The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig, that aims to fill holes in the language—to give a name to emotions we all feel but don’t have a word for. Book version coming this fall from Simon & Schuster! The author’s mission is to capture the aches, demons, vibes, joys and urges that roam the wilderness of the psychological interior. Each sorrow is bagged, tagged and tranquilized, then released gently back into the subconscious.
Psyche is a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.
Browse, scroll and navigate through the two sites within Sparky, or visit and/or subscribe safely to Aeon at psyche or aeon directly.
As with Aeon, Psyche disseminates knowledge from a wide range of expert perspectives. Psychology and philosophy are key, but Psyche also draws on history, anthropology and other disciplines. Psyche recognises that the human condition has always been illuminated by the imagination as much as by reason and practical knowledge, and will showcase poetic and artistic voices and perspectives.
Psyche is organised into three sections. Therapeia provides expert insights and practical help in dealing with emotional and psychological challenges. Eudaimonia focuses on the perennial puzzle of how to live well in our complex world. Poiesis explores the imaginative, artistic and transcendent facets of life.
Psyche has three content channels: Ideas (short articles of 1,000-1,800 words) from experts and writers; Guides, which provide in-depth, expert-written, practical know-how; and Films, which showcase immersive short films. New content is published every weekday.
Explore our most popular Guides, Ideas and Films on our Popular page.
We work hard to bring you the most trustworthy, expert, and up-to-date information on psychology and mental health in our Guides. You can learn more about how we ensure our Guides are reliable here.
The need to elucidate the human condition is a universal one; the avenues to do so are endless. With a dedication to pluralism and openness, Psyche will seek out and share the most revealing perspectives wherever they might be found.
Psyche is published by not-for-profit, registered charity Aeon Media Group Ltd which is endorsed as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) organisation in Australia and registered as a 501(c)(3) charity in the US through its affiliate Aeon America.
The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, “do it yourself” (DIY), and holism, and featured the slogan “access to tools”. While WEC listed and reviewed a wide range of products (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds, etc.), it did not sell any of the products directly. Instead, the vendor’s contact information was listed alongside the item and its review. This is why, while not a regularly published periodical, numerous editions and updates were required to keep price and availability information up to date.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation … It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Then at the very end of this commencement speech Jobs quotes explicitly the farewell message placed on the back cover of the last 1974 edition of the Catalog (#1180 October 1974 titled Whole Earth Epilog[1]) and makes it his own final recommendation: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”[2][3][4]
Origins
Stewart Brand in 2010
The title Whole Earth Catalog came from a previous project by Stewart Brand. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth as seen from space, one of the first images of the “Whole Earth”. He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people. The Stanford-educated Brand, a biologist with strong artistic and social interests, believed that there was a groundswell of commitment to thoroughly renovating American industrial society along ecologically and socially just lines, whatever they might prove to be.
Andrew Kirk in Counterculture Green notes that the Whole Earth Catalog was preceded by the “Whole Earth Truck Store” which was a 1963 Dodge truck. In 1968, Brand, who was then 29, and his wife Lois embarked “on a commune road trip” with the truck, hoping to tour the country doing educational fairs. The truck was not only a store, but also an alternative lending library and a mobile microeducation service.[5]
Kevin Kelly, who would edit later editions of the catalog, summarizes the very early history this way:
‘Here’s a tool that will make drilling a well, or grinding flour, easier,’ Brand would tell [the hippies,] pointing it out in his catalog of recommended tools. But his best selling tool was the catalog itself, annotated by him, featuring tools that didn’t fit into his truck.[6]
The “Truck Store” finally settled into its permanent location in Menlo Park, California.[7] Instead of bringing the store to the people, Brand decided to create “accumulatively larger versions of his tool catalog”[6] and sell it by mail so the people could contact the vendors directly.
