Chelsea Edgar writes for Seven Days on the traditions and legacies of the Bread and Puppet Theater, a mainstay of the East Coast (and particularly Vermont) counterculture: A short distance into the pine forest above the circus field, just beyond the remnants of a Baldwin piano that has been left to molder in the elements, … Read moreBread and Puppet Theater Memorial Shrines
Sophie Brickman writes for The Atlantic on the transformative power of The Muppets as she grieves her father: That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I’d find when I walked … Read more“Grief Counseling With Kermit”
Amy Kurzweil and Daniel Story write for Aeon on the questions raised by interactive LLM AI simulations of deceased people: These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters … Read more“Chatbots of the dead”
Petals fell, poetry was spoken and honey tasted to commemorate the life and death of American author Tom Robbins: The search for meaning is not a whole lot different than the yearning for certainty, which is to say, an unsuitable pursuit for any who might aspire to nimbleness of mind, amplitude of soul, or freedom … Read moreTom Robbins (July 22, 1932 – February 9, 2025)
A short, informative presentation on the Festa dei Morti traditions of Sicily.
My Memoria symbolically began very early, with the inaugural Sky Meadow Mystery School event in Vermont; at that time there were just the first hints of change, tiny patches of russet in an arboreal sea of green, spreading almost imperceptibly during our magical week in the mountains. Now Fall has finally fallen; an exceptionally dry … Read moreMemoria 2024
Thomas Moynihan writes for the BBC on a novel immortality project proposed by the English historian and freethinker Frederic Harrison in 1890: With posterity on his mind, Harrison decided to write an article titled “A Pompeii for the Twenty-Ninth Century”. Leaping off from a forecast that London may one day be as “desolate” as the … Read more“If a Victorian historian had his way, there’d be a giant time capsule under Stonehenge”
The First Protocols of Queer Goetia is an anonymous text first published in 2019. It begins: [1. QUEER: “strange, peculiar, eccentric.” From the German quer meaning “oblique, perverse, odd” which in turn comes from the Old High German word for “oblique.” twerh, which is derived from the root terkw, “to turn, twist, wind” as in “the labyrinth turns, twists, winds.” … Read more“The First Protocols of Queer Goetia”
In the final moments of golden hour, petals fell into the North Branch of the Chicago River this evening in memory of Jayden Perkins, aged 11, who died heroically defending his mother from a domestic abuser.
Mihika Agarwal writes for Vox on the rise of AI-assisted grief processing: In the spring of 2023, Sunshine Henle texted her mother. She asked where she had gone, told her that she missed her, and soon received a response: “Honey, I wish I could give you a definite answer, but what I do know is … Read more“The race to optimize grief”