I am South African, and although I only experienced the justified sanctions on the country as a child, as an adult I realise both how santioning the country sent a message globally about what was…
Posts Published by Suzanne Whitby
Eierlegende Wollmilchsau
Apparently, a multi-hyphenate is someone who does lots of things, and has lots of hyphens in their job title. For example, I am a futures facilitator-science communicator-storyteller-sustainability chamption-educator-trainer-workshop designer-urban walker-artist. Am I a specialist who…
You call it procrastination. I call it thinking.
You call it procrastination, I call it thinking. – Aaron Sorkin The story: In a talk about procrastination, Adam Grant shared this quote about procrastination. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind “Steve Jobs” and “The West…
Food and violence
Michael Shaikh’s “The Last Sweet Bite” is a fascinating exploration of how conflict changes how and what people eat. And food has so much to do with identity, so this is, for me, a book…
Welcome, ChatMD
According to Futurism, OpenAI has launched a health-focused version of ChatGPT that can ingest full medical records. When people tap into this knowledge, they will see an explicit warning it shouldn’t be used for diagnosis or…
On Attention
Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. —British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist
California’s Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan repurposes fallow land into a 21 GW solar farm
A new initiative in California will repurpose farmland that is no longer able to sustain agriculture. The arid land will be used to build large solar farms, providing renewable energy to the grid instead of…
A nod to an “egoless existence”
He’s the subject of a 2016 short film, The Snow Guardian, and a bar six miles away in Crested Butte is named the billy barr in his honor. (Barr lowercases the B’s in his name,…
A rare, human-scale record of a changing mountain ecosystem in Colorado
Billy Barr has lived in a secluded cabin in Gothic, just north of Crested Butte, Colorado, for more than 40 years. He has also spent over 50 winters living off grid, building one of the…
Cape Minstrel Celebrations, Green Point, Cape Town
Brenton Geach, a South African photographer and contributer to GroundUp. He captured some stunning images of minstrels and crowds at the Tweede Nuwe Jaar Festival.