos to survey Deimos before returning to Earth in 2029.

MMX won't be the only spacecraft bringing samples back home. Japan's Hayabusa 2 mission will collect samples from Ryugu, an asteroid believed to have organic matter and water remnants from when the solar system first formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago. Similarly, NASA's OSIRIS-REx has been orbiting and surveying the asteroid Bennu since December 2018. Beginning this year, it will start practicing landing on the asteroid to collect a sample from its surface. According to NASA, researchers suspect that dirt on Bennu may contain "the molecular precursors to the origin of life and the Earth's oceans." (Bennu could collide with Earth late in the 22nd century, making it a valuable research target.)

Flying Cars-No, Really

A future with flying cars may seem cliché, but this might be the decade that gets this reality off the ground.

Most flying vehicles currently in development resemble large, electrically-powered drones that can be mostly automated so the operator doesn't need a pilot's license. But other details vary from model to model: While some resemble the "Jetsons" dream of the 1950s-they're convertible from wheeled to winged, allowing them to transition from the open road to the airways-most of today's "flying cars" look and operate much more like helicopters.

The biggest market for so-called "flying cars" isn't for personal usage, but rather for fleets of air taxis. Uber, for example, has been pushing for air taxi services since 2016. This year, the company set its sights on Dallas, Los Angeles and Dubai as cities to test the system that would bypass standstill road traffic. Uber expects to expand commercially as early as 2023, according to Digital Trends. Until regulations and infrastructure are able to support air traffic, though, most people won't be able to upgrade their personal vehicles just yet-and many doubt the practice will ever go mainstream.

But the reality of flying cars is hard to ignore when the field is packed with industry big shots, including Boeing, Porsche, Hyundai, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce and the Chinese firm Geely, which owns or holds stake in numerous auto companies. (Even the U.S. military is partnering with personal air vehicle manufacturers.)

Better Batteries

The future is electric, which means advancements in battery technology will be crucial to innovation in the 2020s. The next generation of electric cars, solar panels and smartphones will require improvements to battery life and cleaner, more efficient ways to mass-produce them.

All batteries have two electrodes, a cathode and an anode, connected by a liquid electrolyte that allows ions to flow between them. In lithium-ion batteries, the current state of the art that powers machines from laptops to Teslas, most anodes are graphite, but engineers continue to play around with different cathode materials. Most smartphones and laptops today use lithium cobalt oxide as a cathode, which is good at storing energy but costs a lot of money, doesn't last long and often conducts heat easily. The coming decade could be defined by the search for better chemistry.

A handful of engineers are also making strides in introducing graphene into lithium-ion batteries-something Samsung says it will do by 2021. Graphene is a wunderkind in the materials world because it's made of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal patterns. Graphene could lead to much smaller batteries that charge much faster.

America's electrical grid needs a power-up, too. The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) new national grid energy research facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was awarded a multi-million dollar commitment from DOE to update the grid, and a major portion of that funding will be funneled into new battery technologies.

PNNL associate lab director Jud Virden tells Forbes' James Conca that lithium-ion batteries took 40 years of development to get to what we have now. But as Conca writes: "We don't have 40 years to get to the next level. We need to do it in 10."

Mainstream Medicine Gets Trippy

The 2010s saw 18 states approve the use of marijuana for medical purposes, bringing the total to 33 states. In the 2020s, research into the potential medicinal uses of psychedelics could increase dramatically.

John Hopkins Medicine in 2019 launched the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research to study the use of psychedelics and "identify therapies for diseases such as addiction, PTSD, and Alzheimer's," according to a statement. So far, the university has primarily investigated how psilocybin-the chemical in "magic mushrooms"-can be applied in low doses as a therapeutic treatment method for a swath of conditions, including nicotine addiction, major depressive disorder and anxiety. Scientists are now considering whether psilocybin could ease the pain of life-threatening conditions such as cancer.

In another recent example, one researcher found that MDMA, or ecstasy, can make the characteristically shy octopus act friendlier. Though cephalopod brains are more similar to snails than to humans, scientists gleaned insights about how neurons and neurotransmitters behave on the drug that could inform future studies in humans. Other researchers doing experiments with mice hope MDMA ability to manipulate oxytocin could benefit people suffering PTSD.

A form of ketamine that causes dissociative hallucinations is used as a party drug, but in the medical field, the drug is commonly used as a medical anesthetic. Now, scientists are studying its efficacy for cases of hard-to-treat depression. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved a nasal-spray form of ketamine for severe cases of depression. (But beware pop-up "clinics" that are overhyping its usefulness in improper applications, according to a investigation.)

Facing 'Apocalyptic' Species Decline

Insects, amphibians, birds and creatures of every stripe are in serious decline because of a cocktail of threats, primarily habitat destruction, pollution and climate change. The United Nations has set the end of the 2020s as the deadline for serious measures to save these populations.

Big-picture commitments to protect habitats, reduce carbon emissions, eliminate plastic waste, and curb pesticide use are needed. In addition, scientists are getting creative about studying and protecting species. Tech giants like Google are helping, too. Through passive tracking devices like camera traps, researchers can collect spatial and temporal data that inform conservation efforts. Collectively, these traps will accumulate millions of images, but sorting that immense well of data has been a longstanding problem for researchers.

Projects like Wildlife Insights, which is sponsored in part by Google and Smithsonian Institution, are using cloud technology and artificial intelligence to identify animals in images at the species level so scientists can map a population's range more easily. Elsewhere, startups like Conservation X are pooling money to create devices like portable DNA scanners to help officials identify illegally traded items like rhino horns or pangolin scales, reports Lisa Palmer for . The group also funded a program called ChimpFace, which uses facial-recognition software to combat illegal chimpanzee trafficking online by training an algorithm on thousands of images of chimps.

On the ground, one team of researchers in New Zealand is using a suite of tech to recover the endangered kākāpō bird. They pilot drones to move semen samples for breeding across the island quickly; advanced microsatellite DNA tests are used to prevent inbreeding; and they've even 3D-printed eggs to assist incubation. Several teams are using satellites in space to track populations of whales, wombats and penguins.

Food to Feed the Planet

By some estimates, the planet will need to generate more food in the next 35 years than has ever been produced in human history-an ask that will unquestionably strain agricultural resources.

Though genetically modified crops have been around in some form or another for millennia, engineered plants are poised to make a splash in the next decade. Altered staples like golden rice-a variant of white rice engineered to combat vitamin A deficiency-might be on their way to distribution before we hit the 2030s. Also in development are heat-resistant crops that will, in theory, fare better than their counterparts as Earth's temperature ticks upward.

These biotechnological fixes have their critics. Genetically modified plants come with risks, as they can transfer genes to other organisms in their ecosystems, according to National Geographic. Skeptics also point out their relative impracticality: By the time GMOs clear the regulatory hurdles and reach the populations most in need, the aid could be too late.

Instead, experts recommend pouring resources into developing more sustainable agricultural practices that can bolster land management and even out food distribution. Calorically speaking, the planet already produces enough food to keep all its residents fed-something that won't be fixed by focusing on production alone, according to the . Researchers are also prioritizing technology that might minimize food waste, or reduce the world's dependence on foods that carry big carbon footprints, like meat and dairy.

Really, Really Intelligent Machines

We're in the midst of a digital revolution. Computers, programmed to "think" for themselves, can now beat people at games, forecast the weather and even diagnose medical abnormalities better than some doctors. What artificial intelligence will attempt and conquer next is hard to guess, but a few companies have already lined up some potentially heavy hitters for the next ten years. One prominent example is Google, which made headlines earlier this year for a breast cancer diagnostic technology and has announced plans to roll out more of the same for other health-related conditions.

Another buzzworthy topic involves facial recognition, brought to the fore last month when the New York Times published an exposé on a startup gunning to make facial recognition a fixture of law enforcement agencies. Many of these advances have been made possible by so-called neural networks -a form of machine learning modeled after the connectivity of the human brain that have become excellent at picking hidden patterns out of massive datasets, like medical records or photos of people.

The 2020s will bring more than technical advancements: Experts are now pushing for the world to grapple with the legal, social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Machines mining personal data raise issues of privacy. Increasingly "conscious" algorithms evoke difficult questions of personhood, and whether computers will ever reach the point of deserving their own rights. Even the best-intentioned programs are prone to problems: Artificial intelligence can't (yet) tell when people give them incorrect or biased data, and has the potential amplify human errors in medicine, in some cases spitting out discriminatory results.

Solving the Plastics Problem

In the past 70 years, humans have produced more than 8 billion tons of plastic -and most of it is still around today, wreaking havoc on the environment and compromising human health. To move beyond simply reusing and recycling, researchers and policymakers alike are turning to alternative technologies and regulations.

Companies are developing substitutes for plastic based on materials such as flax fibers, mushrooms and shrimp shells. Others are attempting to modify existing plastic formulations to make them more degradable, according to the United Nations. In dire need of an upgrade is recycling technology itself: Only about nine percent of the world's plastic is recycled, according to the . One big issue is contamination, which sends about 25 percent of the stuff we try to recycle to the landfill.

Even the simplest of inventions can take years to hit the market. In the meantime, countries around the world are instituting single-use plastic bans, with several already in place in members of the European Union, China and New Zealand, among others, according to . Similar legislation is gaining traction in the United States, albeit on a state-by-state basis.

Progress in Global Public Health

Infectious diseases, including many that are treatable, remain the leading cause of death in low-income countries, due in large part to poor and inconsistent access to healthcare resources. To streamline diagnostics and treatments, researchers are increasingly turning to easy-to-use devices-some of which offer simplified proxies for clinics or human professionals.

At the University of California, Berkeley, scientists have developed cell phone apps that can spot pathogens in biologic samples. The World Health Organization has increased funding to initiatives working to scale up vaccine production in disease-afflicted countries. Artificial intelligence is also starting to make a big splash in the infectious disease arena as computer scientists deploy the technology to predict-and hopefully temper-outbreaks that originate in animals.

In the 2020s the world might finally eradicate Guinea worm-a parasitic disease that researchers have been battling for decades. The annual count of new infections dropped to just 28 in 2018-down from 3.5 million in the 1980s. Recent efforts to fully stamp out the disease have plateaued, due in part to the parasite's frustrating tendency to hide out in dogs, according to Nature News. But if the World Health Organization meets its goal of officially purging the globe of Guinea worm by 2030, the parasite would become the second pathogen eradicated in human history, after smallpox.

A Bright Future for Solar Energy

Due in large part to human-driven climate change, the 2010s were the hottest decade on record. Without a serious drop in carbon emissions, the next ten years are likely to bring the world another wave of record temperatures, imperiling natural ecosystems and human societies around the world.

Global consumption of coal has begun to plateau as world powers switch to clean energy alternatives. According to the New York Times, experts predict that wind, solar and hydropower will surpass coal as the world's dominant source of electricity by 2030. Solar power in particular shines with potential, as the price tag for harvesting the sun's energy continues to drop for commercial and residential rooftops alike. If solar expansion predictions pan out, the sun's energy will drive about one-fifth of the United States' electricity generation by the start of the 2030s, according to .

But an expanded clean energy market doesn't guarantee a cut in carbon emissions-especially one substantial enough to save the planet from a disastrous uptick in temperature. Renewables like wind and solar still make up a small fraction of the total power sector, and the world's electricity needs are only growing. As James Temple writes for MIT Technology Review, repeating the advances made in the 2010s won't be enough. What's needed now is an acceleration in the pace of energy breakthroughs while there's still time to make a difference.

About the Author: Katherine J. Wu is a Boston-based science journalist and Story Collider senior producer whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Undark magazine, Popular Science and more. She holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunobiology from Harvard University, and was Smithsonian magazine's 2018 AAAS Mass Media Fellow. Read more articles from Katherine J. Wu and Follow on Twitter @katherinejwu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ten Trends That Will Shape Science in the Decade Ahead

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When the 2010s began, private spaceflight had barely gotten off the ground, Google was rolling out early personalized search results and CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology was still in its infancy. By decade's end, artificial intelligence had trounced people at a bevy of board games, SpaceX had become a household name and genetically modified human embryos became a controversial reality.

# data[].attributes.body
When did you last go for a walk? 😉

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
René Descartes argued that each of us is, fundamentally, a thinking thing. Thought is our defining activity, setting us aside from animals, trees, rocks. I suspect this has helped market philosophy as the life of the mind, conjuring up philosophers lost in reverie, snuggled in armchairs. But human beings do not, in fact, live purely in the mind. Other philosophers have recognised this, and connected our inner lives with an everyday, bodily process: walking. The act of putting one foot in front of another creates rhythm, movement, and can elevate the spirit. From teaching to reflecting, here are some suggestions for your next stroll.
1. Aristotle: Walk and talk.
Aristotle was named a peripatetic, one who paces, for his habit of strolling up and down whilst teaching. For Aristotle, walking facilitates talking - and, presumably, thinking. Although Aristotle's walking was famous, he was not the first philosopher to have the habit. Socrates was delighted at how students trailed after their teacher, as reported in Plato's Protagoras: "I saw how beautifully they took care never to get in Protagoras' way. When he turned around with his flanking groups, the audience to the rear would split into two in a very orderly way and then circle around to either side and form up again behind him. It was quite lovely." Comedy writers of the time also made fun of Plato for tiring out his legs whilst working out "wise plans."
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Examine everything in your own time.
For Rousseau, the great benefit of walking is that you can move at your own time, doing as much or as little as you choose. You can see the country you're travelling through, turn off to the right or left if you fancy, examine anything which interests you. In Emile, he writes: "To travel on foot is to travel in the fashion of Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras. I find it hard to understand how a philosopher can bring himself to travel in any other way; how he can tear himself from the study of the wealth which lies before his eyes and beneath his feet." He adds that those who ride in well-padded carriages are always "gloomy, fault-finding, or sick," whilst walkers are "always merry, light-hearted, and delighted with everything."
3. Henry Thoreau: Allow nature to work on you.
Thoreau argues that humans are a part of nature, and walking through nature can allow us to grow spiritually. He argues that being in the wild can act on us, that mountain air can feed our spirits. In his article, "Walking," he advises us to focus: "I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit... What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" To feel the benefits of walking through nature, we must allow it to enter us, to soak it up.
4. George Santayana: Reflect on the privilege of movement.
Santayana points out that plants cannot move, whilst animals can. In "The Philosophy of Travel", he wonders if this privilege of "locomotion" is the "key to intelligence", writing: "The roots of vegetables (which Aristotle says are their mouths) attach them fatally to the ground, and they are condemned like leeches to suck up whatever sustenance may flow to them at the particular spot where they happen to be stuck. Close by, perhaps, there may be a richer soil or a more sheltered or sunnier nook but they cannot migrate, nor have even the eyes or imagination by which to picture the enviable neighbouring lot." Moving around allows animals to experience more of the world, to imagine how it might be elsewhere.

