Jacob Kuppermann

Sep 29, 2024 | joinreboot.org | Jacob Kuppermann |Shira Abramovich |Hamidah Oderinwale |Hannah Scott

Reboot Macrodoses are an informal ~weekly dump of what our editorial board is reading, watching, playing, seeing online, thinking about, or otherwise experiencing. It includes mini-essays, links, pictures, plus perspectives from our beautiful brilliant readers—if you’d like to publish a 250-word Letter to the Editor about our previous essays, you can now do so here.

Jun 19, 2024 | longnow.org | Jacob Kuppermann

There’s no place like The Interval. There are plenty of cafés where you can work and socialize all over the city — but only one where you can do so among a world-class collection of the books most essential to sustain or rebuild civilization, an eight foot tall Orrery to orient you in real time to your place in our solar system, and an infinitely-shifting piece of generative art by Brian Eno.

Apr 23, 2024 | longnow.org | Jacob Kuppermann

The point of Children of a Modest Star, the new book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, is simple: planetary crises require planetary solutions. But what does it mean to think about our problems – and the structures we make to solve them – using what Blake and Gilman refer to as “Planetary Thinking”? Children of a Modest Star is an ambitious book.

Nov 3, 2023 | longnow.org | Jacob Kuppermann

Our knowledge of the past is inherently imperfect. With every passing moment, information about the present fades and is lost as it recedes into the expanses of memory, never to be recalled. That doesn't mean that there's no point in trying to learn about our history, to expand the corpus of knowledge we have reclaimed from the entropic force of forgetting — but it does mean we have to be aware of our limits when we attempt to gain understanding from the past.

Oct 13, 2023 | longnow.org | Jacob Kuppermann

When the Whole Earth Catalog arrived in the Fall of 01968, it came bearing a simple, epochal label: “Access to Tools.” As its editor and Long Now Co-founder Stewart Brand wrote in the introduction to that first edition, the goal was for the Catalog to serve as an “evaluation and access device” for tools that empowered its readers “to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” The key word in all of that...