the Hood’s mission: Prepare young people of color for rewarding careers in tech. For Zakiya Harris, growing up in East Oakland, Calif., meant navigating between two acutely different worlds every day. “I grew up in the hood, but I went to a very affluent school,” she says. “So I spent my days being one of few black people, and I spent my nights being in a predominantly black neighborhood. I believe that really shapes the work that I do, because I’ve always been a bridge-builder.” Today, Harris is building bridges in the Bay Area as the co-founder of Hack the Hood, an Oakland-based nonprofit that introduces young people of color to career... posted on Jun 18 2017 (6,701 reads)

instructor of the world’s most popular MOOC explores how to change your life through the power of learning—and why you have more potential than you think. People around the world are hungry to learn. Instructor Barbara Oakley discovered this when her online course “Learning How to Learn”—filmed in her basement in front of a green screen—attracted more than 1.5 million students. Part of the goal of her course—and her new book, Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential—is to debunk some of the myths that get in the way of learning, like the belief that we’re bad at math or too old to change ... posted on Jul 4 2017 (15,729 reads)

experiencing the beautiful gift of an Awakin Call with Zen monk and Tea Master, Wu De, I never would have understood the magic of tea. Other than being vaguely aware of its medicinal powers and high end varieties, there was little more that I knew and I certainly wouldn’t have equated tea with being “the great human connector”. But the wisdom with which Wu De shared with us how tea connects us back to nature, to each other, and to ourselves opened my heart to more than a different way of starting my day. Journeying from a Rural Ohio to Taiwan Suzanne: How did you find tea, being that you were born in North America? How did you listen to the self and fin... posted on Aug 5 2017 (9,658 reads)

of the great tragedies of modern life is that we live in a culture of death denial. The advertising industry tells us we are forever young, and we retire elders away to care homes, out of sight and mind. As a Western culture, we’ve lost the connection with our mortality our forebears had, when dancing skeletons decorated medieval church walls and people wore skull brooch memento mori (Latin for ‘remember you must die’) as a reminder that death could take them at any moment.  We are constantly dying. The proximity of death propelled our ancestors to live with a radical aliveness that we can hardly imagine in our tech-saturated sedentary present, as we check o... posted on Sep 9 2017 (15,508 reads)

Colier is a psychotherapist, interfaith minister, meditation teacher, and the celebrated author of books such as Inviting a Monkey to Tea: Befriending Your Mind. With Sounds True, Nancy has written a new book called The Power of Off: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Nancy have a frank discussion of the large-scale modern addiction to cell phones, email, and social media. Nancy offers ways one can recognize addictive behavior and how we can break out of compulsive cycles around technology. They also talk about parenting in the digital age and the importance setting appropriate boundaries whe... posted on Feb 8 2018 (18,033 reads)

following is the edited transcript of an Awakin Call with Ulrike Reinhard. You can listen to the full recording of the call here. Preeta Bansal: It's my pleasure to welcome Ulrike Reinhard as our guest this week! Ulrike Reinhard: Yeah, thanks a lot and hello to everyone out there! Preeta: Ulrike is a German publisher, author, a Futurist and she's been involved in a lot of global development efforts throughout her lifetime. Currently, she lives mostly in India, in rural India, where she is the woman behind a skateboard park, that’s in a village; the park has been upending notions of caste and gender, and empowering a community economically. She's been also ... posted on May 18 2019 (3,567 reads)

Episcopalian priest and theologian, Matthew Fox began his career as a member of the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church but was expelled in 1993 by Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI. Among Fox’s teachings the Catholic hierarchy found most objectionable was his belief in “original blessing,” which became the title of one of his most popular books. The concept was in direct contravention of the Roman Catholic doctrine that people are born into “original sin.” Fox was also criticized for his embrace of the divine feminine and his acceptance of homosexuality. An early and influential proponent of “Creation Spirituality,” whi... posted on Nov 12 2020 (28,426 reads)

from Detroit. (Applause) A city that in the 1950s was the world's industrial giant, with a population of 1.8 million people and 140 square miles of land and infrastructure, used to support this booming, Midwestern urban center. And now today, just a half a century later, Detroit is the poster child for urban decay. Currently in Detroit, our population is under 700,000, of which 84 percent are African American, and due to decades of disinvestmentand capital flight from the city into the suburbs, there is a scarcity in Detroit. There is a scarcity of retail, more specifically, fresh food retail, resul... posted on May 15 2018 (10,379 reads)

of the Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran. Credit: By Phillip Maiwald (Nikopol) - Own work. I say ‘Allahu akbar’ dozens of times a day. I say it during prayer. I say it as an expression of reaffirmation and gratitude to God. I said it when my daughter was born, and there will be someone to say it over me when I am buried. I say it when I witness beauty. ‘Allahu akbar.’ In 1985, Lutheran Bishop Krister Stendahl, in defending the building of a Mormon temple by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Stockholm, enunciated “Three Rules of Religious Understanding:” “When tryin... posted on Mar 14 2020 (3,629 reads)

