I’m pretty sure that 79-year-old anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan didn’t foresee both the BBC and Apple asking for interviews this past year. As anarchism has disappeared from any mainstream political relevance, so has Zerzan. For years he’d just been living in Eugene, Oregon with his dog, living a normal life…

As some of you know I’ve been on a bit of a recent bender trying to find good resources on how Conservatives (used to) think about the environment. It’s still a bit of a mystery for me why the right has done so poorly in supporting environmental innovation throughout my…

Here’s the big dumb explanation for why there was no big scary #RedWave this past midterm: Young people turn 18 years old and then can vote. These days they mostly vote for Democrats. Old people die and then cannot vote. These days they would have mostly voted for Republicans. In…

For anyone who’s interested, I want to point you back to something I wrote a while back called Trump, Kanye, Elon, and the Ideology of…

There are two moral models at play today throughout the West. One comes from the French Humanist tradition and the other from the Germanic Naturalist tradition. The first is universal humanist capitalist morality which uses financial metaphors to make sense of the moral world. In this humanist sense of morality…

Toward the end of art critic John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? is a somewhat bizarre few sentences — “The marginalization of animals is today being followed by the marginalization and disposal of the only class who, throughout history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom that accompanies…

There’s this period called the Axial Age which is basically just the millennium before we decided to start time (0 AD), when the Western world started happening, people from India to Italy started to moved to cities, became estranged from the land, and the experience of being a person became…

When Bernie and others say things like “climate change is an existential threat” they are right. But when they inevitably follow up these sorts of claims by proposing new policy interventions they’ve lost the thread. There are not policy solutions to philosophical crises. …

Every Wednesday for the past ten weeks I’ve walked down to one of the old-looking buildings on Yale’s beautiful campus and in the gothic living room of a wonderful professor spent two hours talking about “sociological theory.” There are about fifteen of us in the class — folks from China…