Gros has done more than any other philosopher to advance the philosophy of walking, although according to this amusing interview he does not walk enough. He maintains we should walk alone, preferably through nature. Once you've left populated streets, roads, and public spaces behind, you leave their noises behind. No more speed, jostling, clamour, clattering footsteps, white noise murmurs, snatches of words, rumbling engines. As he notes in "A Philosophy of Walking," gradually, you retrieve silence: "All is calm, expectant and at rest. You are out of the world's chatter, its corridor echoes, its muttering. Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds." The silence gathered by walking is refreshing, restorative.

Throughout the ages, and for different reasons, we have been encouraged (sometimes urged!) to step outside and explore the world by foot. Whether to clear our heads, to gain new perspective, or simply to absorb the wonders of nature, perhaps there is something for everyone to gain by slipping on a pair of shoes and venturing forth into the great beyond.

Featured image credit: Dmitry Schemelev on Unsplash.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Five philosophers on the joys of walking | OUPblog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
René Descartes argued that each of us is, fundamentally, a thinking thing. Thought is our defining activity, setting us aside from animals, trees, rocks. I suspect this has helped market philosophy as the life of the mind, conjuring up philosophers lost in reverie, snuggled in armchairs.

# data[].attributes.headline
Jeanette Winterson Darkness is the time to think, to dream, to love …  

# data[].attributes.subject
Jeanette Winterson Darkness is the time to think, to dream, to love …  

# data[].attributes.body
This text is just too beautiful not to share... Enjoy:)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
t's human to want light and warmth. Our pagan ancestors had a calendar of fire festivals, and God's first recorded words, according to the Hebrew Bible, were: "Let there be light." Night belongs to the dark side, literally and metaphorically: ghosts, scary monsters, robbers, the unknown. Electricity's triumph over the night keeps us safer as well as busier.

But whatever extends the day loses us the dark.

We now live in a fast-moving, fully lit world where night still happens, but is optional to experience. Our 24/7 culture has phased out the night. In fact we treat the night like failed daylight. Yet slowness and silence - the different rhythm of the night - are a necessary correction to the day.

I think we should stop being night-resisters, and learn to celebrate the changes of the seasons, and realign ourselves to autumn and winter, not just turn up the heating, leave the lights on and moan a lot.

Night and dark are good for us. As the nights lengthen, it's time to reopen the dreaming space. Have you ever spent an evening without electric light?

It doesn't matter whether you are in the city or the country, as long as you can control your own little pod. Make it a weekend, get in plenty of candles, and lay the fire if you have one. Prepare dinner ahead, and plan a walk so that you will be heading for home in that lovely liminal time where light and dark are hinged against each other.

City or country, that sundown hour is strange and exhilarating, as ordinary spatial relations are altered: trees rear up in their own shadows, buildings bulk out, pavements stretch forward, the red wrapper of brake lights turns a road into a lava flow.

Inside, the lights are going on. Outside, it's getting dark. You, as a dark shape in a darkening world, want to hold that intimacy, just for one night. Go home. Leave the lights off.

We have all experienced negative darkness - those long stretches of the night when we can't sleep, and worry about everything, and so we know that "dark time" can seem interminably long, compared with daytime. Yet this slowing of time can be the most relaxing and beautiful experience. Spending the evening in candlelight, and maybe by the fire - with no TV - talking, telling stories, letting the lit-up world go by without us, expands the hours, and alters the thoughts and conversations we have.

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing - their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling - their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights - then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.

The famous "sleep on it" when we have a dilemma we can't solve is an indication of how important dream time is to human wellbeing. The night allows this dream time, and the heavier, thicker dark of winter gives us a chance to dream a little while we are awake - a kind of reverie or meditation, the constellation of slowness, silence and darkness that sits under the winter stars.

I live in a wood in deep country, so inevitably light and dark keep their natural, non-city qualities for me, and I find myself responding to the changes in the light, and adjusting my ways from outdoors to indoors. I read more in the winter, write more, think more, sleep more. I don't plan any of this - rather I don't resist the seductions of darkness.

And what could be better, on a winter afternoon, than getting into bed with someone you love? Then the darkness is complicit. Bed is where you should be. If it rains outside, that only adds to the pleasure. And don't put the lights on. The Shakespearean bed trick, where it is so dark that somebody ends up making love to the wrong somebody (or as it happens, ultimately the right somebody), could never happen in our bright bedrooms, but the soft velvet of darkness turns even a familiar lover into an unknown encounter.

Making love in the afternoon is completely different in summer and winter. To begin as the afternoon light is fading, to wake up, warm and heavy, when it is completely dark, to kiss and stroke the shared invisible body, to leave the person you love half asleep while you go and open wine ... then the moment of standing barefoot in the kitchen, just a candle and two glasses to take back to bed, and a feeling of content like no other.

It may be an illusion, it may be the bonding hormone called oxytocin, but it is a gift of darkness too, and the slow extended time of love and night.

I like the slowness of night.

When friends from London arrive, high on electric light, like hamsters on a 24/7 wheel, I slow them down by feeding them food with darkness sealed in it: deep red venison stewed in claret, carp from the bottom of the river, root vegetables grown in rich black earth.

Just as our bodies use the sun to store up vitamin D for the winter, so the root vegetables common to autumn and winter have used their summer foliage to lock in the sun. There is a wonderful alchemical image of a black sun - dark, not radiating outwards but inwards - and that packed-in power is what you get in the autumn root vegetables. Little red turnips and ruby-black beetroot, small rough brown swede and deep orange rounds of carrot are dark suns.

Eating seasonally is not a green fad; it is way of connecting the body to what is really happening out there. We are seasonal creatures - the over-ride button is scarcely 100 years old. Give the body back its seasons and the mind is saner.

I believe in pleasure - but not the same pleasure all the time. Seasonal pleasure prevents boredom and cynicism.

There is great pleasure to be had from coming home on a wild night when the weather is vile, and pouring a glass of good red wine, and cooking dark food, such as mushroom risotto or braised beef and turnips served with dark green cabbage and truffle mash. If you have only 15 minutes to cook, make it mushrooms on toast with chopped parsley, and a chicory and endive salad. But keep the good red wine ... This kind of cooking and eating cheers you up in winter, because it is what the body needs.

If you want to be depressed, spend the long winter nights eating out-of-season food. This is not the time for caesar salads or anything with the words "slim" or "diet" or "low calorie" on the label. After a day in the office, a brisk walk home - even if takes an hour - followed by real winter food, will give you good spirits of the kind not to be found in the over-lit-overheated-bus-in-a-traffic-jam situation, followed by a ready meal.

In the autumn, make the bedroom cooler, not warmer. In winter, keep it slightly chilly, so that there is pleasure in that tingle of cold before you leap into bed with a hot water bottle, a good book and a glass of whisky.

It is a mistake to fight the cold and the dark. We're not freezing or starving in a cave, so we can enjoy what autumn and winter bring, instead of trying to live in a perpetual climate-controlled fluorescent world with the same day-in, day-out processed, packaged, flown-in food.

I have a tiny woodburning stove on my girlfriend's balcony in London. She thinks I'm crazy, but I like to sit in front of it with the lights of the city elsewhere, heating a pan of soup or roasting chestnuts, and yes, I could do that on her fancy Falcon cooker, but I wouldn't be where I like to be in my mind - which is dark without being melancholy, brooding without being depressed.

Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons - all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life - take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have.

Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it's more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Darkness is the time to think, to dream, to love ... - Jeanette Winterson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
t's human to want light and warmth. Our pagan ancestors had a calendar of fire festivals, and God's first recorded words, according to the Hebrew Bible, were: "Let there be light." Night belongs to the dark side, literally and metaphorically: ghosts, scary monsters, robbers, the unknown.

# data[].attributes.headline
Steven Pinker: what can we expect from the 2020s?

# data[].attributes.subject
Steven Pinker: what can we expect from the 2020s?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As "9" on the calendar rolls over to a fresh "0", many people are desperate for a ray of optimism to pierce the gloom of the daily headlines. Having published a hundred graphs documenting human progress, I'm often asked for reassurance that we will overcome our problems and that the coming decade will not just bring intensifying crises and declines.

Progress is a historical fact. The numbers show that over the past seven decades humans have become (on average) longer-lived, healthier, safer, richer, freer, fairer, happier and smarter, not just in the west but worldwide.

Progress is not, however, a natural force. The laws of the universe are indifferent to our wellbeing, with vastly more things that can go wrong than go right. And our species evolved for advantages in the struggle to reproduce, not for happiness or wisdom. The first step in thinking about the future is to reconcile human progress with human nature.

The progress we have enjoyed has come from empowering the better angels of our nature. We are a cognitive species, with the wherewithal to solve problems and the linguistic means to pool solutions. We are a co-operative species, joining forces to achieve outcomes we cannot achieve individually. And we are an intermittently empathetic species, capable of concern with the wellbeing of others.

These gifts were amplified by ideas and institutions advocated during the Enlightenment and entrenched after the second world war: reason, science, liberal democracy, declarations of rights, a free press, regulated markets, institutions of international co-operation.

But this progress is invisible to most people because they don't get their understanding of the world from numbers; they get it from headlines. Journalism by its very nature conceals progress, because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends. Most things that happen suddenly are bad: a war, a shooting, an epidemic, a scandal, a financial collapse. Most things that are good consist either of nothing happening - like a nation that is free of war or famine - or things that happen gradually but compound over the years, such as declines in poverty, illiteracy and disease.

On top of this built-in pessimism, market forces add layers of glumness. People dread losses more than they appreciate gains, so prophets can stoke their vigilance by warning them about looming disasters they may have overlooked. Popular forecasters are not actuaries who extrapolate and adjust medium-term trends but playwrights who titillate our imaginations with high-concept tragedies and horror stories.

So for every Age of Aquarius with electricity too cheap to meter, there are a dozen dystopias. In my lifetime I have survived a thermonuclear third world war, a population bomb, depletion of oil and minerals, a civilisation-ending Y2K bug, weekly 9/11-scale terrorist attacks, and a mushroom cloud from Saddam Hussein. Those who recall the fall of the Berlin Wall as opening a window of optimism have bad memories. Experts at the time warned of revanchism in a unified Germany, a rising sun in Japan and a longing for the stability of a bipolar world. A 1994 Atlantic cover story foretold a " coming anarchy " of world wars, spiralling crime, exploding Aids and the break-up of Nigeria, China, India and the US.

So how can we think about the 2020s without melodrama? Progress does not literally have momentum, but many of its drivers are not going away. Science and medicine continue to explore their endless frontiers and should keep delivering increments of understanding that lengthen and enrich our lives. It's true that the parent ideal of reason is under assault by fundamentalism, fake news and conspiracy theories, as it always has been. But the reach of reason is also expanding through online resources for education and fact-checking, and in movements for evidence-based medicine, policy and philanthropy.

In the moral sphere, the concept of human rights is self-expanding, since mistreatment of arbitrary categories of people withers under scrutiny. Successive generations have applied the ideal to ending religious persecution, despotism, sadistic punishments, legal slavery, callousness towards workers and discrimination against women, ethnic minorities and gay people. Recently it has been extended to sexual harassment, mistreatment of transgender people and oppressive laws in illiberal regions. (In the past decade 13 countries decriminalised homosexuality.) Even the most backward will face pressure to abandon archaic practices that keep girls out of school and women from driving.

For every Age of Aquarius with electricity too cheap to meter, there are a dozen dystopias

By adopting the Sustainable Development Goals, the 193 countries of the UN committed themselves to audacious targets for slashing poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, gender inequality, war and other scourges. Progress toward these goals (other than climate) is continuing and can be tracked on sites like Our World in Data, Gapminder, Human Progress, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Future Crunch. It is unlikely to do a sudden U-turn.

But - as the sustainable goalkeepers emphasise - "progress is possible, but it is not inevitable". Poverty, disease and conflict are natural, not unnatural, parts of the human condition, and only the concerted application of reason, science and humanism can push back against their creep.