Using the most basic typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and his colleagues created the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. In subsequent issues, its production values gradually improved. Its outsize pages measured 11×14 inches (28×36 cm). Later editions were more than an inch thick. The early editions were published by the Portola Institute, headed by Richard Raymond. The so-called Last Whole Earth Catalog (June 1971) won the first U.S. National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category.[8] It was the first time a catalog had ever won such an award. Brand’s intent with the catalog was to provide education and “access to tools” so a reader could “find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”[9]
J. Baldwin was a young designer and instructor of design at colleges around the San Francisco Bay (San Francisco State University [then San Francisco State College], the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts [then California College of Arts and Crafts]). As he recalled in the film Ecological Design (1994), “Stewart Brand came to me because he heard that I read catalogs. He said, ‘I want to make this thing called a “whole Earth” catalog so that anyone on Earth can pick up a telephone and find out the complete information on anything. … That’s my goal.’” Baldwin served as the chief editor of subjects in the areas of technology and design, both in the catalog itself and in other publications which arose from it.
True to his 1966 vision, Brand’s publishing efforts were suffused with an awareness of the importance of ecology, both as a field of study and as an influence upon the future of humankind and emerging human awareness.
Contents
From the opening page of the 1969 Catalog:
Function
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.
An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:
Useful as a tool,
Relevant to independent education,
High quality or low cost,
Not already common knowledge,
Easily available by mail.
CATALOG listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff.
Purpose
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.[10] So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
The 1968 catalog divided itself into seven broad sections:
Understanding Whole Systems
Shelter and Land Use
Industry and Craft
Communications
Community
Nomadics
Learning
Within each section, the best tools and books the editors could find were collected and listed, along with images, reviews and uses, prices, and suppliers. The reader was also able to order some items directly through the catalog.
Later editions changed a few of the headings, but generally kept the same overall framework.
The Catalog used a broad definition of “tools”. There were informative tools, such as books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes. There were well-designed special-purpose utensils, including garden tools, carpenters’ and masons’ tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials, tents, hiking shoes, and potters’ wheels. There were even early synthesizers and personal computers.
The Catalog’s publication coincided with a great wave of convention-challenging experimentalism and a do-it-yourself attitude associated with “the counterculture,” and tended to appeal not only to the intelligentsia of the movement, but to creative, hands-on, and outdoorsy people of many stripes. Some of the ideas in the Catalog were developed during Brand’s visits to Drop City.
With the Catalog opened flat, the reader might find the large page on the left full of text and intriguing illustrations from a volume of Joseph Needham‘s Science and Civilization in China, showing and explaining an astronomical clock tower or a chain-pump windmill, while on the right-hand page are a review of a beginners’ guide to modern technology (The Way Things Work) and a review of The Engineers’ Illustrated Thesaurus. On another spread, the verso reviews books on accounting and moonlighting jobs, while the recto bears an article in which people tell the story of a community credit union they founded. Another pair of pages depict and discuss different kayaks, inflatable dinghies, and houseboats.
For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog
50 years ago, Stewart Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog — one of the cornerstones of the American counterculture. The evening program of The Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celebration was held on October 13, 02018, and featured conversations between Whole Earth Catalog contributors and contemporary wave-makers as they discussed the legacy of the Catalog and what the next 50 years might hold. Speakers included Ryan Phelan, Danica Remy, Rusty Schweickart, Kevin Kelly, Simone Giertz, Howard Rheingold, Chip Conley, Stephanie Mills, Stephanie Feldstein, Stewart Brand and Sal Khan. The event was sponsored by the San Francisco Art Institute, WIRED, The Long Now Foundation, Ken and Maddy Dychtwald, Peter and Cathleen Schwartz, Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan, Juan and Mary Enriquez, and Gerry Ohrstrom. You can learn more about the Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celebration at: http://wholeearth50th.com Watch Whole Earth Flashbacks, a documentary that profiles the creators of the Whole Earth Catalog and the community they inspired: https://vimeo.com/294878432 The evening program was given as part of Long Now’s Seminar Series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world’s leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can: Subscribe to our podcasts: http://longnow.org/seminars/podcast Explore the full series: http://longnow.org/seminars More ideas on long-term thinking: http://blog.longnow.org The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions. Become a Long Now member to support this series, join our community, and connect with our ongoing work to explore and deepen long-term thinking: http://longnow.org/membership
Two city-bred siblings are stranded in the Australian Outback, where they learn to survive with the aid of an Aboriginal boy on his “walkabout”: a ritual separation from his tribe.
