Society

What history tells us about what comes next, and what to do about it.

Nick Bostrom is perhaps best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which explores the existential threat posed to humans by superintelligent A...

Our relationship with the natural world is humanity’s defining challenge. Inspired by ecotopian novels, communities and movements across the world are working to meet it.

In the nearly-500 years since its publication, Thomas More’s Utopia has influenced everything from the thinking of Gandhi to the tech giants of Silicon Valley, writes Tom Hodgkinson.

Do you have bittersweet longings for a utopian future? You may be blessed (or afflicted) with Sehnsucht

America voted for chaos — but we don’t know what real chaos is. Yet.

Public librarians have to be coders, social workers, and book rec machines. They’re irreplaceable.

Dear friends, I wish I had a banquet of hope to put before you, eleven links of uplifting joy, ways to channel any rage or hurt or despair into thoughtful...

Soundtrack: Post Pop Depression - Paraguay I haven't wanted to write much in the last week. Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could've been done differently,

Life-changing choices we may be forced to make if Donald Trump wins

When the German army rolled into France in 1940, the boss of Citroen was never just going to just lie down and surrender

Trump voters have told you they will hurt you. It’s reasonable to believe them.

By prosecuting the website's founders, the government chilled free speech online and ruined lives.

It sounds like an absurd riddle, or perhaps a kindergarten-level math problem: the median male full-time worker earned $314 per week in 1979, while his counterpart at the median in 2018 earned $1,026; who was better off? In fact, the question proves fiendishly difficult, even as its answer lies at the heart of understanding America’s economic progress...

In a column four years ago, I recounted the experience of a friend in academia with the godawful “learning management software” which her institution required for designing exams. She complained that she was trying to create a midterm exam and “blackboard is complete fucking garbage. No intuitive way to break up questions into sections, can’t...

"Well, at least Mussolini made the trains run on time." Except he didn't, of course. Mussolini sought to convince the world that fascism delivered Italy into a technologically efficient order; and the story was part of the dictator's careful (and successful, even) crafting of a mass-media mythology. As Victoria de

Coping strategies for the next few days — and the next four years.

The Pentagon is pursuing every available option to keep US troops safe from the rising tide of adversary drones, including a robotic twist on its standard-issue small arms.

From our editor: last week’s US election will affect the future for all of us. Here’s how we’ll cover it.

For the first time in 80 years, Karl Polanyi’s magnum opus has been published in the UK.

A defense industrial base (DIB; also sometimes referred to as a defense industrial and technological base) is the network of organizations, facilities, and resources that provides a government with materials, products, and services for defense purposes (especially the supply of its armed forces). It may include both public and private actors, including some entities that may not exclusively engage in defense-related production, and is often defined in geographical or national terms (e.g., the U.S. or Chinese defense industrial bases). It may also be divided according to the kinds of weapons and equipment produced (one may speak of a "submarine industrial base," for instance, or a "rotary-wing aircraft industrial base," etc.).[1]

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an idea in psychology proposed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the journal Psychological Review. Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. The theory is a classification system intended to reflect the universal needs of society as its base, then proceeding to more acquired emotions. The hierarchy of needs is split between deficiency needs and growth needs, with two key themes involved within the theory being individualism and the prioritization of needs. While the theory is usually shown as a pyramid in illustrations, Maslow himself never created a pyramid to represent the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy of needs is a psychological idea and an assessment tool, particularly in education, healthcare and social work. The hierarchy remains a popular framework, including sociology research, management training, and higher education.

Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products.[1] Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. While humans started gathering grains at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers only began planting them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. In the 20th century, industrial agriculture based on large-scale monocultures came to dominate agricultural output.

A subsistence economy is an economy directed to basic subsistence, the provision of food, clothing, shelter rather than to the market.

Extensive farming or extensive agriculture is an agricultural production system that uses small inputs of labour, fertilizers, and capital, relative to the land area being farmed.

Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow crops on smallholdings to meet the needs of themselves and their families. Subsistence agriculturalists target farm output for survival and for mostly local requirements. Planting decisions occur principally with an eye toward what the family will need during the coming year, and only secondarily toward market prices. Tony Waters, a professor of sociology, defines "subsistence peasants" as "people who grow what they eat, build their own houses, and live without regularly making purchases in the marketplace".

Establishing Salish Sea Summits under the Oceans Protection Plan