Gandhi famously said that “you must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Few people embody that idea as well as Jerome Threlkeld, a young activist and community leader from Flint, Michigan. In a city reeling from the collapse of the American auto industry, Jerome is a champion of hope and possibility. [...]

Today it’s widely recognized that we use only a fraction of our human capacities even though we carry within us an almost unlimited power to learn, develop, expand and evolve. Michael Murphy has devoted the better part of five decades charting our human potentialities. He co-founded the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in the [...]

The German philosopher Hegel gave us what is still perhaps the most compelling model of how societies change and evolve. His theory of dialectical progression suggested that cultures evolve in much the same way as ideas or outlooks do. The prevailing concept — or thesis as he called it — over time gives rise to its opposite, its [...]

The history of science shows that breakthrough lies not in discovering new facts so much as discovering new ways of thinking about and making sense of them. More: Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is still the best work on the subject Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers is another favorite because of its forceful argument [...]

For many of us, the word revolution conjures up images of political violence and social breakdown, of insurgent militias and defiant chants, of street barricades made from overturned vehicles and ragged mobs armed with makeshift weapons. For better or worse, the idea of revolution often goes hand-in-hand with images of stormed palaces, random violence against [...]