Ethics

Report To Greco

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Man reading, Chania, Crete, 1962 (Costa Manos/Magnum Photos)

Click the photo to go to the recent post titled “Do We Need Stories?” in the blog site of the New York Review of Books.  It starts out:

Let’s tackle one of the literary set’s favorite orthodoxies head on: that the world “needs stories.” There is an enormous need,” Jonathan Franzen declares in an interview with Corriere della Sera (there’s no escape these days), “for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter.”

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Universities Pushing Boundaries

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The University of Minnesota has a website devoted to environmental issues, and we immediately enjoy its spirit and perspective.  Click the image to the left to go to one brief article in a series titled “What would it take?”, in this case featuring an interview with Solomon Prakash.  He is asked a series of questions around the specific theme “What would it take for social entrepreneurship to make inroads to poverty?”  His answers conclude with:

I think the next 10 years will be the decade of social entrepreneurs. I see lots of talented people who want to solve social problems making serious career changes. Some mainstream design firms have actually set up a whole branch around social innovation. Consulting companies are looking at hybrid models of social change. Increasingly, companies are saying it’s no longer possible to look at customers just as consumers. More and more people understand that social change is no longer a marginal activity. The opportunity is huge to solve problems and to come up with interesting commercial models that can be sustainable.

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Travel, Writing & Games

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This series has always been worth reading, whether you are an American looking through the eyes of a fellow American, or otherwise intrigued by a niche of American perspective that is not quite representative of that culture as a whole.

First things first: sometimes a book, a music recording or other item is only available from the mainstream online retailers such as Amazon or iTunes, but whenever possible we promote the purchase from independent sellers.  So click the image to the right if you want a link to independent booksellers in the USA, provided by the ever-entrepreneurial American Booksellers Association.

Now, the side show: the series editor Jason Wilson is also a contributor to a site we refer to on occasion, and he wrote an interesting item a couple of years ago that began:

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Ideas About Why To Hug A Tree

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In several earlier posts Seth highlighted the evolution of environmental philosophy in readings for a course he was taking at Cornell University.  For those of us not lucky enough to be in a course like that, there is a magazine whose current issue covers some of the same terrain.  From one of the articles in that issue (click the image above to go directly to the source):

Leopold argued for the extension of what we see as worthy of our respect from the human community to include animals and the natural world, or what he referred to as ‘the biotic community’. His famous principle, briefly expressed, was, ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.

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