Story of Change. Over the past several decades, many environmental and social change efforts have come to reflect the centrality of shopping in our culture, suggesting change can be made—or is even best made—through alterations in our individual consumption patterns. These efforts—buy Fair Trade or organic, use a reusable bag, screw in a CFL lightbulb—are a great place to start, but they are a terrible place to stop, ignoring the real source of our power: coming together as engaged citizens. In The Story of Change, released in July 2012, Annie Leonard argues that it’s not bad shoppers who are putting our future at risk; it’s bad policies and business practices.
If we really want to change the world, we have to move beyond voting with our dollars and come together to demand rules that work. Credits The Story of Change was created and released by The Story of Stuff Project and produced by Free Range Studios. Show full list of credits. David Foster Wallace's timeless graduation speech on the meaning of life, adapted in a short film" By Maria Popova “The real value of a real education … has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness.”
On May 21, 2005, David Foster Wallace got up before the graduating class of Kenyon college and delivered one of history’s most memorable commencement addresses. It wasn’t until Wallace’s death in 2008 that the speech took on a life of its own under the title This Is Water, and was even adapted into a short book. Now, the fine folks of The Glossary have remixed an abridged version of Wallace’s original audio with a sequence of aptly chosen images to give one pause: UPDATE: The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust exemplifies everything that’s wrong with copyright law. What a shame, this travesty of cultural legacy. The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Thanks, Matt Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr. Delhi to reuse 80 per cent sewage by 2027. With no new dams in sight, the draft Delhi Water Policy, 2013 calls for reuse of treated sewage to achieve water security in the capital Delhi’s 2051 water demand at the norm of 172 litres per person per day works out to 1,018 million gallons a day. Will the new state water policy help to bridge the demand-supply gap and achieve water security? The population of Delhi is expected to be 27 million by 2051, roughly 10 million more than what it is today. But how to ensure everyone gets sufficient water even in the present time is a matter that remains unresolved. Formulating a water policy with the prime objective of “ensuring the long-term water security of the national capital territory (NCT) of Delhi even under conditions of external flux”, is the first step in the direction taken by the Delhi Government.
The draft document (pdf), acknowledges that the large dams planned in the upper reaches of the Yamuna basin are unlikely to be operationalised in “15 to 20 years”, if at all. Happy Birthday, Viktor Frankl: Timeless Wisdom on the Human Search for Meaning. By Maria Popova “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” Celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, born on March 26, 1905, remains best-known for his indispensable 1946 psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning (public library) — a meditation on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived. For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.
In examining the “intensification of inner life” that helped prisoners stay alive, he considers the transcendental power of love: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. Frankl illustrates this with a stirring example of how his feelings for his wife — who was eventually killed in the camps — gave him a sense of meaning: Donating = Loving. Work Alone: Ernest Hemingway's 1954 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Henry Miller on the mystery of the universe and the meaning of life. By Maria Popova “This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it.” More than merely one of the most memorable, prolific, and disciplined authors of the twentieth century, Henry Miller was also a champion of the wisdom of the heart, a poignant oracle of writing, a modern philosopher.
But hardly anywhere does Miller’s spirit shine more brilliantly than in the 1974 gem This Is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn: Conversations with the Author from the Henry Miller Odyssey (public library) — not a book in the traditional sense, but “a transmutation, a reduction of the hours and hours of film and tape” that filmmaker Robert Snyder began recording in 1968 as the basis for the 1969 documentary The Henry Miller Odyssey. The book itself, as Snyder puts it, “is only a skimming of the film of the man” and “couldn’t be more than an invitation to the man’s work.” Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Sherwood Anderson on Art and Life: A Letter of Advice to His Teenage Son, 1927. By Maria Popova “The object of art is not to make salable pictures.
It is to save yourself.” The quest to find one’s purpose and live the creative life boldly is neither simple nor easy, especially for a young person trying to make sense of the world and his place in it. In the spring of 1926, Sherwood Anderson sent his seventeen-year-old son John a beautiful addition to history’s most moving and timeless letters of fatherly advice. Found in Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children (UK; public library), the missive offers insight on everything from knowing whose advice not to take to the false allure of money to the joy of making things with your hands: The best thing, I dare say, is first to learn something well so you can always make a living.
Bob seems to be catching on at the newspaper business and has had another raise. In relation to painting. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr. Magnum Photos - Search Result. A dog sniffing at me. Bertrand Russell on human nature, construction vs. destruction, and science as a key to democracy. By Maria Popova In 1926, British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and social critic Bertrand Russell — whose 10 commandments of teaching endure as a timeless manifesto for education, whose poignant admonition is among history’s greatest insights on love, whose message to descendants should be etched into every living heart — penned Education and the Good Life (public library), exploring the essential pillars of building character through proper education and how that might relate to broader questions of politics, psychology, and moral philosophy.
One of Russell’s key assertions is that science education — something that leaves much to be desired nearly a century later — is key to attaining a future of happiness and democracy: For the first time in history, it is now possible, owing to the industrial revolution and its byproducts, to create a world where everybody shall have a reasonable chance of happiness. Physical evil can, if we choose, be reduced to very small proportions.