Roeg’s second feature film, Walkabout was released internationally by 20th Century Fox, and was one of the first films in the Australian New Wave cinema movement. Alongside Wake in Fright, it was one of two Australian films entered in competition for the Grand Prix du Festival at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.[4] It was subsequently released in the United States in July 1971, and in Australia in December 1971.
In 2005, the British Film Institute included it in their list of the “50 films you should see by the age of 14”.
Ireland’s Climate Status Tool provides interactive access to the Climate Status Report Ireland (CSRI) 2020. The CSRI report presents the state of Ireland’s climate based on the collation and analysis of almost 50 internationally defined essential climate variables (ECV) observed in the atmospheric, oceanic and terrestrial environments. Moreover, it documents the status of Ireland’s climate-observing infrastructure. The full report is available here. SaveSave
Empathy over conflict, it’s all a matter of perspective
Social Perspective – there are only two ways of responding to any challenging social circumstance or situation, positively or negatively, these are basic responses in individuals within the wider community, especially when feeling vulnerable or under threat.
Human nature being what it is, usually tends towards the negative, as in our current state of uncertainty and confusion – the ‘fight or flight’ response, trying to find someone or something to blame, fear and anger at the unknown – this is the worst and most disruptive condition, all are triggered by challenging events within our communities causing confusion and conflict.
We must be more aware of these states of mind and manage the issues at hand. Finding logical, philosophical or psychological perspective from similar and/or historical reference can help – in other words ‘look before we leap’ or acting with empathy rather than fear. Consider this before losing hope, or descending into denial or anger. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Is there hope after 2020
Just thinking …
There is always hope, there are always examples of good behaviour and kindnesses within our communities, countering socially challenging situations and disruptive circumstances.
We are more than capable of coming together when up against threatening forces of ‘wrongfulness’, there is a natural balance within human consciousness which when disturbed tries to correct itself. However, humans are fickle by nature and very susceptible to bad influence, deceit and manipulation, easily ‘conned’ and mislead into ways of thinking, action and inaction.
If there is such a thing as the collective consciousness, it’s purpose right now is to rise above the fear and denial and blame associated with Covid 19 and the resulting pandemic. Rather than cocoon or bury our heads in the sand, we need to observe and witness our behaviour as individuals within communities and help ourselves by helping others see, think and understand what’s really going on.
Everyone has a part to play, but we need to be more aware, to engage, consider and witness, some experiences will hurt and cause anguish, pain and anxiety, but look around, there are more hopeful and positive activity and experiences happening all around, in many cases it is only a matter of perspective.
Visit Sparky’s sister site Being – for creators and collectors of objects of desire and craft
A series of intimate vignettes are woven together by the memories and dreams of people in central Havana. Directed by Giovanni P. Autran
2016 New Orleans Film Festival – World Premiere 2017 Maryland Film Festival 2017 Marfa Film Festival 2017 Brooklyn Film Festival 2017 Boston International Film Festival 2017 Indie Grits Film Festival 2017 Mammoth Lakes Film Festival 2017 Woods Hole Film Festival 2017 New Hope Film Festival 2017 DOC LA Film Festival – Best Cinematography 2018 Picture Farm Film Festival
With ROSAURA MUÑOS KARLA BASÍLIO JULIO ALIÁGE EDEL RAMÍREZ
When Helle Schröder and Martin Janekovic (XTH-Berlin) signed a 199-year lease on some land along the old Berlin Wall, they had a permit to build a row house, but despite the two shared walls, they wanted something that felt airy and light-filled. Solid glass and steel girders helped them avoid solid walls on the front and back of the home while inside they relied on drawbridges, slides and netting to keep floors and ceilings to a minimum. The bedrooms are housed within two concrete elements, but even here one entire wall is a drawbridge that opens easily with hydraulics to allow light and air to flow smoothly. The top floor is a kitchen dining area lit from a huge skylight. A heat pump (pipes going 80 meters into the ground) heats the home and collected rainwater flushes the toilets.