Progress can be threatened not just by complacency but by tribalism, authoritarianism and science denial. Populists such as Donald Trump embody these threats; he treats public discourse not as a means of collectively pursuing an objective reality but as a weapon with which to project dominance. He has blown off the scientific consensus on climate change and suppressed dissemination of data on public health and the environment. He has sown ethnic hostility at home while rejecting international co-operation in favour of zero-sum economic or political combat. These insults to Enlightenment ideals are not just philosophical; they undermine concrete measures that have driven progress in the past, including democratic checks, free trade, environmental regulation and international agreements.

Though we cannot know how much damage authoritarian populism will do, there are reasons to think it is not the face of the future. Its support is greatest among rural, less-educated, ethnic-majority and older cohorts, all in demographic decline. And even countries that try to hide in a nationalist fortress will increasingly be besieged by crises that are inherently global and cannot be solved without international co-operation, including climate change, ocean degradation, pandemics, migrants, cyber crime, terrorism, piracy, dark money and nuclear proliferation.

Democracy, repeatedly declared moribund by schadenfreudian pundits, may be more resilient than they acknowledge. Everyone has read about backsliding in countries such as Turkey, Russia and Venezuela - but fewer have read about the gains in countries such as Georgia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Armenia, Malaysia and Ethiopia. According to the Varieties of Democracy scorecard, during the past decade the number of democracies in the world has hovered in a record-high range, with 99 (55 per cent) in 2018, compared to 87 in 1998, 51 in 1988, 40 in 1978, 36 in 1968 and 10 in 1918. And in the past year, pressure for democratisation has heated up in protests in Venezuela, Bolivia, Russia, Algeria, Sudan and Hong Kong.

Peace, too, may have staying power. Despite recent scares from Putinism and the Arab Spring, the long peace since the second world war keeps lengthening. Wars between great powers, once chronic, have vanished: the last one pitted the US against China more than 65 years ago. Wars between states continue their slide toward obsolescence, with no more than three in any year since 1945 and none since 2003. Though civil wars persist, the overall rate of deaths in wars of all kinds plunged a hundredfold between 1950 and 2005, from 22 per 100,000 people per year to 0.2. After rising to 1.5 in 2014 during the horrific Syrian civil war, it halved to 0.7 in 2018. And for all the warnings of a rising China that will inevitably fight its rival hegemon, that country has rested its fortunes on trade, contributed to UN peacekeeping, joined global and regional organisations, kept North Korea on a leash, assisted poor countries with infrastructure rather than weaponry, and not fought a war in 32 years.

Past performance is, of course, no guarantee of future results. Though history is not cyclical, it can be knocked backwards by nasty surprises. It's happened before: the two world wars, the Spanish flu, the outbreak of Aids in Africa, surges in crime and civil war from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, 9/11. The coming decade will surely bring more, though by definition we cannot know what they are.

Of course, we know what some of the catastrophic threats to gradual progress are. As the bumper sticker notes, one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. Contrary to almost 75 years in which doomsday has supposedly been minutes away, no nuclear weapon has been detonated in war since Nagasaki. This suggests that the norms and safeguards against accidental and impulsive launches have done their job.

Still, the possible destruction is so horrific that we would be foolish to push our luck indefinitely. The low but disconcerting odds can be pushed still lower by putting the weapons on a longer fuse, and by reducing their number below the threshold of a nuclear winter and eventually to zero. Today's leaders of nuclear states are not exactly moving in this direction, and it's inexcusable that the future of civilisation is a non-issue in an electoral arena obsessed with minor gaffes and scandals.

Also possibly calamitous are pandemics that could hop continents and cybersabotage that could bring down the internet. Here too the safeguards have worked so far, but experts say they must be strengthened.

In a category of its own is climate change, which is more of an approaching asteroid than a spinning roulette wheel. It would be irresponsible to predict either that everything will turn out OK or that we're cooked. Climate salvation, if it comes at all, will not primarily come from shaming oil companies or making personal sacrifices. It will require breakthroughs in policy and technology.

The atmosphere is a global commons, where no individual or country has an incentive to stint on emissions because it would suffer all the cost but no benefit unless everyone else makes the same sacrifice. Policies that put a price on carbon are necessary to avert this tragedy, but we have learnt that people react to them not by weatherstripping their windows but by donning yellow vests and setting cars on fire. Such policies must be sweetened with rebates or hidden in dark layers of the economy.

But I suspect that it will be more effective to make clean energy cheap than dirty energy expensive. In the short term this could involve a rapid buildout of nuclear power, as France and Sweden did in the past. In the longer term it will require breakthroughs in storing the intermittent energy from wind and sun, in bioenergy, and in a new generation of small modular fission or fusion reactors. Technological advances will also be needed to electrify industry, reduce greenhouse gases from agriculture, and capture the CO2 already in the atmosphere.

You can't worry about everything, and my appreciation of the complexity of human nature leaves me sceptical about another common fear: that the 2020s will see a brave new world of high-tech mind-hacking.

Predictions from the 1990s that yuppie parents would soon implant genes for intelligence or musical talent in their unborn children seemed plausible in a decade filled with discoveries of the gene for X. But these findings were destined for the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and today we know that heritable skills are the products of hundreds of genes, each with a minuscule effect, and many with deleterious side-effects. Micromanaging an embryo's genome will always be complex and risky. Given that most parents are squeamish about genetically modified applesauce, it's unlikely they would roll the dice for genetically modified children.

Brain-computer interfaces, except as treatments for paralysis or other disabilities, also strike me as dubious, like trying to adjust your iPhone settings with a soldering gun. Our thoughts are embodied in intricate patterns of connectivity in networks of millions of neurons, using a code that neuroscientists have not cracked. Since we already come equipped with pinpoint interfaces to our neural networks - eyes, ears, fingers, tongues - I doubt that healthy people will see the need for another hole in their head or for a foreign object lodged in their brain.

Some tech prophets sow fear about an advanced artificial intelligence subduing its creators. Others warn of an AI laying waste to the world while single-mindedly pursuing a goal, like inducing tumours in human guinea pigs to find a cure for cancer or asphyxiating us all to de-acidify the oceans. But the first fear projects human sins like greed and dominance on to the concept of intelligence. A human-made intelligent system is a problem-solving tool, not a rival primate. And the second refutes itself. It assumes that engineers are so smart that they could invent a system that can cure cancer and undo pollution but so stupid they would forget to give it any other conditions or test how it works before granting it omnipotence over the planet. Moreover, a system that monomaniacally pursued a single goal may be A, but it's hardly I.

And then there's the prospect that fake news and targeted political ads will hijack people's minds and obliterate democracy. Though the spread of disinformation must be combated, research on political messaging shows that it's not so easy to change people's minds. Even traditional TV and direct-mail ads are surprisingly ineffective, and in the 2016 American election fake news and bot-generated tweets made up a tiny fraction of online political traffic and were mostly consumed by zealots. (Few swing voters made up their minds upon reading that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a pizzeria.) For that matter online advertising, for all its claims to data-driven microtargeting, is dubiously effective, serving readers with ads for products they have already bought and ads for products they would never buy (like the trunnion tables and high-tech dreidels regularly interpolated into my daily news).

Prudence and experience compel me to hedge these reflections on the next decade. Like soothsayers before me, I will surely be wrong in some of my expectations about continuing progress and the threats it does and does not face.

But I am confident in one thing: the 2020s will be filled with problems, crises and discord, just like the decades before and after. Some people are surprised to hear this champion of progress abjure any hope for a future free of trouble and strife. Why can't we build on our accomplishments and aspire to utopia?

Fear of an advanced AI subduing its creators projects human sins on to the concept of intelligence

The reason is that we are not blank slates. The hard-won knowledge that has allowed us to marginalise our superstitions and biases must be relearned every generation in a Sisyphean struggle, never perfectly.

Also, human nature imposes permanent trade-offs among the things we value. People differ in talent and temperament, so even in a fair system they will end up unequal, and what pleases some will inevitably anger others. People are not infinitely wise, so when they are given their freedom, some will use it to screw up their lives, and when they are empowered in a democracy, they may choose leaders and policies that are bad for them. And people are not infinitely selfless. Any policy that makes most people better off will make some people worse off (say, coal executives), and they will not sacrifice their interests for the good of the group.

Yet the fact of progress shows that these trade-offs do not pin us to a constant level of suffering. Knowledge and technology can bend the trade-offs to give us more of each good. Education, a free press and civil society can remind us that the compromises of democracy are better than the alternatives. And (as physicist David Deutsch has noted) problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and solutions create new problems that can be solved in their turn.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of 10 books, including 'Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress' Comments on this artice have been disabled and will reopen on Monday Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen and subscribe to Culture Call, a transatlantic conversation from the FT, at ft.com/culture-call or on Apple Podcasts
Letters in response to this article:
Chemical pollution is another 'asteroid threat' / From Prof Barbara Demeneix, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France Less celebration, a lot more action on SDGs / From Kevin Watkins, Chief Executive, Save the Children UK

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Steven Pinker: what can we expect from the 2020s?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As "9" on the calendar rolls over to a fresh "0", many people are desperate for a ray of optimism to pierce the gloom of the daily headlines. Having published a hundred graphs documenting human progress, I'm often asked for reassurance that we will overcome our problems and that the coming decade will not just bring intensifying crises and declines.

# data[].attributes.headline
Lessons from Auschwitz: The power of our words - Benjamin Zander

# data[].attributes.subject
Lessons from Auschwitz: The power of our words - Benjamin Zander

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Benjamin Zander's original TED Talk.
Here's a TED.com Blog post published on Holocaust Remebrance day in 2013.
All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. It was established by Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. Its name was changed to Auschwitz, which also became the name of Konzentrationslager Auschwitz. The direct reason for the establishment of the camp was the fact that mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing "local" prisons. Initially, Auschwitz was to be one more concentration camp of the type that the Nazis had been setting up since the early 1930s. It functioned in this role throughout its existence, even when, beginning in 1942, it also became the largest of the death camps.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lessons from Auschwitz: The power of our words - Benjamin Zander

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Classical music mastermind Benjamin Zander concluded his 2008 TED Talk by recounting the heartrending story of an Auschwitz survivor and her brother. This short animated piece highlights that story, reminding us that the words we speak to one another are incredibly powerful tools that we shouldn't take for granted.

# data[].attributes.headline
Survivors call for end to world indifference at Auschwitz memorial

# data[].attributes.subject
Survivors call for end to world indifference at Auschwitz memorial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Survivors of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, have warned the world against indifference to hatred, at a ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet army.

More than 200 survivors of the camp were among more than 3,000 who gathered in a huge purpose-built tent enveloping the notorious "Gate of Death" where prisoners were brought into the camp in southern Poland by cattle car, selected into lines of those who would live and die, and where most were murdered almost immediately in gas chambers.

The focus of the commemoration - attended by dignitaries from around the world, including royalty, presidents and ambassadors - was on the survivors, most in their late 80s to mid-90s, who talked movingly of their own tales of endurance and hope, of the despair of losing loved ones, as well as their sense of incredulity still to this day at the efficiency of the Nazi state-sanctioned killing machine, to which the rest of the world appeared largely indifferent and that murdered approximately 1.1 million mostly Jews in Auschwitz alone.
'I see it as a chance to finally say goodbye': Auschwitz survivors tell their stories
A total of 6 million Jews were slaughtered, 1.5 million of them children, in the Holocaust - of which Auschwitz has become the dominant and enduring symbol.

Marian Turski, who was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 18 because he was Jewish, urged the world to adopt an 11th commandment: "Thou shalt not be indifferent," a reference to the late Nobel writer and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, who wrote: "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."

Born in the Polish city of Łódź in 1926, Turski said he was addressing his own children and grandchildren as well as the dignitaries and the audience of millions who tuned in to a livestream of the ceremony.

He said: "Do not be indifferent when you see ... historical lies ... when you see that the past is stretched to fit the current political needs ... do not be indifferent, otherwise you should not be surprised when another Auschwitz crashes down on us."

Survivors wrapped in winter coats, some wearing striped uniforms similar to those they had been forced to wear at the camp, nodded and applauded. Some sat with their eyes closed, others held their heads in their hands. Thanking the survivors who had travelled from around the world along with relatives, Andrzej Duda, the president of Poland and the only high-level leader to speak, said Auschwitz had been a "monstrous, criminal nightmare". He said the "industrial nature of the crime perpetrated here was horrifying".

Bat-Sheva Dagan, a Polish-Israeli Auschwitz survivor, born in Łódź in 1925, said she had asked herself what had been more painful: the tattooed number on her arm, as every prisoner not sent immediately to their death received; or the loss of her hair after it was shaved off on arrival.

She said: "There's no word in the dictionary to describe how human dignity was trampled on. The tattoo on my arm is just as visible today as it was back then ... and this crown of mine was taken away ... and I was turned into a pitiful creature." Dagan said she was even more devastated when she was told that the hair was to be used to stuff mattresses.

She had survived, she said, having worked in the section of the camp where the suitcases of newcomers from Hungary were brought, and ate the food she found in them. Friendship had also kept her going.

Elza Baker who arrived as an eight-year-old with Sinti and Roma prisoners from Hamburg, after her mother was identified by the Nazi authorities as Sinti, said: "Not many people know about our suffering." About 90% of the estimated 23,000 Sinti and Roma people who arrived at Auschwitz were murdered, she said, out of a total of between 500,000 to 1.5 million in the entire second world war.

Baker, who later settled in the UK, recalled watching a large area burning and bodies being thrown into a pit. "I remember as an eight-year-old thinking to myself: they must have run out of gas, and now they are burning people alive," she said.

Baker, who is blind, said that at a time of rising hate crimes and anti-Jewish sentiment, "when minorities have to feel vulnerable again, I can only hope that everyone would stand up for democracy and human rights".

