During my twelve-year quest to complete and publish Mating in Captivity—my memoir of five years, post-Harvard, in a cult with a radical take on sex and relationships—I read many, many cult memoirs. Plus a number of cult-related self-help and narrative non-fiction works and a few cult novels. Nowadays, I still read cult books—just not as […]
More than four years ago, when I first stepped into the Medicine Wheel kitchen, at Earthaven Ecovillage (in Black Mountain, North Carolina, USA), I was not feeling bullish about community. I’d tried that, right? At Zendik. (Yes, Zendik was a cult—but I’d found it in The Communities Directory!) And it hadn’t gone so well. No, I […]
More than twenty years ago, as I was nearing graduation, I instigated a protest against Harvard’s commencement speaker, then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Not because I vehemently opposed his politics, or anything specific he’d done, but because he was a banker. Who I expected would bore the hell out of me with some sold-out […]
In James Howard Kunstler’s 2008 novel, World Made by Hand, the people of the Hudson Valley are struggling: vast numbers have died of influenza; others have succumbed to encephalitis; still others have left Union Grove (a fictitious town in Kunstler’s own Washington County) in search of something better, and—in the absence of telephone, postal, or […]
Hey, humans—how’s it going? Oh, right. Badly. And you blame it on me. It’s true, I am a nasty little fucker (I had to be, to fight my way out of the bat world and into yours). And, yeah, I would love to destroy your way of life. But I’m not actually out to get you. […]
[This is my January column for Livelihood magazine, which recently appeared in print. Enjoy!] As soon as I heard about Jenny Odell’s new book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House 2019), I put it on hold at the library—only to find that I would have to wait in an unusually long line. Apparently, […]
[This is my December column for Livelihood magazine, which recently appeared in print and may eventually show up on the Livelihood website. Enjoy!] When I first started visiting Earthaven Ecovillage, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, nearly four years ago, I found the term “work party” mildly Orwellian. Huh? I thought. I’m not only supposed to […]
[This is my November column for Livelihood magazine, which recently appeared in print and may eventually show up on the Livelihood website. Enjoy!] It’s Friday morning. I step out the front door of my house and climb the bluestone steps up to East Main Street, to check the Gift Library for new offerings. Sure enough, […]
[This is my October column for Livelihood magazine. I’m posting it here, temporarily, until it appears on the Livelihood website. Enjoy!] In past columns, I’ve purported to know what I’m talking about. This month, for a change, I’d like to explore something that remains mysterious, perhaps to you as well: how to create and maintain […]
I wrote this song in 2006, after completing my Permaculture Design Course at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center in Occidental, California (and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature). When I sand it last week at the NYC Permaculture Festival, some listeners requested a recording. Here it is, with lyrics: Oil runs down from […]