When Daniel Russell and his colleagues at UCLA set out to create a standardized way to measure people’s loneliness in 1978, what they came up with was arguably the least fun 20-item questionnaire in history. On a four-point scale from “never” to “often,” it asked individuals: How often did they feel they had no one to turn to or talk to? How often did they feel their relationships with others were not meaningful? How often did they feel left out?
It was probably not the most painless way to learn about the inner lives of people who reported feeling bummed-out and alone. But over the course of 40 years, the UCLA Loneliness Scale has become a valuable tool in studying what’s now being called an epidemic in some Western countries. Case in point: The United Kingdom last week announced the creation of a Minister for Loneliness role within its government. Tracey Crouch, the former minister for Sport and Civil Society, will now be tasked with carrying out the prescriptions of the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness (named for a member of Parliament who was murdered in 2016), which released a report last year declaring that over 9 million British adults reported being “often or always lonely,” approximately 15 to 20 percent of the adult population. For comparison, while research on loneliness among all adults in the U.S. is scarce, a 2012 study found that between 20 and 43 percent of American adults over age 60 experienced “frequent or intense” loneliness.
When researchers study loneliness, they tend to define it as “the perceived discrepancy between one’s desired level of social connection and their actual level of social connection,” says Brigham Young University psychology and neuroscience professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad. Some people who are socially isolated don’t necessarily feel lonely, and some people who are lonely are surrounded by people who make them feel more alienated, not less.
But 9 million lonely people probably aren’t just a damper on the national morale; they’re likely to be a strain on national productivity and health-care systems, too. The bodies of lonely people are markedly different from the bodies of non-lonely people. Prolonged loneliness, Holt-Lunstad says, “can put one at risk for chronic health conditions, exacerbate various health conditions, and ultimately put us at increased risk for premature mortality.” The bodies of lonely people are more likely to have:
High blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Loneliness, it turns out, is bad for both your figurative heart and your literal one. As Holt-Lunstad points out, feeling lonely can make our environments feel just plain unsafe or unfriendly, which — as most of us have gleaned just by being alive and sometimes feeling acutely, anxiously alone — can make our heart rates faster and our blood pressures go up.
Those cardiovascular effects are frequently attributed to cortisol, the “stress hormone,” and studies of loneliness have shown lonely people have consistently elevated levels of cortisol. Which can contribute to other sorts of problems: “Chronic high blood pressure can lead to hypertension,” Holt-Lunstad says, “and hypertension is a risk factor for heart disease.”
These effects can accumulate over time, too. A 2002 National Institutes of Health study showed that lonely participants’ cardiovascular systems responded less acutely to laboratory stress tests, but only because their cardiovascular systems were more constricted and pressurized in general. And according to one NIH review of the physiological effects of loneliness, consistently feeling rejected or lonely early in life is a good predictor of high blood pressure in young adulthood — and of more exaggerated high blood pressure in middle age.
Reduced immunity. Lonely people can also be more susceptible to illness. A 2005 study of 83 healthy first-semester college freshmen found that those who reported feeling lonely also responded more poorly to getting the flu vaccine; their bodies didn’t produce antibodies quite as well as those of non-lonely people. “Those with both high levels of loneliness and a small social network had the lowest antibody response,” the study authors add.
Why does this happen? One pathway researchers have identified is that stress hormones, in conjunction with other hormones and peptides secreted from the brain, “talk” to specific parts of the body’s white blood cells, affecting their distribution and function.
