"This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive."   - Alice Waters

“'Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,' writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships.

"Ghodsee’s new book, 'Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life,' is an attempt to change that. The book is a tour of radical social experiments from communes and ecovillages to “platonic parenting” and intentional communities. But, on a deeper level, it’s a critique of the way existing structures of family and community life have left so many of us devoid of care and connection, and a vision of what it could mean to organize our lives differently." - Ezra Klein Producers

"Much of the public no longer believes that the major institutions of America are working for the many; they are vessels for the few.

"When the game is widely seen as rigged in favor of those at the top, society shifts from a system of mutual obligations to a system of private deals. Rather than be founded in the common good, political and social relationships increasingly are viewed as contracts whose participants seek to do as well as possible, often at the expense of others (workers, consumers, the community, the public) who are not at the table. 

"When it’s all about making deals, one 'gets ahead' by getting ahead of others. Duty is replaced by self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. Calls for sacrifice or self-denial are replaced by personal demands for better deals." - Robert Reich

One-liners

Article: Pangaia's digital passports make reselling clothing as easy as scanning a QR code.

Article: Nespresso launches its first paper-based coffee capsules that are compostable at home.

Article: Pontevedra, Spain, offers some of the best evidence available about what happens when a city is reconfigured to accommodate people, rather than cars.

Article: South Dakota is the only US state without a ska band.

Article: ‘Treebank’ in England features wood from thousands of different tree species.

"After Nature Boy became a hit, in an appearance on the CBS show We the People, Cole finally met the man who had written his song, the year’s bestseller. In archive clips of the episode, eden ahbez (the lower case was preferred) has hair down to his shoulders and wears loose-fitting clothes; his style is nearly two decades ahead of his time. Reading from prepared scripts, these two outliers – a proto-hippy and an early African American crossover artist – tell the story of how Cole discovered the song, after it was delivered on spec to the Los Angeles theatre where he was performing. To the incredulity of the host, ahbez announces that he has 'not much use for money'. It’s no small irony that this devotee of simple living – albeit with an entrepreneurial side – is being presented on a talkshow on a major US network, produced by Life magazine and sponsored by Gulf Oil. As ahbez rides on to the stage on his bicycle and then assumes a yoga position, he makes it clear that he will not conform to the values of corporate America: in his sheer strangeness, he is a harbinger of things to come." - Jon Savage

Article: Mother Nature’s Son: The Exotic World of Songwriter eden ahbez

Article: Explore the Vast Scientific Collections of D.C.’s National Museum of Natural History Paired with Respective Experts