Isaacson is a gifted storyteller. A career journalist who has steered both Time magazine and CNN, Isaacson has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. His latest biography, published last year, looks at the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Isaacson, now a history professor at Tulane University, recently visited Wharton to be interviewed by his friend and management professor Adam Grant as part of the Authors@Wharton speakers series. Grant has also written several bestsellers, including Give and Take and Option B, which he co-authored with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Grant and Isaacson shared a lively discussion on topics ranging from ... posted on Apr 6 2018 (12,354 reads)

makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, 'an escape from personality'? Do novelists have a duty? Do readers? Why are there so few truly great novels? Zadie Smith on literature's legacy of honourable failure January 13, 2007: 1. The tale of Clive I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission: he wants to write the perfect novel. Clive has a lot going for him: he's intelligent and well read; he's made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong; he has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory - those elegant bluepri... posted on Mar 14 2018 (11,790 reads)

thing about Finnish is that it’s not linear, it’s orbital,’ said the ticket collector on the 10:35 train to Leeds. ‘The language comes from the land. You have to find the object in the sentence and then everything else around it will make sense.’ Here is the orginal conversation I held with the mythologist Martin Shaw for the latest Dark Mountain journal #11. We ran a shortened version for a DM blog series on the 'mythos we live by' in March, asking six writers who work with story to explore what a mythological response to an age of converging crises might look like. Follow us as we traverse a territory that includes underworld&... posted on May 13 2018 (7,449 reads)

Note: From Chelsea Green Publishing, the publishers of Human Scale Revisited: There was a time when buildings were scaled to the human figure, democracies were scaled to the societies they served, and enterprises were scaled to communities. Against that backdrop, author Kirkpatrick Sale revisits his classic book Human Scale against recent global developments and offers compelling new insights on how to turn toward a scale that allows humanity to not only survive, but thrive. In this excerpt from Human Scale Revisited, Sale tackles the notion of human-scale technology. There is no such thing as a society without technology. Homo erectus and Homo sapiens for nearly two million years... posted on May 4 2018 (7,800 reads)

in the business of creating a miracle here on earth.” – Charles Eisenstein What is it like to be in the midst of a miracle? The idea of a miracle sounds so warm and delicious, the kind of thing you would aspire to experience in a minute, right? Well, in fact, here on earth we are in the middle of miracle school, whether you remember enrolling or not. And, much like life itself (a miracle in its own right), it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s very important to know the signs that one is participating in a miracle so you can see it through and not mess it up. Because miracles inspire panic, not awe, while they are in process. Keep this... posted on Jul 25 2018 (13,028 reads)

Bakshi is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist and storyteller who writes about social and political movements in contemporary India. Two of her well-known books include ‘Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi’, chronicling the work and lives of activists engaged in social transformation rooted in the philosophy of Gandhi, and ‘Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom: for a market culture beyond greed and fear’ that looks at the history, philosophy and anthropology of market-systems. In this free-ranging Awakin Call with Rajni Bakshi, a wide range of diverse and thought-provoking themes are illuminated. Some examples include what being a child of Partition ... posted on Aug 23 2018 (4,720 reads)

Shamasunder is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder of Heal Initiative. He completed his Internal Medicine residency at Harbor UCLA. He has worked extensively in Rwanda, Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and India. In 2010, he was named an Asia 21 fellow as well as the Northern California Young Physician of the Year. The piece below was originally published in the October 2006 edition of New Physician. Photo credit Frederic Martin Duchamp  The largest Tibetan refugee colony in the world lies five hours from where I spent the summers of my childhood at my grandmother’s house in Bangalore,India. Neither my mother nor my father n... posted on Mar 14 2019 (5,327 reads)

following excerpt by Tsering Gellek is from Tarthang Tulku's new book 'Caring' (Dharma Publishing, 2018).  To care is to really understand that we are in a very concerning situation. As the individual in modern society moves through various spheres of life, from home, to school, to work, to perhaps hospitals and eventually death, she often has less and less support from the people around her. When I imagine earlier times, I think there was a deeper sense of care from family, friends and neighbors, from our religious or sacred communities, from the towns and villages we lived in. This atmosphere of care, of embeddedness, of being inter woven ... posted on Nov 1 2018 (9,315 reads)

mother was a single mom, and I was her only child. We lived in the ’60s in the city in a tiny apartment. My Aunt Rose and cousins lived next-door. Every December my mom spread the word to anyone alone on Christmas Eve that she would be having an open house. My mom believed that no one should be alone during the holidays. If she could, she probably would have put an ad in the paper inviting the world. As it was, our tiny apartment was stuffed, every room but my bedroom filled with partying adults on Christmas Eve. Sleep was impossible, but I tried to fall asleep anyway because Santa would not leave gifts for little girls who were awake (so I was told). As I lay in bed, I wondered ... posted on Dec 25 2022 (18,945 reads)

recently slipped through a sidewalk cellar door to enter the basement of Freebird Books, a large space crammed with books organized into different sections, where I spent the evening reading letters from prison inmates and selecting and packaging books for them. At least twice a week, volunteers go through the 700-800 letters NYC Books Through Bars, a collective based in New York City, New York, receives from inmates every month and fulfill their requests. It's a team effort. Founded 21 years ago, the group seeks to provide "humanitarian outreach to people who are incarcerated," says Daniel Schaffer, a coordinator at the organization. All books... posted on Jan 13 2019 (5,107 reads)

have written often of the value and importance of grief. In the context of this section on resistance, I would like to amplify the essential importance of this often-neglected emotion and situate It squarely in the heart of our capabilities to respond to the challenges of our times. Denise Levertov has a brief, but illuminating poem about grief. She says, To speak of sorrow works upon it moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul’s hall. It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, when left unattended, that block our access to the soul. To be able to freely move in and out of the soul’s inner chambers... posted on Oct 22 2023 (47,714 reads)