Emergence Magazine Podcast

In this expansive conversation from our archive, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle looks at how the glorification of our own intelligence has shaped the history of technology, and anticipates in our future an “ecological turn” in the way we view and create it. James draws on principles of decentralized knowledge systems, a redistribution of agency among all beings, and an embrace of what is unknowable to envision how our technology could move away from the reductionism of ones and zeros and towards reflecting other kinds of intelligence and the ways we are intimately connected to the world.

Read the transcript.

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Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. Two centuries ago, as many as ninety languages and three hundred dialects were spoken in California; today, only half of these languages remain. In this series, we delve into the current state of four Indigenous languages which are among the most vulnerable in the world: Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu. Along this journey, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.

In Episode One, we are introduced to the language revitalization efforts of these four Indigenous communities. Through their experiences, we examine the colonizing histories that brought Indigenous languages to the brink of disappearance and the struggle for Indigenous cultural survival in America today.

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From the archive, this week’s episode is a conversation with author and artist Jenny Odell. Speaking about her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she challenges the social and cultural ideas that underpin standardized, mechanized time, and imagines how we might instead attune to the rhythms of the Earth and embrace interruptions that allow us to glimpse the inherent unpredictability and creativity of every moment. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we stepped out of chronos time and towards a kairos time?

Read the transcript.

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time.

Photo by Chani Bockwinkel.

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We commissioned four authors to approach the theme of apocalypse through fiction, from the perspectives of past, present, and future. Our fourth and final installment is a short story by Ben Okri, entitled And Peace Shall Return. Ben is a Nigerian poet, novelist, and playwright whose many books and poetry collections include Prayer for the Living, Rise Like Lions: Poetry for the Many, and The Famished Road. Narrated by the British actor Colin Salmon, And Peace Shall Return is set twenty thousand years into the future, when an exploration of the Earth uncovers the final notes and unfinished stories left behind by the last sentient human beings in the twilight of their history.

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Jane Hirshfield’s poetry is both mystical and deeply rooted in physical life, opening our eyes and hearts to what lies at the periphery—what is both ordinary and invisible amid the clamor of modern life—and reorienting us to engage from a space of wonder. In this expansive conversation, Jane recites several of her poems, including "Time Thinks of Time," from our fifth print edition. Drawing on a lifelong relationship with Zen, she speaks about how a profoundly felt intimacy between self and world can recalibrate our ethics, helping us find both humility and an inner spaciousness that can lead us towards being in service to the Earth.

Read the transcript.

Read Jane’s poem "Time Thinks of Time."

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