In matters of life and fate, timing is everything. Culturally, socially, materially, the setting of your upbringing, specific to time and place, cannot but impress itself on you. And the parts of your upbringing that are not unique to you, but which are shared by all your coevals, likewise inform their sensibilities, bringing about a cohort of young people with similar experiences, common attitudes, kindred beliefs — in other words, a new generation.

The automobile is a hundred years old. In a mere century, we’ve manufactured billions of them — and pumped trillions of litres of gasoline to keep them running. The oil and auto industries rose in titanic tandem, both creators of unimaginable wealth and sources of employment for generations of workers, around the world.

There's a theory that a microbe-carrying asteroid hit our planet and life began in the warm ocean waters. A few billion years later came our first great migration: we crawled onto the beach and learned how to live on land.

Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.

Here are a few random words: Millennials, depression, anxiety, apathy, suicide, exhaustion, over-consumption, social media, breaking news, housing prices, tuition fees, healthcare, late capitalism, fuck off.

I found you years ago and was deeply inspired. I never missed an issue until they started changing. The overall feeling had become extremely masculine and desperate, and I was forced to let go of a magazine I dearly loved. I see that you use the word “brutal” in your campaign as though it were a good thing, but I think it alienates people.

After learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard an announcement : “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well – one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

“HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union.

In 1930, the English economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that by the year 2030 capital investment and technological progress would have raised living standards as much as eightfold, creating a society so rich that people would work as little as fifteen hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and other “non-economic purposes.”