Twenty years ago, Wikipedia set out on its path to provide humanity with free access to the sum of all knowledge. Even if this is a mission that can’t be finished, Wikipedia has made remarkable progress toward the impos-sible. How so? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia built on a wiki. And never has an application (gathering the sum of human knowledge) been so suited to its medium (easily …
Palaeoecology of Africa(PoA) of which this is the 35th volume, is a series traditionally focusingon multi-disciplinary studies on palaeoenvironments of Africa, especially on more recent parts ofgeological time like the Neogene and Quaternary. The early PoA volumes reveal the developmenthistory of these palaeoscience aspects in Africa. Thanks to the pioneering and visionary effortsof Eduard Mein…
Are architects who write a dying race?”1 asked Belgian architectural theorist and historian Hilde Heynen in 2017, reflecting on the position of the practis-ing architect as a writing scholar in the academic field. In her article, Heynen compares Joan Ockman’s Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology with Michael Hays’s selection in Architecture Theory s…
Th e following book on Bob Dylan’s songs does not directly concern Bob Dylan a.k.a Robert Zimmerman, either the actual person or the musical-cultural celebrity. Nor does it claim to make claims about what Bob Dylan intended in or when composing any one of his songs. Instead, I mostly refer to Bob Dylan’s work and certain biographically relevant events in terms of a fi gur…
Keep Watch! That simple warning summaries Jesus’ teaching about the end-times. That warning accompanied parables that explained its significance. One such story concluded that if the owner of the house had known when the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and not been robbed. (Matthew 24:43) There are practical aspects of keeping watch. Epic world events have already placed the world …
n a suggestive passage, Wilfred Thesiger, or, as his Arab friends affectionately called him, Mubarak bin London, described his encounter with the people of the Empty Quarter in the following terms:“The northern Arabs had no traditions of civiliza-tion behind them. To arrange three stones as a fireplace on which to set a pot was the only archi-tecture that many …
Climate change threatens the physical and mental health of vulnerablecommunities and can have a significant impact on their livelihoods. Climate changecan also deepen existing social and economic inequities and contribute to the erosionof coping skills and resilience. Transformative social and economic responses basedon inclusion and dialogue with members of the community are needed in such ane…
Despite not having been used in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bomb is still the biggest threat that faces us in the 21st century. As Bill Clinton's first secretary of defence, Les Aspin, aptly put it: 'The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is no more. But the post-Cold War world is decidedly not post-nuclear'. For all the effort to reduce nuclear stockpiles to zero, it seems that the…
"This is, for my money, the best single-source primer on the state of climate change." - New York Magazine "The right book at the right time: accessible, comprehensive, unflinching, humane." - The Daily Beast "A must-read." - The Guardian Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know is the essential primer on what will be the defining issue of our time. Newly updated with the latest in …
During the Paris pandemic confinement period of 2020, the dread of viral death was in the air. Confined to the indoors, I took the hint and finished in May my second (and, I think, last) book of drôle poetry called Styling Sagaciousness: Oh Great No! Drollness being essential to a good life, I fashioned Styling Sa-gaciousness as a death farce epic poem divided into seve…