Inflammation. Lonely people are especially susceptible to chronic inflammation, which is considered a key component in a wide range of health maladies. Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and potentially even certain cancers can stem from it; so can rheumatoid arthritis, clogged arteries, and periodontitis.
As UCLA genomics researcher Steve Cole explained to NPR in 2015, he’d found in his research that “when people felt lonesome, they had significantly higher levels of norepinephrine,” the hormone that shuts down viral defense but escalates production of certain white blood cells “coursing through their blood.” At the same time, NPR writes, lonely people develop a genetic immunity to the inflammation-curbing properties of the “stress hormone” cortisol, so the defensive inflammation response increases.
Poor sleep. When the NIH conducted its loneliness study in 2002, researchers found in their labs what stressed-out, lonesome-feeling people have found in their bedrooms for centuries: Lonely people took longer to fall asleep than non-lonely people, slept for a shorter time, and had “greater daytime dysfunction.”
And, of course, whatever damage loneliness itself doesn’t do to you physically, the sleep loss it causes will. Sleep-restriction studies have found sleep-deprived people are more likely to suffer from lowered glucose tolerance (which sometimes leads to type 2 diabetes) and elevated stress hormone levels in the evenings. Plus, the authors of the 2002 NIH study add, “If individuals are lonely chronically, it is conceivable that the effects of impaired sleep diminish nightly restorative processes and the overall resilience of lonely individuals.” These findings also suggest that sleep loss can exacerbate those effects in older age.
So how, exactly, would a Minister for Loneliness be able to help a country full of people feeling lonesome? The Cox Commission endorses measures that aim to both find and engage with lonely people where they live and draw them out into community gatherings — like citywide “Door Knock” events and “The Great Get-Together” weekends organized by county councils. When I asked Holt-Lunstad whether one could really expect these kinds of programs to work, her answer surprised me.
“People ask me, ‘What are we supposed to do, make people go around and hug each other?’” she says. But we have “good evidence,” Holt-Lunstad says, that a loneliness epidemic is developing in the United States, too — and the U.S. should consider following Britain’s lead in making loneliness a public-health priority.
Holt-Lunstad testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging last springto propose some measures aimed at doing just that. For example, she helped usher in new legislation designed to make hearing aids more affordable, since hearing loss is a risk factor for social isolation and loneliness, especially for older adults. “If you can’t hear, it’s hard to be part of a conversation,” she says. “It’s easy to start to withdraw and disconnect from others.” Holt-Lunstad has also endorsed programs like Oprah Winfrey’s “Just Say Hello” campaign and the AARP’s efforts to combat social isolation, but cautions that meaningful public health benefits will emerge only when the measures taken are firmly rooted in research findings.
Additionally, Holt-Lunstad says, assessing the risk of loneliness and loneliness-related health problems should be part of medical training; doctors should communicate to patients how to prevent loneliness and encourage them to take it seriously as part of a healthy lifestyle, “just like you would take sleep, exercise, diet, all of these kinds of things seriously.”
But it’s not just the elderly who need loneliness intervention, she says. She thinks social education should be taught in schools the way physical education is. In K–12 curriculums, it’d be beneficial to educate kids on “not only why it’s important for our health but what good relationships look like. How to be a good friend,” she says. “Just like being physically active, we need to be socially active.”
Research on young people’s loneliness isn’t abundant. But what does exist suggests loneliness might not go away anytime soon as a health crisis: A UCLA Berkeley study published last year found that even though adults between 21 and 30 had larger social networks, they reported twice as many days spent feeling lonely or socially isolated than adults between 50 and 70.
With Thanks and Originally published at www.thecut.com on January 22, 2018 and via Medium https://medium.com/the-cut/what-loneliness-does-to-the-human-body-fa554babd8ae
A very graphic collection of details and scenes featuring street graffiti – sprayed, stencilled, painted, carved and chipped. Captured over various visits to Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, and other cities around Europe. Photos by Greville Edwards
