Rethinking Education — Known as the “people of the book”, the Jews valued education since their early history [e.g. Wikipedia]. My parents were both teachers for part of their life. My mom taught art and my father taught history, literature and the bible. My only aunt was a teacher for kids with special…

Can we rebel against ourselves? — An Inconvenient Truth On the hottest day (42 degrees Celsius in my home town of Tel Aviv) of the hottest year of the hottest decade in the recorded history of the human race, I saw an article with the headline “All of Israel will become a desert by 2100”. I remember the documentary…

How can we win? — My parents, my brother and sister, and myself were born and grew up in Israel. My four grandparents emigrated to Israel from Russia in the 1920s after WWI. They came from small towns near Odesa, today the third most populous city in Ukraine, well-known for its beauty, rich history, and…

When it comes to reading Nature’s code we are illiterate — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. Now comes the Omicron variant. In case you are wondering why we skipped some of the letters in the Greek alphabet — we didn’t. Thousands of variants have developed over the nearly two years since COVID-19 (the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus) was first discovered…

From Individual Despair to Collective Hope — Collaborating to Survive This incredible photo is taken from a 2018 story demonstrating how animals take refuge in the trees from the floodwaters in Kimberly, Australia, rubbing shoulders with their predators in the name of survival. Indeed there are many examples of how in the presence of a natural disaster, such as a…

Lessons From Earth Overshoot Day — “Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.” The Global Footprint Network, which originated and maintains the Earth Overshoot Day, explains that “To determine the date of Earth Overshoot Day for each…

How Would You Educate Humanity? — A Thought Experiment Many people I know complain about the Coronavirus. They are also unhappy with other Mother Nature’s “gifts” to mankind, such as tsunamis, hurricanes, thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanos, wild fires, floods, locust, global warming and air pollution. Not to mention poverty, injustice, political polarization, social disintegration, and the list goes on.

Let’s Play Different! — Hail Caesar From Wikipedia: “Bread and circuses (or bread and games; from Latin: panem et circenses) is a phrase referring to superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE — and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts. In…

Totalitarian mass media and anti-social networks — Media — Etymology “The word media is a plural form of the Latin word ‘medium’ meaning ‘middle ground or intermediate’.” In some languages such as Spanish (el medios de comunicación), Russian (средства массовой информации) and Hebrew (כלי תקשורת) the literal translation of media is “means/facilities for communication”. Until recently our image of the…