“Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.”                                         ― Anne Deavere Smith

"Do you feel trapped in a broken economic model? A model that's trashing the living world and threatens the lives of our descendants? A model that excludes billions of people while making a handful unimaginably rich? That sorts us into winners and losers, and then blames the losers for their misfortune? Welcome to neoliberalism, the zombie doctrine that never seems to die, however comprehensively it is discredited. Now you might have imagined that the financial crisis of 2008 would have led to the collapse of neoliberalism. After all, it exposed its central features, which were deregulating business and finance, tearing down public protections, throwing us into extreme competition with each other, as, well, just a little bit flawed. And intellectually, it did collapse. But still, it dominates our lives. Why? Well, I believe the answer is that we have not yet produced a new story with which to replace it." (emphasis mine) - George Monbiot

TEDTalk: The New Political Story That Could Change Everything

"Brief forms of social touch can also increase friendly and prosocial behaviors. Simply including brief social contact to a request—such as a touch on the arm—can increase our willingness to take part in surveys, to give money to charity, and even to look after a stranger’s dog for 10 minutes while they pop into a shop!

"One classic study in the 1970s found that people were more likely to give back a coin left in a phone booth if the previous caller touched them when they left the booth than if they did not. Nearly three decades later, a 2007 study in France found that people were more likely to give away a cigarette if the request was accompanied by a touch.

"These findings show us how rudimentary touches that we encounter in everyday social interactions can provide a starting point for cooperation and compliance. A brief persuasive touch can exert a strong impact, even between people who are otherwise strangers." - Michael Banissy

Book Excerpt: Tips, Clicks, and Charitable Gifts: The Persuasive Impact of a Single Touch

Related Article: The Brain Reacts Differently to Touch Depending on Context.

"Remember when you used to explore the Internet, when you used to discover cool little websites made by people and it wasn’t just a bunch of low effort content mill listicles and blog spam?

"I want to show you that the Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.

"So it’s a search engine. It’s perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for." - Viktor Lofgren

Search Engine: Marginalia

One-liners

The Image of the Week is an iPhone shot I took of a scene composed of figures in clay. Titled "Christening", it was made by the Aguilar family in Ocotlán de Morelos, Oaxaca, Mexico, circa 1960.

These characters are just a few of more than 100,000 pieces of folk art that Alexander and Susan Girard collected over their lifetimes. They began collecting in the 1930s on a postponed honeymoon. From that trip to Mexico they retuned with a carload of art and objects for their new home, the start of the largest collection of cross-cultural folk art in the world. In 1978 they donated the collection to the State of New Mexico. In 1982 Alexander, by then then a retired interior, graphic and architectural designer, designed and installed 10,000 of these pieces in a permanent exhibition at the International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe.

He named the exhibit Multiple Visions: A Common Bond. In creating this display, Alexander hoped that visitors would be able to see the connections and common bond between the diverse peoples of the world. He was fond of repeating an old Italian proverb: "Tutto il mondo è paese" — the whole world is hometown.

Website: Museum of International Folk Art