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Marian Turski: 'Do not be indifferent, otherwise you should not be surprised when another Auschwitz crashes down on us.' Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

Hundreds unable to attend the main event spilled into an extra viewing space erected beyond the main tent, as well as into a museum and community centre in Kraków's Jewish quarter, Kazimierz.

Before the ceremony, returning through the entry gate, which bears the Nazi slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (work sets you free), David Marks, who lost 35 members of his family in Auschwitz when they were rounded up and deported from their home town of Șimleu Silvaniei, Romania said: "We would like the next generations to know what we went through so that it will never happen again."

"And it could happen again," said the 91-year-old who had travelled with his fiancee from his home in Connecticut. "There are signs to look out for. If you don't watch out one day you wake up and it's too late."

Tova Friedman from Tomaszów Mazowiecki in Poland, who was five when she was incarcerated in Auschwitz and now lives in New Jersey, said: "I am the youngest survivor of just four children who returned from my village out of 5,000 children who were deported. I feel that I represent all the children that are not here, many of whom I remember. I remember when they were sent into the ovens. I represent all the possibilities that were lost - all the lives and hopes, all the writers, doctors, the scientists."

Hirsz Litmanowicz, who was deported from a village in Poland as a child and had travelled to Poland from his home in Lima, Peru for the ceremony, said: "I was less than 12 years old when I arrived here. We were a group of 11 children, chosen by Dr [Josef] Mengele and another doctor who was experimenting on the effects of hepatitis B and infected us with it. We didn't know why we were chosen by him but we spent three months here in Auschwitz. We were always asking: 'Why are we here?' But no one told us why or what was going to happen to us."

Rabbi Naftali Schiff, director and founder of the British organisation Jroots, which partnered with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation to bring many of the survivors back, said: "We are marking one of the worst periods in Jewish history. There is a genuine deep feeling of life, positivity and decency that somehow conquers all, mixed so deeply with the tears and the loss of loved ones.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Auschwitz liberation anniversary in Oświęcim. Photograph: Robin Utrecht/Rex/Shutterstock

"I am looking into the eyes of octogenarians and nonagenarians and there's pride mixed with sorrow, hope with frustration. But above all there is an enormous energy and sense of 'we shall continue to rebuild and be inspired by these incredible survivors to work together to build a better world.'"

At a dinner held on Sunday night to celebrate the revival of Jewish communities around the world, Michael Bornstein, who was four when he was liberated from Auschwitz, said he frequently heard the claim that there might not be an 80th anniversary event, because of the advanced age of so many survivors.

He said: "You know what I say? Never underestimate a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp," he said. "See you at the 80th."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Do not be indifferent': Auschwitz survivors call for world to stay vigilant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Survivors of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, have warned the world against indifference to hatred, at a ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet army.

# data[].attributes.headline
12 new year’s resolutions for the planet in 2020

# data[].attributes.subject
12 new year’s resolutions for the planet in 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Javascript must be enabled for the correct page display

Skip to Content

Climate Action

It's that time of year again: Time to put 2019 - a tumultuous year of ups and downs for our planet - to bed and start fresh with renewed energy and vision for 2020. And there's no better time, because 2020 going to be a pivotal year for our planet.

Five years into the adoption of the Paris Agreement, 2020 will mark the year where we assess our collective progress on our greatest global challenges at the international political scale. The year is also ripe for political movement, as more than 65 countries will be hosting major elections this year.

The time could not be better for individuals and communities to make their priorities known, and to vote on those priorities at the ballot boxes and polls.

2020 will also mark 50 years of Earth Day (I know, it's flown by for me, too). The 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 will bring Earth Day back to its roots to mobilize millions to act for our planet.

We hope to see you in April, but what if you also want to do something today? To combat climate change, we need bold political action (that's where your power as a voter comes in) and transformative change across industries and sectors. But change also starts with individual action.

Look, I know that composting your food scraps or cleaning up your community isn't all that we need to transform our way of living - we need bold political action (that's where your power as a voter comes in) and transformative change across industries and sectors as well.

But what these acts may do is set you on the path of continued action, and increased ambition, from day to day, week to week, and year to year.

Solving our climate crisis isn't going to be easy. It's going to be a challenge, and it's going to be uncomfortable. But, hey, it's the New Year. If I can't get you to make some changes when I have you at your most guilt-ridden, when can I?

Ready to take the first step (or steps) to save the planet?

12 resolutions for the planet in 2020:

1. Go plant-based (1-2 meals a day)

You might be regretting your food choices over the holidays. Skip the crash diet (you look beautiful!) and try plant-based instead.

Animal agriculture has an enormous impact on climate change, contributing as much greenhouse gases as every car, plane, train, and ship on Earth. Going plant-based is one of the most powerful ways to reduce our personal carbon footprints (or foodprint, as we call it). Not ready to go all the way? Just start with one meal, or go plant-based for breakfast and lunch, like author Jonathan Safran Foer. Bon appetit!

2. Skip the gym. Skip the car.

Did I mention again that you look great just as you are? But if you're insistent on toning up, skip the gym membership (it's kind of a New Year's cliché, isn't it?) by skipping the car.

We know this doesn't work for everyone, but where and when you can, skip the car and walk, bike or take public transportation instead. You'll get some good (free!) exercise, while taking a huge bite out of your personal carbon footprint. For every mile you don't drive, you reduce your carbon footprint by one pound. Bonus points if you're lugging bags of groceries home on your walk.

4. Compost, compost, compost

Food waste greatly contributes to climate change. Think about it - when you toss food in the trash, you're wasting all the resources that it took to grow, harvest and ship that food.

Food also sits in a landfill, producing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is 34 times more potent over a 100-year period than carbon dioxide. If food waste were a country, it would be the world's third-largest emitter after the U.S. and China. So serve yourself as much as you can eat, salvage your leftovers and compost what's truly bad.

Not sure where to compost? Try your local farmer's market - many coordinate with municipal services to provide free composting to communities - or pair up with others in your apartment or on your block to split a composting service.

6. Skip the single-use plastic bag

Did you know that those convenient plastic grocery bags are only used for an average of 15-20 minutes? Meanwhile they have a lifespan of 500-1,000 years in the landfill. Suddenly that convenience is looking very inconvenient for our planet...

Just stick a reusable bag in your purse or backpack, or stash one in your desk. It's that simple.

To take this step to the next level, see if you can go a whole day without plastic. It's much harder than you might think, but it gives you an illuminating view at just how bad our plastic problem is, while identifying key places to cut plastics from your life.

7. Pass it on: Recycling edition

The last one was easy, so this resolution will push you.

The next time you see someone recycling wrong, let them know. Connect over how you also used to toss your containers in unwashed, or tried to recycle plastic grocery bags - which you should be skipping in the first place - then share the right way to do it,

Pass along our 7 tips to recycling better or just show them. Let us know that you and your friends are recycling right.

It can be hard to correct people, especially loved ones who have been doing things one way (the wrong way) for years, but when you pass on what you know, information can spread exponentially.

Also, don't be afraid to remind them that recycling isn't the be-all-end-all solution to our planet's woes, and that in many ways recycling is an opportunity for industries to shunt the burden of responsibility onto consumers, when it should be squarely on producers who should be developing more sustainable alternatives...or you can save that for another day.

8. Register your Earth Day event (and turn up!)

The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

The power of civil society mobilization cannot be overstated - just look at the first Earth Day, when 20 million individuals mobilized to come together to demand increased protections for our planet. History was made on April 22, 1970, and it's a history that we have marked every year since then.

The first Earth Day sparked a fire of legislative action to follow, from the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, to the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts.

The 50 th anniversary of Earth Day is going to be another historic moment for our planet. But to make history, we need you. How can you take your action to the next level on Earth Day?

Take your action to the next level on Earth Day by joining the global EARTHRISE mobilization for our planet on April 22, checking out the confirmed events for Earth Day 2020 and registering your own events.

9. Go plant-based (2.0 version)

So you've replaced two meals a day with plant-based options - awesome. Now make the jump to go plant-based three times a day. Each time you buy plant-based products, you're sending a demand signal to the food industry by voting with your wallet.

Not sure you can do it? Read how our staff writer went plant-based in 2019, and be inspired. Because if that meat-eating Midwesterner can embrace a tofu scramble, anyone can.

10. Travel, with care

Travelling to new places is always a top resolution, but air travel is, well, problematic.

Just how problematic, you ask? As author David Wallace Wells warns in his book "The Uninhabitable Earth," every round-trip flight from New York to London costs the Arctic three square meters of ice.

Short of travelling by solar sailboat (à la Greta Thunberg), let's resolve to travel smarter in 2020. For instance, you can travel by train (Greta's other preferred mode of travel) and explore locations closer to home. Maybe 2020 is the year that you finally see those incredible local landmarks and national parks.

Also, consider swapping a vacation for a staycation - you'll greatly reduce your carbon footprint, as well as saving massive amounts of money (another top New Year's resolution).

11. Stop buying crap

Since we're talking about saving more money, one of the best ways to do that is by simply buying less. What we really mean is buy less crap.

Take fast fashion - we buy far more clothing than we need (and wear), often tossing clothes in the trash: Research shows that a garbage truck's worth of clothing and textiles is landfilled or incinerated every second.

Every. Second.

So, don't buy it, and don't buy into it! You should never underestimate your power as a consumer. Try writing to the company or use the power of social media to call for an end to unjust and wasteful practices. Instead, try shopping secondhand. It's a great way to give new life to old clothes while saving money and keeping perfectly good clothing out of landfills.

It's also a good way to ensure you're not wearing the same faux-hipster bohemian crop top as everyone else this season...

Like with food waste, not only are these clothes sitting in landfills to produce greenhouse gases as they break down, but the resources (including low-paying and dangerous labor for marginalized communities) used to create these textiles is also wasted as well. Our current clothing industry is incredibly polluting, resource-intensive and wasteful (not to mention unjust).

12. Register to vote (and turn up!)

Two of the greatest civic opportunities that citizens have are the ability to mobilize, and the ability to vote. These are two unassailable chances to help drive and shape the political agenda, so don't waste them!

As we mentioned, 2020 will see more than 65 countries hosting major elections. Is your country one of them? If so, make sure you're registered to vote. Then do your research and understand candidates' stances before you show up at the polls.

Most importantly, TURN UP on election day - get to your polling place and vote. It's arguably the most powerful individual action that a person can take, with an impact bigger than carrying a reusable bag every day or taking public transportation.

Climate change will never be solved by recycling, or bicycling, for that matter. It's going to require immense political will and leadership to overhaul our cities, our industries and our economies to embrace the opportunities of a clean energy future. This sounds huge - and it is - but remember that these political leaders are elected by votes from individuals just like you and me.

If you really want to save the planet, make voting your top priority in 2020.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
12 New Year's resolutions for the planet in 2020 - Earth Day

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Javascript must be enabled for the correct page display Skip to Content Climate Action It's that time of year again: Time to put 2019 - a tumultuous year of ups and downs for our planet - to bed and start fresh with renewed energy and vision for 2020.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2019
General permission is granted for the publication in newspapers in any language after December 7, 2019, 16.45 CET. Publication in periodicals or books otherwise than in summary requires the consent of the Foundation. On all publications in full or in major parts the above underlined copyright notice must be applied.

7 December, 2019

The Tender Narrator

1.

The first photograph I ever experienced consciously is a picture of my mother from before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white photograph, which means that many of the details have been lost, turning into nothing but gray shapes. The light is soft, and rainy, likely a springtime light, and definitely the kind of light that seeps in through a window, holding the room in a barely perceptible glow. My mom is sitting beside our old radio, and it's the kind with a green eye and two dials-one to regulate the volume, the other for finding a station. This radio later became my great childhood companion; from it I learned of the existence of the cosmos. Turning an ebony knob shifted the delicate feelers of the antennae, and into their purview fell all kinds of different stations-Warsaw, London, Luxembourg and Paris. Sometimes, however, the sound would falter, as though between Prague and New York, or Moscow and Madrid, the antennae's feelers stumbled onto black holes. Whenever that happened, it sent shivers down my spine. I believed that through this radio different solar systems and galaxies were speaking to me, crackling and warbling and sending me important information, and yet I was unable to decipher it.

When as a little girl I would look at that picture, I would feel sure that my mom had been looking for me when she turned the dial on our radio. Like a sensitive radar, she penetrated the infinite realms of the cosmos, trying to find out when I would arrive, and from where. Her haircut and outfit (a big boat neck) indicate when this picture was taken, namely, in the early sixties. Gazing off somewhere outside of the frame, the somewhat hunched-over woman sees something that isn't available to a person looking at the photo later. As a child, I imagined that what was happening was that she was gazing into time. There's nothing really happening in the picture-it's a photograph of a state, not a process. The woman is sad, seemingly lost in thought-seemingly lost.

When I later asked her about that sadness-which I did on numerous occasions, always prompting the same response-my mother would say that she was sad because I hadn't been born yet, yet she already missed me.

"How can you miss me when I'm not there yet?" I would ask.

I knew that you miss someone you've lost, that longing is an effect of loss.

"But it can also work the other way around," she answered. "Missing a person means they're there."

This brief exchange, someplace in the countryside in western Poland in the late sixties, an exchange between my mother and me, her small child, has always remained in my memory and given me a store of strength that has lasted me my whole life. For it elevated my existence beyond the ordinary materiality of the world, beyond chance, beyond cause and effect and the laws of probability. She placed my existence out of time, in the sweet vicinity of eternity. In my child's mind, I understood then that there was more to me than I had ever imagined before. And that even if I were to say, "I'm lost," then I'd still be starting out with the words "I am"-the most important and the strangest set of words in the world.

