Warning: This commentary is not for the faint of heart.

I thought I'd start this particular Monday morning, May the 14^th, with a little rant. Sometimes it helps to ditch the uber-rational, cool-headed analysis and remind people just how screwed up [More...]

I read a piece on The Huffington Post today that got me thinking. In fact, it got me thinking how curious it is that so many well-meaning and relatively intelligent people arrive at such a diversity of curiously faulty ideas and conclusions, even [More...]

People often ask at our globe-trotting lectures how to go about building community, after we've emphasized the importance of doing exactly that. I wanted to share the best example we've come across so far - Hulbert Street in Fremantle, Western Aus [More...]

This is Jerry McManus' follow-up to his very insightful article, Modeling Collective Behavior, and it delves into the scientific meaning of a commonly-used, but sometimes misunderstood term of complex systems theory - "tipping point". I have [More...]

Teju Cole ‏ @tejucole

7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

The Atlantic Magazine features an excellent article by Teju Cole, which explains t [More...]

The Arctic plains are an eminent example of nature’s untouched beauty: an endless nothing in which only few know how to survive. But a silent assassin is destroying the Inuit community in Greenland. Chemical residues from all over the world a [More...]

Here at TAE, we like to apply the insights of systems theory to our global economic, financial, energy and environmental systems and think in big picture terms about how these systems evolve and interact. That is why, for example, we don't look [More...]

Herman Daly is a formidable mind. He has been writing for many years about the true effects of clinging to our perpetual growth paradigm. Daly concluded long ago that the solution to the plethora of problems this paradigm leads us to would be to m [More...]

The other day, we received a mail from a reader who offered to create a smartphone app for The Automatic Earth. Great! Wonderful! One thing he mentioned, though, was that he would need a logo for that purpose. And we don't yet really have one, do [More...]