“Is anybody here doing LiveStream?” It’s a new generation, and it snuck up on me. Suddenly, we live in the age of personal broadcasting. I was sitting in the main chapel of the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland, Oregon. The event was a speaker’s evening with author and teacher Charles Eisenstein. Eisenstein is the author of The Ascent of Humanity and the more recent Sacred Economics, the latter of which dovetailed so nicely with the Occupy movement that it has become an intellectual after-current that is reverberating deeply ... Read More

It’s the Bugatti Veyron. This magnificent machine of loving grave was designed by Hartmut Warkuss and Jozef Kabaň, who were commissioned by the Volkswagen group to deliver a simple product: the supercar to end all supercars. The Bugatti Veyron rocks so hard it makes my teeth hurt. This spectral, spherical slice of heavenly engineering is sold exclusively through Bugatti manufacturers, costs between $1.5 and $2.7 million US dollars, was named Car of the Decade by the BBC’s Top Gear, and in current incarnation as the Veyron Super Sport, is ... Read More

About a week ago, I came across an article about the Occupy Wall Street movement penned by one Carolyn Elliott, a scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. The article, entitled The Poetics of Occupation: Pressing reasons why we need to “occupy” our own cities, quite frankly blew my socks off. It was simple, resonant, and true. In her article, Elliott was talking up Lewis Hyde, author of the 1983 classic The Gift, a work of scholarships that explores economics outside the box of modern neoliberalism. As I was exploring her blog, I ... Read More

We must find a way to build a more beautiful world, without the ugliness and suffering of the present day. The human experiment has reached towering golden heights and plunged to hideous, shuddering depths. There has got to be a better way to do this, and I am committed to finding and enacting it. I want my coffee from halfway around the world without nitrogen pollution and fish-killing runoff. I want comfortable, durable footwear without slave labor. I want globe-spanning travel without death weather. I want grass-fed beef and whole ... Read More

According to the official record, Jason Silva is a filmmaker, gonzo journalist, and a host/producer at Current TV, the fastest-growing TV network in history. What this official description fails to fully capture is Jason’s gift, which I would seek to express by calling him a digital DJ, a re-vitalizer and remixer of optimism, and above all a curator: of ideas, of inspiration, and of awe. The phrase that leaped to mind when I first saw Jason was ‘existential jazz’; like a trumpet player or modern-day digital Mingus, he jams, riffs and rhapsodizes ... Read More

Over the past two and half years, I have purchased or been gifted a more than a dozen pieces of Icebreaker apparel, including tops, bottoms, outerwear, underwear and socks. I have purchased another half-dozen items as gifts for friends and family. I have spent countless hours exploring their web site, blogs, and researching their history, product, and ethics. At this point I feel like I have a pretty strong understanding of their overall product line. I feel ready to make a recommendation. Are you ready? Here’s the ... Read More

It is when the world flames a bit in our peripheral vision that it brings us jubilation and not depression. -Lewis Hyde, The Gift, 1983 I first attended the Burning Man arts and culture festival in 2010. It was clear to me right from the beginning that this motley collection of fifty thousand people camping in the desert was on to something. They thought they were just partying. I became convinced, based on what I saw and experienced in that first year, and during my return year in 2011, ... Read More