Strong Food

Whatever happened to hard work?

Review of Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything

Sympathy for a Desert Dog

What the Kalahari Bushmen can teach us about a 15 hour work week

Office working was already on the way out, Covid-19 has just hastened its end

Feeling jealous during the holidays? That can be a good thing

"Rather, it is because envy served an important, if surprising, evolutionary purpose, one that helps us to reconcile this most selfish of traits with the sociability that was so critical to the extraordinary success of our species. "

"The economic trauma induced by the pandemic has provided us with an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with work and to re-evaluate what jobs we consider really important."

How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago.
The prehistoric shift towards cultivation began our preoccupation with hierarchy and growth – and even changed how we perceive the passage of time

The Jackal and the Donkey: How Stories Saved a People’s Identity
Pushed to the margins, the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia built an enduring folklore from the kinship of humans and animals

How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago.
The prehistoric shift towards cultivation began our preoccupation with hierarchy and growth – and even changed how we perceive the passage of time

"The economic trauma induced by the pandemic has provided us with an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with work and to re-evaluate what jobs we consider really important."

The Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari have always been fiercely egalitarian. They hate inequality or showing off, and shun formal leadership institutions. It’s what made them part of the most successful, sustainable civilisation in human history

The Bushmen who had the whole work/life thing sorted out

Tsumkwe is the closest thing to a town in Namibia’s Nyae Nyae district, the epitome of remoteness in a country where almost everywhere is remote. Tsumkwe is also the capital of roughly 3,500 Ju/'hoansi, perhaps the best known of the few groups of people who continued to live as hunter-gatherers well into the 20th century.