Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • a range of different positively impactful solutions available through our platform

    I have, for reasons which in hindsight are hard to understand, mostly been following UK political news for the last year or so via the New Statesman‘s RSS feed. As such, I’ve also been observing what seemed to be less an editorial drift to the center than an all-out sprint, centered around the black comedy…

  • no such thing as nature

    A serendipitous find: Humans have continually altered biodiversity on many scales. We have changed the local mix of species, their ranges, habitats and niches for thousands of years. Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species shaped their evolutionary course. Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene were capable of…

  • collecting for the collective

    Got yer weak signals right here, guv: Called B-Wa(h)renhaus (an untranslatable pun meaning both department store and “conserving house”), the store covers over 7,000 square feet and sells used and upcycled clothing, furniture, phones and other electronics. In an attempt to reach beyond the usual people who already patronize secondhand shops, the store’s location is also significant: It’s…

  • declining the unearned luxury of despair

    Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber: Our era is drenched in narrative. From the beguiling flame spiral of neoliberalism’s end of ‘grand narratives’, to Trump’s three and four word (lock her up / maga) ultra-short stories of destruction, to our helpless fascination with the far right’s ability to govern by unverified sound-bite, to the fact that…

  • when workshops attack

    TFW you make a bunch of off-the-cuff suggestions around lunchtime on Monday about how you might go about doing some institutional futures stuff in a workshoppy character-driven format, and your PI calls your bluff by saying “sounds good, can you run that on Tuesday afternoon?” ?