The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a philosophical short story by the sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, originally published in 1973 and then re-republished in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), a collection of Le Guin’s short stories. This particular short story (which you can read here) describes the utopian city of Omelas,…
View Post
Adam Nathaniel Furman is a prolific, award-winning artist, designer, and architect of Argentine, Japanese, and Israeli descent. He is currently based in London. He is pioneering a design movement that he has termed ‘New Fabulous London’, which he describes as “design and architecture as a visual and cultural pursuit, which is highly aesthetic, sensual and celebratory…
View Post
I visited Myanmar in 2015 and, unlike in other Southeast Asian countries, US dollars were the preferred form of currency. But the dollars also needed to be crisp and pristine. If you go to a foreign exchange counter or bank and try to exchange creased, ripped, or scribbled dollar bills, they can be rejected. The…
View Post
The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe is little known to most Anglophone readers. He was greatly inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer and has been called one of the “bleakest thinkers of all times and places”. Zapffe was also an avid mountaineer and a friend of fellow Norwegian philosopher – and originator of deep ecology – Arne Næss.…
View Post
Antinatalism is the view that procreation is morally wrong. Its most well-known current defender is David Benatar, a professor of philosophy at the University of Capetown, who explicated this moral position on procreation in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. However, antinatalism long predates Benatar’s work. Antinatalism has…
View Post