Adopting wild Russian cubs and a greater-than-human sensibility — I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what floored me immediately; pictures of bears sitting down enjoying natural scenery such as vistas and sunsets. They struck me as being a lot like hikers and photographers, spending great effort just to get to sit and stare out at a pretty view…

What Karahan Tepe tells us about human beliefs 12,000 years ago — Maybe you’ve heard of Göbeklitepe. The findings, rolling in since the 1990s and accelerating in the 2010s, regarding what amounted to a completely pre-agricultural temple complex with impressive carved artworks of humans and animals and indecipherable symbols which hint at a highly developed and deeply meaningful world-belief system lost to…

What it says about the past and what it means for the future — I remember my history teacher in middle school reciting Plato’s famous quote on the youth of ancient Greece: “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions.” The quote itself is…

Practicing proper grief in the face of progress — One can argue that humankind, as a singular global community for the first real time ever, has felt pass through them most profoundly for the last few years a wave of grief; a sense that some aspect of human life essential to our antecedents got lost in all the dust…

Expect the unexpected in the 21st century — People like to say that the world is getting weirder; more erratic; harder to define. You could argue that is both the least and the most true right now that it has ever been. What is undeniable is that the rules which used to predictably guide world events up until…

An Honest Analysis of the Mirror Held Up by Modern Media — It should come as no surprise for me to say that art is and has always been reflective of the social values and desires of the day. 18th century Enlightenment values saw the mechanistic and mathematical aspects of the natural order expressed in art through the intricate, geometric and aggrandizing…

Hauntology and its pernicious effects on media and thought — It’s not a secret that corporations are manipulating the popular consciousness by profiting off of standardized and reinforced “nostalgic waves” every 20 years or so after a trend’s initial peak. The idea is that any given time, the young people of that time feel a mass sense of nostalgia for…

A window into the mysteries at the end of Rome — Anybody with some baseline knowledge on the Roman Cult of Mithras will know that the central problem in the study of the cult today concerns the identity of Mithras himself. And yet, for several decades from the start of the 20th century, this problem was thought to have been firmly…

A short story about pitying birds — I was walking with a girl at night in the wind in the winter. …