Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence—hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical systems humans create. It is inevitable. And so the challenge is, How much can we understand and predict about these systems and about the social dynamics that lea...

El Último Grito is an avant-garde indie electronic neoflamenco band based out of Paris. I shall consider the rapid evolution of indie economics due to recent technological innovations which have effectively removed the barriers to entry for aspiring indie musicians and critics alike. I argue that the invention of the internet has induced rampant inflationary pressure on indie cultural capital, ...

An ethnographic approach to language aims at explaining the organization of a verbal culture, understood as the result of speakers’ practices and agency. The instrument of this research is fieldwork. For the verbal cultures of bygone societies, only examination of written records helps us to guess how speaking worked at the time. This general issue is addressed by scrutinizing a medieval Catala...

The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, as Viktor E. Frankl’s Logotherapy is commonly hailed, veers around the proposition that the primary motivational force of human existence is neither ‘will to pleasure’ as propounded by Psychoanalysis nor ‘will to power’ of Adlerian concept but a sheer ‘will to meaning’. Logotherapy encapsulates the Greek word ‘logos’ in the sense of meaning, thus maki...

We discuss Russell’s 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell’s application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific ...

Although explicit references to religion are rare in the marketplace, pictorial representations and rhetoric evocative of religious figures and concepts manifest a unique strategy in contemporary American beer branding. By reflecting societal views, prejudices, and preferences, advertising provides an enclosed narrative of how people think and in turn illustrates the way in which society is str...

Contemporary systems of production, distribution, and retail provide many end-consumers, although certainly not all, with an unprecedentedly wide choice of cheap, high quality goods and services. Yet this bounty comes at ever higher, ultimately unsustainable environmental and social cost. Something must change but what and how? Simply how production, distribution and retail are organized? Simpl...

The conceptual relationship between restorative justice and punishment has already attracted a great deal of attention in the literature. A similarly rich body of work has considered the two main aims of punishment, retributivism and reductivism, in relation to criminological theories. It is surprising, therefore, that relatively little (direct) attention has been paid to the relation between r...

Existing norms for scientific communication are rooted in anachronistic practices of bygone eras, making them needlessly inefficient. We outline a path that moves away from the existing model of scientific communication to improve the efficiency in meeting the purpose of public science – knowledge accumulation. We call for six changes: (1) full embrace of digital communication, (2) open access ...