And so a young woman who was never religious-my mother-gave me something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world's greatest tender narrator.

2.

The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes. Today the purview of these looms is enormous-thanks to the internet, almost everyone can take place in the process, taking responsibility and not, lovingly and hatefully, for better and for worse. When this story changes, so does the world. In this sense, the world is made of words.

How we think about the world and-perhaps even more importantly-how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore. A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge.

Today our problem lies-it seems-in the fact that we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today's world. We lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world.

We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.

I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world. Western civilization is to a great extent founded and reliant upon that very discovery of the self, which makes up one of our most important measures of reality. Here man is the lead actor, and his judgment-although it is one among many-is always taken seriously. Stories woven in first person appear to be among the greatest discoveries of human civilization; they are read with reverence, bestowed full confidence. This type of story, when we see the world through the eyes of some self that is unlike any other, builds a special bond with the narrator, who asks his listener to put himself in his unique position.

What first-person narratives have done for literature and in general for human civilization cannot be overestimated-they have completely reworked the story of the world, so that it is no longer a place for the operations of heroes and deities upon whom we can have no influence, but rather a place for people just like us, with individual histories. It is easy to identify with people who are just like us, which generates between the story's narrator and its reader or listener a new variety of emotional understanding based on empathy. And this, by its very nature, brings together and eliminates borders; it is very easy to lose track in a novel of the borders between the narrator's self and the reader's self, and a so-called "absorbing novel" actually counts on that border being blurred-on the reader, through empathy, becoming the narrator for a while. Thus literature has become a field for the exchange of experiences, an agora where everyone can tell of their own fate, or give voice to their alter ego. It is therefore a democratic space-anyone may speak up, everyone can create a speaking voice for herself. Never in the history of humanity have so many people been writers and storytellers. We have only to look at the statistics to see that this is true.

Whenever I go to book fairs, I see how many of the books being published in the world today have to do with precisely this-the authorial self. The expression instinct may be just as strong as other instincts that protect our lives-and it is most fully manifested in art. We want to be noticed, we want to feel exceptional. Narratives of the "I'm going to tell you my story" variety, or "I'm going to tell you the story of my family," or even simply, "I'm going to tell you where I've been," comprise today's most popular literary genre. This is a large-scale phenomenon also because nowadays we are universally able to access writing, and many people attain the ability, once reserved for the few, of expressing themselves in words and stories. Paradoxically, however, this situation is akin to a choir made up of soloists only, voices competing for attention, all traveling similar routes, drowning one another out. We know everything there is to know about them, we are able to identify with them and experience their lives as if they were our own. And yet, remarkably often, the readerly experience is incomplete and disappointing, as it turns out that expressing an authorial "self" hardly guarantees universality. What we are missing-it would seem-is the dimension of the story that is the parable. For the hero of the parable is at once himself, a person living under specific historical and geographical conditions, yet at the same time he also goes well beyond those concrete particulars, becoming a kind of Everywhere Everyman. When a reader follows along with someone's story written in a novel, he can identify with the fate of the character described and consider their situation as if it were his own, while in a parable, he must surrender completely his distinctness and become the Everyman. In this demanding psychological operation, the parable universalizes our experience, finding for very different fates a common denominator. That we have largely lost the parable from view is
a testament to our current helplessness.

Perhaps in order not to drown in the multiplicity of titles and last names we began to divide literature's leviathan body into genres, which we treat like the various different categories of sports, with writers as their specially trained players.

The general commercialization of the literary market has led to a division into branches-now there are fairs and festivals of this or that type of literature, completely separate, creating a clientele of readers eager to hole up with a crime novel, some fantasy or science fiction. A notable characteristic of this situation is that what was only supposed to help booksellers and librarians organize on their shelves the massive quantity of published books, and readers to orient themselves in the vastness of the offering, became instead abstract categories not only into which existing works are placed, but also according to which writers themselves have started writing. Increasingly, genre work is like a kind of cake mold that produces very similar results, their predictability considered a virtue, their banality an achievement. The reader knows what to expect and gets exactly what he wanted.

I have always intuitively opposed such orders, since they lead to the limiting of authorial freedom, to a reluctance toward the experimentation and transgression that is in fact the essential quality of creation in general. And they completely exclude from the creative process any of the eccentricity without which art would be lost. A good book does not need to champion its generic affiliation. The division into genres is the result of the commercialization of literature as a whole and an effect of treating it as a product for sale with the whole philosophy of branding and targeting and other, similar inventions of contemporary capitalism.

Today we can have the great satisfaction of seeing the emergence of a wholly new way of telling the world's story that is purveyed by the on-screen series, the hidden task of which is to induce in us a trance. Of course this mode of storytelling has long existed in the myths and Homeric tales, and Heracles, Achilles or Odysseus are without doubt the first heroes of series. But never before has this mode taken up so much space or exerted such a powerful influence on the collective imagination. The first two decades of the twenty-first century are the unquestionable property of the series. Their influence on the modes of telling the story of the world (and therefore on our way of understanding that story, too) is revolutionary.

In today's version, the series has not only extended our participation in the narrative in the temporal sphere, generating its various tempos, offshoots and aspects, but also introduced its own new orders. Since in many cases its task is to hold the viewer's attention for as long as possible-the series narrative multiplies the threads, interweaving them in the most improbable manner so much so that when at a loss it even harks back to the old narrative technique, once compromised by classical opera, of the Deus ex machina. The creation of new episodes often entails the total, ad-hoc overhaul of the psychology of the characters, so that they will be better suited to the developing events of the plot. A character who begins as gentle and reserved winds up vindictive and violent, a supporting character turns protagonist, while the main character, to whom we have already grown attached, loses significance or actually completely disappears, much to our dismay.

The potential materialization of another season creates the necessity of open endings in which there is no way that mysterious things called catharsis can occur or resound fully-catharsis, formerly the experience of the internal transformation, the fulfillment and satisfaction of having participated in the action of the tale. Such complication, rather than conclusion-the constant postponement of the reward that is catharsis-renders the viewer dependent, hypnotizes her. The f abula interrupta, created long ago, and well known from the stories of Scheherazade, has now made its bold return in series, altering our subjectivity and having bizarre psychological effects, tearing us out of our own lives and hypnotizing us like a stimulant. At the same time, the series inscribes itself into the new, drawn-out and disordered rhythm of the world, into its chaotic communication, its instability and fluidity. This story-telling form is probably the one most creatively searching for a new formula today.
In that sense, there is serious work in the series on the narratives of the future, on reformatting the story so that it suits our new reality.

But above all, we live in a world of too many contradictory, mutually exclusive facts, all battling one another tooth and nail.

Our ancestors believed that access to knowledge would not only bring people happiness, well-being, health and wealth, but would also create an equal and just society. What was missing in the world, to their minds, was the ubiquitous wisdom that would naturally arise from information.

John Amos Comenius, the great seventeenth-century pedagogue, coined the term "pansophism," by which he meant the idea of potential omniscience, universal knowledge that would contain within it all possible cognition. This was also, and above all, a dream of information available to everyone. Would not access to facts about the world transform an illiterate peasant into a reflective individual conscious of himself and the world? Will not knowledge within easy reach mean that people will become sensible, that they will direct the progress of their lives with equanimity and wisdom?

When the Internet first came about, it seemed that this notion would finally be realized in a total way. Wikipedia, which I admire and support, might have seemed to Comenius, like many like-minded philosophers, the fulfillment of the dream of humanity-now we can create and receive an enormous store of facts being ceaselessly supplemented and updated that is democratically accessible to just about every place on Earth.

A dream fulfilled is often disappointing. It has turned out that we are not capable of bearing this enormity of information, which instead of uniting, generalizing and freeing, has differentiated, divided, enclosed in individual little bubbles, creating a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing.

Furthermore, the Internet, completely and unreflectively subject to market processes and dedicated to monopolists, controls gigantic quantities of data used not at all pansophically, for the broader access to information, but on the contrary, serving above all to program the behavior of users, as we learned after the Cambridge Analytica affair. Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat. The famous Shakespeare quote has never been a better fit than it is for this cacophonous new reality: more and more often, the Internet is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.

Research by political scientists unfortunately also contradicts John Amos Comenius' intuitions, which were based on the conviction that the more universally available was information about the world, the more politicians would avail themselves of reason and make considered decisions. But it would appear that the matter is not at all so simple as that. Information can be overwhelming, and its complexity and ambiguity give rise to all sorts of defense mechanisms-from denial to repression, even to escape into the simple principles of simplifying, ideological, party-line thinking.

The category of fake news raises new questions about what fiction is. Readers who have been repeatedly deceived, misinformed or misled have begun to slowly acquire a specific neurotic idiosyncrasy. The reaction to such exhaustion with fiction could be the enormous success of non-fiction, which in this great informational chaos screams over our heads: "I will tell you the truth, nothing but the truth," and "My story is based on facts!"

Fiction has lost the readers' trust since lying has become a dangerous weapon of mass destruction, even if it is still a primitive tool. I am often asked this incredulous question: "Is this thing you wrote really true?" And every time I feel this question bodes the end of literature.

This question, innocent from the reader's point of view, sounds to the writer's ear truly apocalyptic. What am I supposed to say? How am I to explain the ontological status of Hans Castorp, Anna Karenina or Winnie the Pooh?

I consider this type of readerly curiosity a regression of civilization. It is a major impairment of our multidimensional ability (concrete, historical, but also symbolic, mythic) to participate in the chain of events called our lives. Life is created by events, but it is only when we are able to interpret them, try to understand them and lend them meaning that they are transformed into experience. Events are facts, but experience is something inexpressibly different. It is experience, and not any event, that makes up the material of our lives. Experience is a fact that has been interpreted and situated in memory. It also refers to a certain foundation we have in our minds, to a deep structure of significations upon which we can unfurl our own lives and examine them fully and carefully. I believe that myth performs the function of that structure. Everyone knows that myths never really happened but are always going on. Now they go on not only through the adventures of ancient heroes, but rather also make their way into the ubiquitous and most popular stories of contemporary film, games and literature. The lives of the inhabitants of Mount Olympus have been transferred to Dynasty, and the heroic acts of the heroes are attended to by Lara Croft.

In this ardent division into truth and falsehood, the tales of our experience that literature creates have their own dimension.

I have never been particularly excited about any straight distinction between fiction and non-fiction, unless we understand such a distinction to be declarative and discretionary. In a sea of many definitions of fiction, the one I like the best is also the oldest, and it comes from Aristotle. Fiction is always a kind of truth.

I am also convinced by the distinction between true story and plot made by the writer and essayist E.M. Forster. He said that when we say, "The king died and then the queen died," it's a story. But when we say, "The king died, and then the queen died of grief," that is a plot. Every fictionalization involves a transition from the question "What happened next?" to an attempt at understanding it based on our human experience: "Why did it happen that way?"

Literature begins with that "why," even if we were to answer that question over and over with an ordinary "I don't know."

Thus literature poses questions that cannot be answered with the help of Wikipedia, since it goes beyond just information and events, referring directly to our experience.

But it is possible that the novel and literature in general are becoming before our very eyes something actually quite marginal in comparison with other forms of narration. That the weight of the image and of new forms of directly transmitting experience-film, photography, virtual reality-will constitute a viable alternative to traditional reading. Reading is quite a complicated psychological and perceptual process. To put it simply: first the most elusive content is conceptualized and verbalized, transforming into signs and symbols, and then it is "decoded" back from language into experience. That requires a certain intellectual competence. And above all it demands attention and focus, abilities ever rarer in today's extremely distracting world.

Humanity has come a long way in its ways of communicating and sharing personal experience, from orality, relying on the living word and human memory, through the Gutenberg Revolution, when stories began to be widely mediated by writing and in this way fixed and codified as well as possible to reproduce without alteration. The major attainment of this change was that we came to identify thinking with language, with writing. Today we are facing a revolution on a similar scale, when experience can be transmitted directly, without recourse to the printed word.

There is no longer any need to keep a travel diary when you can simply take pictures and send those pictures via social networking sites straight into the world, at once and to all. There is no need to write letters, since it is easier to call. Why write fat novels, when you can just get into a television series instead? Instead of going out on the town with friends, it would be better to play a game. Reach for an autobiography? There's no point, since I am following the lives of celebrities on Instagram and know everything about them.

It is not even the image that is the greatest opponent of text today, as we thought back in the twentieth century, worrying about the influence of television and film. It is instead a completely different dimension of the world-acting directly on our senses.

3.

I don't want to sketch an overall vision of crisis in telling stories about the world. But I'm often troubled by the feeling that there is something missing in the world―that by experiencing it through glass screens, and through apps, somehow it becomes unreal, distant, two-dimensional, and strangely non-descript, even though finding any particular piece of information is astoundingly easy. These days the worrying words "someone, "something," "somewhere," "some time" can seem riskier than very specific, definite ideas uttered with complete certainty―such as that "the earth is flat," "vaccinations kill," "climate change is nonsense," or "democracy is not under threat anywhere in the world." "Somewhere" some people are drowning as they try to cross the sea. "Somewhere," for "some" time, "some sort of" a war has been going on. In the deluge of information individual messages lose their contours, dissipate in our memory, become unreal and vanish.

The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of "good news," but it hasn't the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world. Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions.

Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.

