Game developer Bennett Foddy was watching a Greek myth unfold in front of him. A playtester for his latest project, Baby Steps, was struggling to navigate the game’s lead—Nate, a 35-year-old “failson” in a stained onesie—up a slippery hill. Each time, the terrain proved to be too much, and Nate skidded uselessly down it.
Foddy has a reputation for making onerous games that take a little bit of masochism to master. This was not one of those times. Neatly placed next to the slippery hill was a staircase, which Foddy says the player took note of after the third or fourth fall. However, this modern-day Sisyphus refused to quit; he continued to flop Nate’s thick limbs up that hill again and again, and he continued to fall again and again. The playtester’s “intense need to climb that mudslide—it’s funny to me, it’s gratifying as a designer,” says Foddy. “I loved that he was doing it. Like, that’s not productive.”
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While often citing American critic and screenwriter James Agee as a model for her emotional and intellectual engagement with the cinema, Kael claimed that she “was more influenced . . . by literary critics, such as R. P. Blackmur.”
Among the earliest forms of visual imagery are, of course, the cave paintings of Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, which often feature images of animals, hunting scenes, dancing people, and handprints that may signify the presence of a specific creator. Although we can’t be absolutely sure what the images were meant to convey, cave painting is a familiar enough case of the impulse of ancient artists to create significant images that seem aimed at replicating and perhaps even controlling an otherwise fleeting reality. Capturing the image of an animal, for example, perhaps meant freezing it in time and thereby magically ensuring good hunting.
I rarely eat fruit. But because I’ve been taken in by healthy living campaigns, I occasionally find myself buying a half kilo of pears or apples or grapes. Why these expensive imports? I think it’s because they were once totally unattainable to me, and now that I can afford them—while I still can afford them—I bring them home and put them in my fridge as a little act of revenge. Rarer still, I might buy a bunch of bananas, just because they’re right there in between the cassava and tempeh at the vegetable peddler’s stall. But I never buy papayas, watermelon, or mangoes. I grew up surrounded by papaya trees and I simply cannot accept a business transaction in their name. Papayas are obtained in two ways: asking or just taking. It’s very hard for me to entertain any other option. And watermelon reminds me of my childhood. From when I was ten until I was fifteen, my mother tried to support us by selling them. She was a very kind woman, but a terrible merchant, and so watermelons bring me back to a time in my childhood that I’d rather forget—grudgingly waking before dawn and trudging to market shouldering two heavy baskets, my mother’s tears over her financial losses and the other burdens she had to bear. Watermelons were my first foray into critical philosophy: Why does the sweet, red watermelon, with no sour bite, sell for so much less than citrus? I’ll eat one now and then, but I won’t buy a fruit that brings back such bad memories.
As the tech industry spends and spends, 
There are two ways to decarbonize: 1) degrowth, and 2) green energy. None of the proponents of degrowth are asking China to stop growing its economy
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It’s easy to take safe drinking water for granted. In most developed countries, access to safe water takes a simple flip of a kitchen tap or a run to the grocery store. But over 
The idea of 
Shamanism defines religion as a yin-yang battle between its “shamanic” and “institutional” elements. The chaotic forces of individual prophecy, possession, and inspiration give rise to formal religious rituals and doctrines, which in turn constrict those same forces. Singh argues for an extreme broadening of what “shamanism” refers to. It encompasses not only Siberian and Pan-American Indigenous practices, whose similarities (and potentially shared Asian origins) have long been acknowledged, but also a broad and much more transcultural spectrum of phenomena including charisma, possession, mounting, glossolalia, dream journeying, catching the holy spirit, trance, and other things. These phenomena all involve inducing special states of consciousness in the “shaman,” their audience, or both, in order to communicate with the beyond: to speak with gods and ancestors, to see the future, or to discover one’s spirit animal.
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