With the fast pace of today’s news cycle it can be hard to know what to pay attention to, and information overload is often the inevitable result. Listed under the categories of Economy, Energy, Environment and Geopolitics, our selected news highlights bypass celebrity gossip and partisan politics, cutting through the crap to shine the spotlight on the world affairs that affect us most strongly.
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Jam the frequency with this cheat-sheet of SHIFT’s top 10 culture-jamming tactics – making change really can be as much fun as making mayhem!
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I have an unsponsored Kleenex confession to make: I cried during the Hunger Games. And no, it wasn’t because Katniss put Peeta in the friend zone; a squandered opportunity at cultural critique is far more tragic.
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One of the Open Food Network’s core values is to be open-source and entirely not-for-profit. This allows communities all over the world to access the Open Food Network software, adjust it for their needs, and use it to aid their own efforts, whether they be in inner London or rural India. While the open-source and not-for-profit character of the Open Food Network is great news for farmers and communities globally, unsurprisingly it doesn’t make the project particularly appealing to venture capitalists!
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Every night while you’re asleep, fairies enter your bedroom, put earphones on your head, and play a special endless-loop soundtrack. All night long, you hear, “Growth is good, growth is wonderful, growth is the path to prosperity, growth is success, there is a pot of gold at the end of the growth rainbow….”
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Seventy years down the track I imagine you might be pretty pissed off with us. Especially since historical records will show that we were well aware that the party we were having on fossils fuels was destroying the planet upon which you are now trying to have a good life. The question “what were they thinking?” must be on your mind, just as it is on our minds as we look back at many of the actions of our ancestors.
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The stories we tell ourselves govern our way of life. They form the bedrock of our worldviews, underpinning our perception of reality and directing the course of our society’s development. It should therefore come as no surprise that many of the differences between one society and another hinge upon the stories prevalent within their culture.
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Scholars don’t come much more renowned than Noam Chomsky, a man whose name elicits sage-like nods of recognition when it comes to political pearls of wisdom. The opportunity to pick Professor Chomsky’s brain and capitalize on his immense intellect was something I had been waiting a lifetime to work up the courage to ask for, so I was bowled over by his humility when that time came. Certain that there was nothing I could plonk into my preamble that he hadn’t heard before, I dove right in…
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Clearly what we’ve been doing as responsible citizens and climate activists has not been working as well as we hoped it would; we haven’t built the powerful people’s movement we need for strong climate action. It is time for a new approach – not a shifting of the goalposts, but an attempt to tackle the goal from a different angle.
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All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge.
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SHIFT magazine 