Documenting the next millennium of Tempe urbanization in history’s slowest photograph

Boasting two interstate freeways and one of Arizona’s largest shopping malls, the city of Tempe has been selected to represent the evolution of world civilization over the next thousand years.

A new cooperative venture at Arizona State University aims to make the university a key academic hub for the emerging discipline of biomimicry. Since Janine Benyus first observed and named the

Radically new visions of the future will be showcased as part of Arizona State University’s Emerge 2015 – a one-day event featuring visionary Jad Abumrad, host of the award-winning show Radiolab, and 10 spellbinding “visitations from the future,” including theatrical performances, improvisation, games, dance and hands-on opportunities to design and build the future.

Climate fiction, or “cli fi,” can be a dreary genre. Storytellers like to make a grim business of climate change, populating their narratives with a humorless onslaught of death, destruction, drowned monuments, and starving children. Margaret Atwood is the conspicuous exception, somehow managing to tackle the subject, including these familiar elements, with deadpan wit and an irreverent playfulness, making it both more interesting and believable. The flood is coming, her MaddAddam trilogy promises, but there is hope.

Want to change the future? Start with a great story. EVOKE is a massive multi-player online educational game that uses narrative to help players develop 21st century skills and drive collaborative innovation. EVOKE “agents” engage online and in the real world in social networks to complete missions that will change their community, their country and their future. EVOKE is a collaboration between the World Bank and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

We are sentimental creatures. And by this I mean to say that we have the capacity to balance our emotions with our mental facility. From Wiktionary, we learn this about the word sentimental and its origins: “A vogue word mid-18c. with wide application, commonly a thought colored by or proceeding from emotion” (1762). The word sentimental suggests a balance: the human balance.