Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_swanj/)
In the last years of the nineteenth century, two adolescent great powers — the United States of America and the recently founded collection of states called the German empire — stepped onto the world stage, flexing their muscles and arming for war.
A Menu of Choices for an Embattled Incumbent.
Jon Swan urges mainstream media outlets to overcome their paralysis and confront “the single-most important story of our time: climate change, its causes and effects.”
“And the moment I was able to look them / in the eye, they opened theirs, // as surprised as I was to find themselves alive.” A new poem from Jon Swan.
“The sea that tumbles onto shore is not the sea / we waded in as kids. We’ve changed its nature.” A new poem from Jon Swan.
“so now we […] may nightly observe […] the deft undoing of what we once / had thought would long endure.” A new poem from Jon Swan.
Jon Swan reports on the disastrous effects of travel on the environment, and argues that we are “doomed unless we radically alter our priorities.”
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The backwards-brain bicycle, created for Destin Sandlin, the host of a Facebook show called Smarter Every Day, is a regular bike that has been modified so that if the rider turns the handlebars to the right, the bike goes left. And vice versa. The short Facebook film shows the host and several others, in various countries, attempting to ride
the backwards-brain bike and failing. They can’t go four feet without putting a foot on the ground or falling. The point of the film is that the how-to-ride-a-bike algorithm is so strongly fixed in the adult brain that it takes months to retrain the mind to accept the new algorithm.
And it came to pass
we multiplied until there was
no room for more of us
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Tikkun 2016 Volume 31, Number 4: 57
Jon Swan’s poem about drones is a haunting vision. “The drone hovers under the iron-gray dome of heaven . . .”