A story always turns circles around meaning. Even if it doesn't express it directly, even when it deliberately refuses to seek meaning, and focuses on form, on experiment, when it stages a formal rebellion, looking for new means of expression. As we read even the most behavioristically, sparingly written story, we cannot help asking the questions: "Why is this happening?," "What does it mean?," "What is the point?," "Where is this leading?" Quite possibly our minds have evolved toward the story as a process of giving meaning to millions of stimuli that surround us, and that even when we're asleep keep on relentlessly devising their narratives. So the story is a way of organizing an infinite amount of information within time, establishing its relationship to the past, the present and the future, revealing its recurrence, and arranging it in categories of cause and effect. Both the mind and the emotions take part in this effort.

No wonder one of the earliest discoveries made by stories was Fate, which apart from always appearing to people as something terrifying and inhuman, did in fact introduce order and immutability into everyday reality.

4.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

A few years later, the woman in the photograph, my mother, who missed me although I hadn't yet been born, was reading me fairy tales.

In one of them, by Hans Christian Andersen, a teapot that had been thrown on the trash heap complained about how cruelly it had been treated by people―as soon as its handle broke off, they had disposed of it. But if they weren't such demanding perfectionists it could still have been of use to them. Other broken objects picked up his tune, and told truly epic stories of their modest little lives as objects.

As a child, I listened to these fairy tales with flushed cheeks and tears in my eyes, because I believed deeply that objects have their own problems and emotions, as well as a sort of social life, entirely comparable to our human one. The plates in the dresser could talk to each other, and the spoons, knives and forks in the drawer formed a sort of a family. Similarly, animals were mysterious, wise, self-aware creatures with whom we had always been connected by a spiritual bond and a deep-seated similarity. But rivers, forests and roads had their existence too―they were living beings that mapped our space and built a sense of belonging, an enigmatic Raumgeist. The landscape surrounding us was alive too, and so were the Sun and the Moon, and all the celestial bodies―the entire visible and invisible world.

When did I start to have doubts? I'm trying to find the moment in my life when at the flick of a switch everything became different, less nuanced, simpler. The world's whisper fell silent, to be replaced by the din of the city, the murmur of computers, the thunder of airplanes flying past overhead, and the exhausting white noise of oceans of information.

At some point in our lives we start to see the world in pieces, everything separately, in little bits that are galaxies apart from one another, and the reality in which we live keeps affirming it: doctors treat us by specialty, taxes have no connection with snow-plowing the road we drive to work along, our lunch has nothing to do with an enormous stock farm, or my new top with a shabby factory somewhere in Asia. Everything is separate from everything else, everything lives apart, without any connection.

To make it easier for us to cope with this we are given numbers, name tags, cards, crude plastic identities that try to reduce us to using one small part of the whole that we have already ceased to perceive.

The world is dying, and we are failing to notice. We fail to see that the world is becoming a collection of things and incidents, a lifeless expanse in which we move around lost and lonely, tossed here and there by somebody else's decisions, constrained by an incomprehensible fate, a sense of being the plaything of the major forces of history or chance. Our spirituality is either vanishing or becoming superficial and ritualistic. Or else we are just becoming the followers of simple forces―physical, social, and economic―that move us around as if we were zombies. And in such a world we really are zombies.

This is why I long for that other world, the world of the teapot.

5.

All my life I've been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors that I followed in Flights. I'm fascinated by associating facts, and by searching for order. At base―as I am convinced―the writer's mind is a synthetic mind that doggedly gathers up all the tiny pieces in an attempt to stick them together again to create a universal whole.

How are we to write, how are we to structure our story to make it capable of raising this great, constellation form of the world?

Naturally, I realize that it is impossible to return to the sort of story about the world that we know from myths, fables and legends, which, communicated orally, kept the world in existence. Nowadays the story would have to be far more multidimensional and complicated; after all, we really do know much more, we're aware of the incredible connections between things that seem to be far apart.

Let us take a close look at a particular moment in the history of the world.

It is August 3, 1492, the day on which a small caravel named Santa Maria is to set sail from a quay at the port of Palos in Spain. The ship is commanded by Christopher Columbus. The sun is shining, there are sailors going to and fro on the quay, and there are stevedores loading the last crates of provisions on board. It is hot, but a light breeze from the west saves the families who have come to say farewell from fainting. Seagulls strut grandly up and down the loading ramp, closely observing the human activities.

The moment that we can now see across time led to the death of 56 million of the almost 60 million native Americans. At the time, they represented about 10 percent of the world's entire population. The Europeans unwittingly brought them some lethal gifts―diseases and bacteria to which the indigenous inhabitants of America had no resistance. On top of that came ruthless oppression and killing. The extermination continued for years, and changed the nature of the land. Where beans, corn, potatoes and tomatoes had once grown in cultivated fields that were irrigated in a sophisticated way, wild vegetation returned. In just a few years, almost 150 million acres of arable land changed into jungle.

As it regenerated, the vegetation consumed vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thus weakening the greenhouse effect, and that in turn lowered the global temperature of the Earth.

This is one of many scientific hypotheses to explain the onset of the minor ice age that in the late sixteenth century brought a long-term cooling of the climate in Europe.

The minor ice age changed the economy of Europe. Over the decades that followed, the long, frozen winters, cool summers and intense precipitation reduced the yield of traditional forms of farming. In Western Europe, small family farms producing food for their own needs proved inefficient. Waves of famine ensued, and the need to specialize production. England and Holland were worst affected by the colder climate; as their economies could no longer rely on farming, they began to develop trade and industry. The threat of storms prompted the Dutch to dry out the polders and to convert marshy areas and shallow marine zones into land. The southward shift of the range where cod occur, though catastrophic for Scandinavia, proved advantageous for England and Holland―it allowed these countries to start developing into naval and commercial powers. The significant cooling was particularly acutely felt in the Scandinavian countries. Contact with Greenland and Iceland broke off, the severe winters reduced the harvests, and years of famine and shortages set in. So Sweden turned its greedy gaze southward, embarking on war against Poland (especially as the Baltic Sea had frozen, making it easy to march an army across it) and getting involved in the Thirty Years' War in Europe.

The efforts of scientists, trying to establish a better understanding of our reality, show it to be a mutually coherent, densely connected system of influences. This is no longer just the famous "butterfly effect," which as we know involves the way that minimal changes at the start of a process can lead in the future to tremendous, unpredictable results, but here we have an infinite number of butterflies and their wings, in constant motion―
a powerful wave of life that travels through time.

In my view, the discovery of "the butterfly effect" marks the end of the era of unswerving faith in our own capacity to be effective, our ability to control, and by the same token our sense of supremacy in the world. This does not take away from mankind our power to be a builder, a conqueror and an inventor, yet it illustrates that reality is more complicated than mankind might ever have supposed. And that we are nothing but a tiny part of these processes.

We have more and more proof of the existence of some spectacular, sometimes highly surprising dependencies on a worldwide scale.

We are all―people, plants, animals, and objects―immersed in a single space, which is ruled by the laws of physics. This common space has its shape, and within it the laws of physics sculpt an infinite number of forms that are incessantly linked to one another. Our cardiovascular system is like the system of a river basin, the structure of a leaf is like a human transport system, the motion of the galaxies is like the whirl of water flowing down our washbasins. Societies develop in a similar way to colonies of bacteria. The micro and macro scale show an endless system of similarities.
Our speech, thinking and creativity are not something abstract, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of transformation.

6.

I keep wondering if these days it's possible to find the foundations of a new story that's universal, comprehensive, all-inclusive, rooted in nature, full of contexts and at the same time understandable.

Could there be a story that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one's own self, revealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections? That would be able to keep its distance from the well-trodden, obvious and unoriginal center point of commonly shared opinions, and manage to look at things ex- centrically, away from the center?

I am pleased that literature has miraculously preserved its right to all sorts of eccentricities, phantasmagoria, provocation, parody and lunacy. I dream of high viewing points and wide perspectives, where the context goes far beyond what we might have expected. I dream of a language that is capable of expressing the vaguest intuition, I dream of a metaphor that surpasses cultural differences, and finally of a genre that is capacious and transgressive, but that at the same time the readers will love.

I also dream of a new kind of narrator―a "fourth-person" one, who is not merely a grammatical construct of course, but who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time. Oh yes, I think this narrator's existence is possible.

Have you ever wondered who the marvelous storyteller is in the Bible who calls out in a loud voice: "In the beginning was the word"? Who is the narrator who describes the creation of the world, its first day, when chaos was separated from order, who follows the serial about the origin of the universe, who knows the thoughts of God, is aware of his doubts, and with a steady hand sets down on paper the incredible sentence: "And God saw that it was good"? Who is this, who knows what God thought?

Leaving aside all theological doubts, we can regard this figure of a mysterious, tender narrator as miraculous and significant. This is a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us. Seeing everything also means a completely different kind of responsibility for the world, because it becomes obvious that every gesture "here" is connected to a gesture "there," that a decision taken in one part of the world will have an effect in another part of it, and that differentiating between "mine" and "yours" starts to be debatable.

So it could be best to tell stories honestly in a way that activates a sense of the whole in the reader's mind, that sets off the reader's capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events. To tell a story that makes it clear that everyone and everything is steeped in one common notion, which we painstakingly produce in our minds with every turn of the planet.

Literature has the power to do this. We should drop the simplistic categories of highbrow and lowbrow literature, popular and niche, and take the division into genres very lightly. We should drop the definition of "national literatures," knowing as we do that the universe of literature is a single thing, like the idea of unus mundus, a common psychological reality in which our human experience is united. The Author and the Reader perform equivalent roles, the former by dint of creating, the latter by making a constant interpretation.

Perhaps we should trust fragments, as it is fragments that create constellations capable of describing more, and in a more complex way, multi-dimensionally. Our stories could refer to one another in an infinite way, and their central characters could enter into relationships with each other.

I think we have a redefinition ahead of us of what we understand nowadays by the concept of realism, and a search for a new one that would allow us to go beyond the limits of our ego and penetrate the glass screen through which we see the world. Because these days the need for reality is served by the media, social networking sites, and indirect relationships on the internet. Perhaps what inevitably lies ahead of us is a sort of neo-surrealism, some rearranged points of view that won't be afraid to stand up to a paradox, and will go against the grain when it comes to the simple order of cause-and-effect. Indeed, our reality has already become surreal. I am also sure that many stories require rewriting in our new intellectual contexts, taking their inspiration from new scientific theories. But I find it equally important to make constant reference to myth and to the entire human imaginarium. Returning to the compact structures of mythology could bring a sense of stability within the lack of specificity in which we are living nowadays. I believe that myths are the building material for our psyche, and we cannot possibly ignore them (at most we might be unaware of their influence).

No doubt a genius will soon appear, capable of constructing an entirely different, as yet unimaginable narrative in which everything essential will be accommodated. This method of storytelling is sure to change us; we will drop our old, constricting perspectives and we will open up to new ones that have in fact always existed somewhere here, but we have been blind to them.

In Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann wrote about a composer who devised a new form of absolute music capable of changing human thinking. But Mann did not describe what this music would depend on, he merely created the imaginary idea of how it might sound. Perhaps that is what the role of an artist relies on―giving a foretaste of something that could exist, and thus causing it to become imaginable. And being imagined is the first stage of existence.

7.

I write fiction, but it is never pure fabrication. When I write, I have to feel everything inside myself. I have to let all the living beings and objects that appear in the book go through me, everything that is human and beyond human, everything that is living and not endowed with life. I have to take a close look at each thing and person, with the greatest solemnity, and personify them inside myself, personalize them.

That is what tenderness serves me for―because tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk.

Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.

It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our "self".

Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.

I have no idea what their life will be like, or who they will be. I often think about them with a sense of guilt and shame.

The climate emergency and the political crisis in which we are now trying to find our way, and which we are anxious to oppose by saving the world have not come out of nowhere. We often forget that they are not just the result of a twist of fate or destiny, but of some very specific moves and decisions―economic, social, and to do with world outlook (including religious ones). Greed, failure to respect nature, selfishness, lack of imagination, endless rivalry and lack of responsibility have reduced the world to the status of an object that can be cut into pieces, used up and destroyed.
That is why I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it. Translated by Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones

To cite this section
MLA style: Olga Tokarczuk - Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2020. Sat. 3 Oct 2020. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/104871-lecture-english/>

Back to top

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2019 General permission is granted for the publication in newspapers in any language after December 7, 2019, 16.45 CET. Publication in periodicals or books otherwise than in summary requires the consent of the Foundation. On all publications in full or in major parts the above underlined copyright notice must be applied.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to get better at the things you care about       TED talk 

# data[].attributes.subject
How to get better at the things you care about       TED talk 

# data[].attributes.body
1. What is the difference between the Learning Zone and Performance Zone?
2. What happens once we think we have become good enough?
3.What should we spend more time doing?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eduardo Briceño: How to get better at the things you care about

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Working hard but not improving? You're not alone. Eduardo Briceño reveals a simple way to think about getting better at the things you do, whether that's work, parenting or creative hobbies. And he shares some useful techniques so you can keep learning and always feel like you're moving forward.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Invention of Thanksgiving (The New Yorker)

# data[].attributes.subject
The Invention of Thanksgiving (The New Yorker)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Autumn is the season for Native America. There are the cool nights and warm days of Indian summer and the genial query "What's Indian about this weather?" More wearisome is the annual fight over the legacy of Christopher Columbus-a bold explorer dear to Italian-American communities, but someone who brought to this continent forms of slavery that would devastate indigenous populations for centuries. Football season is in full swing, and the team in the nation's capital revels each week in a racist performance passed off as "just good fun." As baseball season closes, one prays that Atlanta (or even semi-evolved Cleveland) will not advance to the World Series. Next up is Halloween, typically featuring "Native American Brave" and "Sexy Indian Princess" costumes. November brings Native American Heritage Month and tracks a smooth countdown to Thanksgiving. In the elementary-school curriculum, the holiday traditionally meant a pageant, with students in construction-paper headdresses and Pilgrim hats reënacting the original celebration. If today's teachers aim for less pageantry and a slightly more complicated history, many students still complete an American education unsure about the place of Native people in the nation's past-or in its present. Cap the season off with Thanksgiving, a turkey dinner, and a fable of interracial harmony. Is it any wonder that by the time the holiday arrives a lot of American Indian people are thankful that autumn is nearly over?

