I spent three weeks in Scandinavia in late 2009. I’ve been to Denmark several times before (my mother hails from there), so I wasn’t expecting to have any revelations about how different life is there than here. To a great extent, things are quite similar. But there are deep and important differences that I experienced [...]
Been way too busy with the book project (Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978) and a fascinating oral history project (“Ecology Emerges”) that has had me doing sixteen interviews in the past few weeks… sorry for my poor blog here, which has lost out in the tussle for my time… anyway, wah [...]
Funny to get a news feed indicating that “nowtopia” had popped up in an essay over on Counterpunch, written by a Torontoan… it’s a lovely essay, and flattering to see nowtopia becoming a useful noun already!
In May 2008 Nowtopia was published. It’s been a year and a quarter and I’ve had the great fortune to [...]
I live in San Francisco’s Mission District, going back to 1987. It’s a neighborhood undergoing intense gentrification, even with the current economic and housing crises. Sometimes I think with all the cafes and bars and trendy new galleries and boutiques that we’re sliding towards becoming a Greenwich Village.
There are different populations living here, among each [...]
IBM’s latest slogan is “We can make a smarter world” or something idiotic like that… here, again, in a dumb marketing campaign we immediately confront the basic problem. The world is an incredible intelligence already. We humans really don’t understand it well at all… It might make sense for a corporation like IBM to invite [...]
