Independent Media Institute

An international group of researchers and data scientists are creating a comprehensive database of the world’s archaeological knowledge—and changing our understanding of humans’ prehistoric heritage. By Eric Laursen Archaeology isn’t what it was in Indiana Jones’s heyday. The traditional image…

The twentieth century saw the emergence of public funded universities and technical institutions, while technology development was concentrated in the R&D laboratories of large corporations. The age of the lone inventor—Edison, Siemens, Westinghouse, Graham Bell—had ended with the nineteenth century.…

The free and shared goods economy is creating community resilience and alternatives to trash culture for millions of people. By April M. Short Humans have a serious stuff problem. We keep making and buying new things when most of the…

Many people are already investing themselves in the local peace economy as they divest from the economy of war. By April M. Short War is not innate to humanity; it is learned culturally, and intentional systems of peace can prevent…

At this critical moment in human history, a new paper on multilevel cultural evolution shows how looking at our cultural evolutionary origins might help us improve society at many levels. By April M. Short Ours is a critical time in…

No food should be worth the amount of suffering experienced by sentient animals trapped in our food system. By Reynard Loki The facts are clear and they are shocking: Factory farming is unhealthy for consumers, dangerous for workers, and devastating…

The new blockbuster film on Oppenheimer has brought back the memories of the first nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It has raised complex questions on the nature of the society that permitted such bombs to be developed and used and…

At 3 a.m. on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Troops, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani closed the country’s borders and declared a curfew. The coup d’état was immediately…

How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? Three years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis. By Michael Lerner What happened? What Is the Polycrisis? First, let’s…

On Saturday, July 1, 2023, a large crowd gathered inside and around the Ibn Badis Mosque in Nanterre, France, where a seventeen-year-old boy, Nahel M, was mourned and then later buried. Nahel M, of Algerian and Tunisian heritage, was shot…