Americans have been celebrating Thanksgiving for nearly four centuries, commemorating that solemn dinner in November, 1621. We know the story well, or think we do. Adorned in funny hats, large belt buckles, and clunky black shoes, the Pilgrims of Plymouth gave thanks to God for his blessings, demonstrated by the survival of their fragile settlement. The local Indians, supporting characters who generously pulled the Pilgrims through the first winter and taught them how to plant corn, joined the feast with gifts of venison. A good time was had by all, before things quietly took their natural course: the American colonies expanded, the Indians gave up their lands and faded from history, and the germ of collective governance found in the Mayflower Compact blossomed into American democracy.

Almost none of this is true, as David Silverman points out in "This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving" (Bloomsbury). The first Thanksgiving was not a "thanksgiving," in Pilgrim terms, but a "rejoicing." An actual giving of thanks required fasting and quiet contemplation; a rejoicing featured feasting, drinking, militia drills, target practice, and contests of strength and speed. It was a party, not a prayer, and was full of people shooting at things. The Indians were Wampanoags, led by Ousamequin (often called Massasoit, which was a leadership title rather than a name). An experienced diplomat, he was engaged in a challenging game of regional geopolitics, of which the Pilgrims were only a part. While the celebrants might well have feasted on wild turkey, the local diet also included fish, eels, shellfish, and a Wampanoag dish called nasaump, which the Pilgrims had adopted: boiled cornmeal mixed with vegetables and meats. There were no potatoes (an indigenous South American food not yet introduced into the global food system) and no pies (because there was no butter, wheat flour, or sugar).

Nor did the Pilgrims extend a warm invitation to their Indian neighbors. Rather, the Wampanoags showed up unbidden. And it was not simply four or five of them at the table, as we often imagine. Ousamequin, the Massasoit, arrived with perhaps ninety men-more than the entire population of Plymouth. Wampanoag tradition suggests that the group was in fact an army, honoring a mutual-defense pact negotiated the previous spring. They came not to enjoy a multicultural feast but to aid the Pilgrims: hearing repeated gunfire, they assumed that the settlers were under attack. After a long moment of suspicion (the Pilgrims misread almost everything that Indians did as potential aggression), the two peoples recognized one another, in some uneasy way, and spent the next three days together.

No centuries-long continuity emerged from that 1621 meet-up. New Englanders certainly celebrated Thanksgivings-often in both fall and spring-but they were of the fasting-and-prayer variety. Notable examples took place in 1637 and 1676, following bloody victories over Native people. To mark the second occasion, the Plymouth men mounted the head of Ousamequin's son Pumetacom above their town on a pike, where it remained for two decades, while his dismembered and unburied body decomposed. The less brutal holiday that we celebrate today took shape two centuries later, as an effort to entrench an imagined American community. In 1841, the Reverend Alexander Young explicitly linked three things: the 1621 "rejoicing," the tradition of autumnal harvest festivals, and the name Thanksgiving. He did so in a four-line throwaway gesture and a one-line footnote. Of such half thoughts is history made.

A couple of decades later, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, proposed a day of unity and remembrance to counter the trauma of the Civil War, and in 1863 Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be that national holiday, following Young's lead in calling it Thanksgiving. After the Civil War, Thanksgiving developed rituals, foodways, and themes of family-and national-reunion. Only later would it consolidate its narrative around a harmonious Pilgrim-Wampanoag feast, as Lisa Blee and Jean O'Brien point out in "Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit" (North Carolina), which tells the story of how the holiday myth spread. Fretting over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration, American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.

The new story aligned neatly with the defeat of American Indian resistance in the West and the rising tide of celebratory regret that the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo once called "imperialist nostalgia." Glorifying the endurance of white Pilgrim founders diverted attention from the brutality of Jim Crow and racial violence, and downplayed the foundational role of African slavery. The fable also allowed its audience to avert its eyes from the marginalization of Asian and Latinx labor populations, the racialization of Southern European and Eastern European immigrants, and the rise of eugenics. At Thanksgiving, white New England cheerfully shoved the problematic South and West off to the side, and claimed America for itself.

The challenge for scholars attempting to rewrite Thanksgiving is the challenge of confronting an ideology that has long since metastasized into popular history. Silverman begins his book with a plea for the possibility of a "critical history." It will be "hard on the living," he warns, because this approach questions the creation stories that uphold traditional social orders, making the heroes less heroic, and asking readers to consider the villains as full and complicated human beings. Nonetheless, he says, we have an obligation to try.

So how does one take on a myth? One might begin by deconstructing the process through which it was made. Silverman sketches a brief account of Hale, Lincoln, and the marketing of a fictionalized New England. Blee and O'Brien reveal how proliferating copies of a Massasoit statue, which we can recognize as not so distant kin to Confederate monuments, do similar cultural work, linking the mythic memory of the 1621 feast with the racial, ethnic, and national-identity politics of 1921, when the original statue was commissioned. One might also wield the historian's skills to tell a "truer," better story that exposes the myth for the self-serving fraud that it is. Silverman, in doing so, resists the temptation to offer a countermyth, an ideological narrative better suited to the contemporary moment, and renders the Wampanoags not simply as victims but as strugglers, fighting it out as they confront mischance and aggression, disagreeing with one another, making mistakes, displaying ambition and folly, failing to see their peril until it is too late.

In the story that many generations of Americans grew up hearing, there were no Wampanoags until the Pilgrims encountered them. If Thanksgiving has had no continuous existence across the centuries, however, the Wampanoag people have. Today, they make up two federally recognized tribes, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, and they descend from a confederation of groups that stretched across large areas of Massachusetts, including Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket.

In the years before the Pilgrims' landing, trails and roads connected dozens of Wampanoag communities with gathering sites, hunting and fishing areas, and agricultural plots. North America's defining indigenous agriculture-the symbiotic Three Sisters of corn, beans, and squash-came late to the region, adopted perhaps two hundred years before Europeans appeared. That's when the Wampanoags, who moved seasonally between coastal summer residences (not unlike Cape Cod today) and protected winter homes inland, took up farming. Cultivation and cropping created a need for shared-use land management and an indigenous notion of property. That led in turn to the consolidation of a system of sachems, leaders who navigated the internal needs of their communities, established tributary and protectorate relationships with nearby communities, and negotiated diplomatic relations with outsiders. When the Pilgrims encountered Ousamequin, they were meeting a paramount sachem, a Massasoit, who commanded the respect necessary to establish strategy for other groups in the region.

The Pilgrims were not the only Europeans the Wampanoags had come across. The first documented contact occurred in 1524, and marked the start of a century of violent encounters, captivity, and enslavement. By 1620, the Wampanoags had had enough, and were inclined to chase off any ship that sought to land. They sent a French colonizing mission packing and had driven the Pilgrims away from a previous landing site, on the Cape. Ousamequin's people debated for months about whether to ally with the newcomers or destroy them. When they decided to begin diplomacy, they were guided by Tisquantum (you may recall him as Squanto) and Epenow, New England natives who had been captured, held in bondage in Britain, and trained as interpreters by the English before eventually finding their way back across the Atlantic.

Why would Ousamequin decide to welcome the newcomers and, in 1621, make a mutual-defense pact with them? During the preceding years, an epidemic had struck Massachusetts Bay Indians, killing between seventy-five and ninety per cent of the Wampanoag and the Massachusett people. A rich landscape of fields and gardens, tended hunting forests, and fishing weirs was largely emptied of people. Belief systems crashed. Even survival did not mean good health, and, with fields unplanted and animals uncaught, starvation followed closely behind. The Pilgrims' settlement took place in a graveyard.

Wampanoag people consolidated their survivors and their lands, and reëstablished internal self-governance. But, to the west, the Narragansetts-traditional rivals largely untouched by the epidemic-now outnumbered the Wampanoags, and that led to the strengthening of Ousamequin's alliances with the surviving Massachusett and another nearby group, the Nipmucks. As the paramount sachem, he also had to contend with challenges to his leadership from a number of other Wampanoag sachems. And so, after much debate, he decided to tolerate the rather pathetic Pilgrims-who had seen half their number die in their first winter-and establish an alliance with them. That history, understood through Wampanoag characters and motives, explains the "rejoicing" that Americans later remembered as a pumpkin-spiced tale of Thanksgiving conciliation.

This rejoicing arrives about a third of the way through Silverman's four-hundred-plus-page book. What follows is a vivid account of the ways the English repaid their new allies. The settlers pressed hard to acquire Indian land through "sales" driven by debt, threat, alliance politics, and violence. They denied the coequal civil and criminal jurisdiction of the alliance, charging Indians under English law and sentencing them to unpayable fines, imprisonment, even executions. They played a constant game of divide and conquer, and they invariably considered Indians their inferiors. Ousamequin's sons Pumetacom-called King Philip by the English-and Wamsutta began forming a resistance, despite the poor odds. By 1670, the immigrant population had ballooned to sixty or seventy thousand in southern New England-twice the number of Native people.

We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony. Perhaps we should recall instead how English settlers cheated, abused, killed, and eventually drove Wampanoags into a conflict, known as King Philip's War, that exploded across the region in 1675 and 1676 and that was one of the most devastating wars in the history of North American settlement. Native soldiers attacked fifty-two towns in New England, destroyed seventeen of them, and killed a substantial portion of the settler population. The region also lost as much as forty per cent of its Native population, who fought on both sides. Confronted by Mohawks to the west, a mixed set of Indian and Colonial foes to the south, and the English to the east, Pumetacom was surrounded on three sides. In the north, the scholar Lisa Brooks argues, Abenaki and other allies continued the struggle for years. In "Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War" (Yale), Brooks deepens the story considerably, focussing on indigenous geographical and linguistic knowledge, and tracing the life of Weetamoo, the widow of Wamsutta and the saunkskwa, or female leader, of her tribe, the Pocasset. Weetamoo was Pumetacom's ally, his relative, and a major figure in the fight. In the end, not only Pumetacom's head was stuck on a pike; hers was, too, displayed for Wampanoag prisoners who were likely soon to be sold to the Caribbean.

The Thanksgiving story buries the major cause of King Philip's War-the relentless seizure of Indian land. It also covers up the consequence. The war split Wampanoags, as well as every other Native group, and ended with indigenous resistance broken, and the colonists giving thanks. Like most Colonial wars, this one was a giant slave expedition, marked by the seizure and sale of Indian people. Wampanoags were judged criminals and-in a foreshadowing of the convict-labor provision of the Thirteenth Amendment-sold into bondage. During the next two centuries, New England Indians also suffered indentured servitude, convict labor, and debt peonage, which often resulted in the enslavement of the debtor's children. Thanksgiving's Pilgrim pageants suggest that good-hearted settlers arrived from pious, civilized England. We could remember it differently: that they came from a land that delighted in displaying heads on poles and letting bodies rot in cages suspended above the roads. They were a warrior tribe.

Despite continued demographic decline, loss of land, and severe challenges to shared social identities, Wampanoags held on. With so many men dead or enslaved, Native women married men outside their group-often African-Americans-and then redefined the families of mixed marriages as matrilineal in order to preserve collective claims to land. They adopted the forms of the Christian church, to some degree, in order to gain some breathing space. They took advantage of the remoteness of their settlements to maintain self-governance. And by the late twentieth century they began revitalizing what had been a "sleeping" language, and gained federal recognition as a tribal nation. Today, Wampanoag people debate whether Thanksgiving should be a day of mourning or a chance to contemplate reconciliation. It's mighty generous of them.

David Silverman, in his personal reflections, considers how two secular patriotic hymns, "This Land Is Your Land" and "My Country 'Tis of Thee," shaped American childhood experiences. When schoolkids sing "Land where my fathers died! Land of the Pilgrim's pride," he suggests, they name white, Protestant New England founders. It makes no sense, these days, to ask ethnically diverse students to celebrate those mythic dudes, with their odd hats and big buckles. At the very least, Silverman asks, could we include Indians among "my fathers," and pay better attention to the ways they died? Could we acknowledge that Indians are not ghosts in the landscape or foils in a delusional nationalist dream, but actual living people?

This sentiment bumps a little roughly against a second plea: to recognize the falsely inclusive rhetoric in the phrase "This land is your land, this land is my land." Those lines require the erasure of Indian people, who don't get to be either "you" or "me." American Indian people are at least partly excluded from the United States political system, written into the Constitution (in the three-fifths clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, where they appear as "Indians not taxed") so as to exist outside it. Native American tribes are distinct political entities, sovereign nations in their own right.

"American Indian" is a political identity, not a racial one, constituted by formal, still living treaties with the United States government and a long series of legal decisions. Today, the Trump Administration would like to deny this history, wrongly categorize Indians as a racial group, and disavow ongoing treaty relationships. Native American tribal governments are actively resisting this latest effort to dismember the past, demanding better and truer Indian histories and an accounting of the obligations that issue from them. At the forefront of that effort you'll find the Mashpee Wampanoags, those resilient folks whose ancestors came, uninvited, to the first "Thanksgiving" almost four centuries ago in order to honor the obligations established in a mutual-defense agreement-a treaty-they had made with the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Philip Deloria on massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

# data[].attributes.headline
365 Grateful Project     Hailey Bartholomew        

# data[].attributes.subject
365 Grateful Project     Hailey Bartholomew        

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
365 grateful project | Hailey Bartholomew | TEDxQUT

# data[].attributes.headline
Student Philosopher: Where to Start with Philosophy?     21 November 2019

# data[].attributes.subject
Student Philosopher: Where to Start with Philosophy?     21 November 2019

# data[].attributes.body
Make a list of books she recommends.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Student Philosopher: Where to Start with Philosophy?

# data[].attributes.headline
What Is Philosophy For?      21 November 2019 

# data[].attributes.subject
What Is Philosophy For?      21 November 2019 

# data[].attributes.body
Handout with an exercise

# data[].attributes.headline
What Is Philosophy For?      21 November 2019 

# data[].attributes.subject
What Is Philosophy For?      21 November 2019 

# data[].attributes.body
Text + film.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
People are understandably confused about what philosophy is. From a distance, it seems weird, irrelevant, boring and yet also - just a little - intriguing. But it's hard to put a finger on what the interest really is. What are philosophers? What do they do? And why does one need them?

Luckily, the answer is already contained in the word philosophy itself. In Greek, philo means love - or devotion - and sophia means wisdom. Philosophers are people devoted to wisdom.

Though a rather abstract term, the concept of 'wisdom' isn't mysterious. Being wise means attempting to live and die well, leading as good a life as possible within the troubled conditions of existence. The goal of wisdom is fulfilment. You could perhaps say 'happiness' but 'happiness' is misleading, for it suggests continuous chirpiness and joy, whereas 'fulfilment' seems compatible with a lot of pain and suffering, which every decent life must by necessity have.

So a philosopher or 'person devoted to wisdom' is someone who strives for systematic expertise at working out how one may best find individual and collective fulfilment.

In their pursuit of wisdom, philosophers have developed a very specific skill-set. They have, over the centuries, become experts in many of the general, large things that make people not very wise. Six central ones have been identified:
1. We don't ask big questions
What is the meaning of life? What should I do with my work? Where are we going as a society? What is love? Most of us have these questions in our minds at some point (often in the middle of the night), but we despair of trying to answer them. They have the status of jokes in most social circles: and we get shy of expressing them (except for brief moments in adolescence) for fear of being thought pretentious and of getting nowhere.

But these questions matter deeply because only with sound answers to them can we direct our energies meaningfully.

Philosophers are people unafraid of the large questions. They have, over the centuries, asked the very largest. They realise that these questions can always be broken down into more manageable chunks and that the only really pretentious thing is to think one is above regularly raising naive-sounding enquiries.
2. We are vulnerable to errors of common sense
Public opinion - or what gets called 'common sense' - is sensible and reasonable in countless areas. It's what you hear about from friends and neighbours, the stuff that's just assumed to be true, the stuff you take in without even thinking about it. The media pumps it out by the gallon every day. But in some cases, common sense is also full of daftness, error and the most lamentable prejudice.

Philosophy gets us to submit all aspects of common sense to reason. It wants us to think for ourselves, to be more independent. Is it really true what people say about love, about money, about children, about travel, about work? Philosophers are interested in asking whether an idea is logical - rather than simply assuming it must be right because it is popular and long-established.
3. We are mentally confused
We're not very good at knowing what goes on in our own minds. We know we really like a piece of music. But we struggle to say quite why. Or someone we meet is very annoying, but we can't pin down what the issue is. Or we lose our temper, but can't readily tell what we're so cross about. We lack insight into our own satisfactions and dislikes.

That's why we need to examine our own minds. Philosophy is committed to self-knowledge - and its central precept - articulated by the earliest, greatest philosopher, Socrates - is just two words long: Know yourself.
4. We have muddled ideas about what will make us happy
We're powerfully set on trying to be happy, but go wrong in our search for it on a regular basis. We overrate the power of some things to improve our lives - and underrate others. In a consumer society, we make the wrong choices because, guided by false glamour, we keep on imagining that a particular kind of holiday, or car, or computer will make a bigger difference than it can. At the same time, we underestimate the contribution of other things - like going for a walk, tidying a cupboard, having a structured conversation or going to bed early - which may have little prestige but can contribute deeply to the character of existence.

Philosophers seek to be wise by getting more precise about the activities and attitudes that really can help our lives to go better.
5. Our emotions can send us in dangerous directions
We are inescapably emotional beings but regularly forget this uncomfortable fact. Occasionally certain emotions - certain kinds of anger, envy or resentment - lead us into serious trouble. Philosophers teach us to think about our emotions, rather than simply have them. By understanding and analysing our feelings, we learn to see how emotions impact on our behaviour in unexpected, counterintuitive and sometimes dangerous ways. Philosophers were the first therapists.
6. We panic and lose perspective
We are constantly losing a sense of what matters and what doesn't. We are - as the expression goes - constantly 'losing perspective'. That's what philosophers are good at keeping a hold of. On hearing the news that he'd lost all his possessions in a shipwreck, the Stoic philosopher Zeno simply said: 'Fortune commands me to be a less encumbered philosopher.' It's responses like these that have made the very term 'philosophical' a byword for calm, long-term thinking and strength-of-mind, in short, for perspective.

What we call the 'history of philosophy' is made up of repeated attempts over the centuries to address ways in which we are unwise. So, for example, in ancient Athens, Socrates paid special attention to the problem of how people get confused in their minds. He was struck that people didn't quite know what they meant by key ideas - like courage or justice or success - even though these were the main ideas they used when talking about their own lives. Socrates developed a method (which still bears his name) by which you can learn to get clearer about what you mean by playing devil's advocate with any idea. The aim isn't necessarily to change your mind. It is to test whether the ideas guiding your life are sound.

A few decades later, the philosopher Aristotle tried to make us more confident around big questions. He thought that the best questions were those that ask what something is for. He did this a lot and over many books, asked: What is government for? What is the economy for? What is money for? What is art for? Today he would be encouraging us to ask questions like: What is the news media for? What is marriage for? What are schools for? What is pornography for?

Also active in Ancient Greece were the Stoic philosophers, who were interested in panic. The Stoics noticed a really central feature of panic: we panic not just when something bad occurs, but when it does so unexpectedly, when we were assuming that everything was going to go rather well. So they suggested that we should arm ourselves against panic by getting used to the idea that danger, trouble and difficulty are very likely to occur at every turn.

The overall task of studying philosophy is to absorb these and many other lessons and put them to work in the world today. The point isn't just to know what this or that philosopher happened to say, but to aim to exercise wisdom at an individual and societal level - starting now.

The wisdom of philosophy is - in modern times - mostly delivered in the form of books. But in the past, philosophers sat in market squares and discussed their ideas with shopkeepers or went into government offices and palaces to give advice. It wasn't abnormal to have a philosopher on the payroll. Philosophy was thought of as a normal, basic activity - rather than as an unusual, esoteric, optional extra.

Nowadays, it's not so much that we overtly deny this thought - we are always getting snippets of wisdom here and there - but we just don't have the right institutions set up to promulgate wisdom coherently in the world. In the future, though, when the value of philosophy is a little clearer, we can expect to meet more philosophers in daily life. They won't be locked up, living mainly in university departments, because the points at which our unwisdom bites - and messes up our lives - are multiple and urgently need attention right now.

To embark on a life led by philosophy, please visit: www.theschooloflife.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
People are understandably confused about what philosophy is. From a distance, it seems weird, irrelevant, boring and yet also - just a little - intriguing. But it's hard to put a finger on what the interest really is. What are philosophers? What do they do? And why does one need them?

# data[].attributes.headline
Reporting questions             21 November 2019

# data[].attributes.subject
Reporting questions             21 November 2019

# data[].attributes.headline
Two monuments to books  20 November 2019

# data[].attributes.subject
Two monuments to books  20 November 2019

# data[].attributes.headline
Book Project                          20 November 2019

# data[].attributes.subject
Book Project                          20 November 2019

# data[].attributes.body
7 articles on different aspects of Halloween

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death ✓ Sympathy & Funeral - Words To Use ✓ Mourning Clothes Fashion History ✓ Death Is Nothing At All Poem by Henry ...

# data[].attributes.headline
The Kaizen Approach to Achieving Your Biggest Goal 

# data[].attributes.subject
The Kaizen Approach to Achieving Your Biggest Goal 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a perfect world, by this time of the year, you would be halfway through your 2017 goals, right? Unfortunately, not many people can commit to a course of action to get what they want every year.

The Kaizen philosophy can make it insanely easy to commit to that goal. You should aim to continually make progress.

Instead of aiming for huge, drastic changes, what if you aimed to find small changes or actions you can make starting today. Small, continuous actions are the foundation of habits that stick. Einstein once said, "Compounding is the greatest mathematical discovery of all time."

A magic bullet cannot save you! You've got to embrace the process and enjoy it. You can't escape the hard work it takes to get better. Every incredibly successful person you know today has been through the boring, mundane, time-tested process that eventually brings success. So, stop looking for "quick hacks" that bring faster results.

"Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no greater investment." says Stephen Covey

Instead of reading every self-improvement post for the one golden tip that will make you superhumanly efficient, focus on doing the actual work that needs to be done. You can inspire yourself to take action. The hard, long process is the only way though. You can't achieve tremendous life success with a quick fix. Nobody gets it that easy.

Your attempt to be better usually ends in failure because you life-changing goals overwhelm you into inaction instead of inspiring you into action. Unrealistic goals make it insanely difficult to make any progress. You will get "stressed" over what is supposed to help you take action.

Helmut Schmidt encourages us to take baby steps towards a bigger goal. He once said, "Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps."

Your performance and ability to get things done is inextricably bound to brain performance. A big, audacious goal looks scary to your brain. And when your brain encounters scary, it goes into "freeze" mode. You don't want that. If you constantly overstretch yourself, you will lose the required energy you need to take the necessary action to get better.

Setting a goal, no matter how simple is always the easy part. Everyone has goals. The real challenge is not determining if you want the result, but if you are willing to accept the sacrifices required to achieve your goals.

If you want to achieve your goals at all times, create a system that works. Instead of a goal, design a great system or process. That way, you will always win. Even when your short-term goals are achieved, your next goal won't be a struggle. Having a system is what matters. Committing to the process makes a huge difference.

James Clear explains, "We place unnecessary stress on ourselves to lose weight or to succeed in business or to write a best-selling novel. Instead, you can keep things simple and reduce stress by focusing on the daily process and sticking to your schedule, rather than worrying about the big, life changing goals. When you focus on the practice instead of the performance, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time."

"You will never change your life until you change something you do daily," says Mike Murdock

Learning should not end after formal education. Lifelong learning, the ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge can enrich your life and make you a better person every day.

Self-improvement isn't a destination. You're never done. Even if you have some success, and you want to maintain it, you have to keep doing the things you were doing that got you that success in the first place.

Your first step to improving your life and becoming the best version of your self won't be easy. Nobody can promise you that things will be easy but they will get better. It pays to take a small action-any action-and grow from there. Remember, you are better off trying and crawling than anyone else who isn't trying.

"Little strokes fell great oaks." - Benjamin Franklin
Kaizen - Japanese for continuous improvement.
It was developed by Depression-era American business management theorists in order to build the arsenal of democracy that helped the U.S. win World War II. The Japanese took to the idea of small, continual improvement right away and gave it a name: Kaizen - Japanese for continuous improvement.

While Kaizen was originally developed to help businesses improve and thrive, it's just as applicable to our personal lives.

The idea here is to focus on consistent improvements in your life, every day, no matter how small the step you take to be a better you than you were yesterday.

Kaizen is an amazing practice that yields extraordinary results with virtually no effort at all!

According to Brett and Kate McKay of "The Art of Manliness":

"Instead of trying to make radical changes in a short amount of time, just make small improvements every day that will gradually lead to the change you want.Each day, just focus on getting 1% better in whatever it is you're trying to improve. That's it. Just 1%. It might not seem like much, but those 1% improvements start compounding on each other. In the beginning, your improvements will be so small as to seem practically nonexistent. But gradually and ever so slowly, you'll start to notice the improvements in your life. It may take months or even years, but the improvements will come if you just focus on consistently upping your game by 1%."

"When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens - and when it happens, it lasts." - John Wooden

The Kaizen approach is a reminder that all improvements must be maintained if we wish to secure consistent gains. Think of the smallest step you can take every day that would move you incrementally towards your goal.

Becoming 1% better everyday is a simple, practical way to achieve big goals. 1% seems like a small amount. Yes, it is. It's tiny. It's easy. It's doable. And it's applicable to most things you want to do or accomplish.

It feels less intimidating and is more manageable. It might feel less exciting than chasing a huge win, but its results will be stronger and more sustainable.

If you enjoyed this post, you will love Postanly Weekly (my free digest of the best productivity and self-improvement posts). Subscribe and get a free copy of my new eBook, " The Power of One Percent Better: Small Gains, Maximum Results". Join over 27,000 people who are on a mission to build a better life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Kaizen Approach to Achieving Your Biggest Goal (The Philosophy of Constant Improvement)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a perfect world, by this time of the year, you would be halfway through your 2017 goals, right? Unfortunately, not many people can commit to a course of action to get what they want every year. The Kaizen philosophy can make it insanely easy to commit to that goal.

# data[].attributes.body
Please watch this TED talk and complete the Reading/Listening handout below

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.