Skyscrapers Of Babel: How Ancient Mesopotamia Shaped The Modern City

• by: Eva Miller

Dr. Eva Miller – University College London

06-24-2025 ~ In the early 20th century, architects and artists like Hugh Ferriss drew on the myths and monuments of ancient Babylon to imagine futuristic skylines—melding ziggurats with modernism in a visionary blend of the past and the possible.

In the early 20th century, architects turned to a newly discovered past to craft novel visions of the future: the ancient history of Mesopotamia. Eva Miller traces how both the mythology of Babel and reconstructions of stepped-pyramid forms influenced skyscraper design, speculative cinema in the 1910s and 20s, and, above all else, the retrofuturist dreams of Hugh Ferriss, architectural delineator extraordinaire.

In a dramatic, monochrome rendering in ink and charcoal, a fractal of pyramids and steps regenerates at different scales and angles. Vertiginous towers, the tallest outgrowing the frame, ascend from a base of tiered structures—or ziggurats—rising in regular terraces. The roofs of lower blocks are dotted with minuscule trees that echo the larger, man-made shapes around them. They are the only living things visible at this scale, but an accompanying text tells us that this skyline is populated with people who enjoy the city’s elaborate roof gardens, sun porches, and open-air swimming pools.

This was how Hugh Ferriss imagined the future of urbanism in his treatise Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929). Born in St. Louis in 1899, Ferris trained as an architect and forged a career for himself in a role for which he invented his own job title: “architectural delineator,” bringing other architects’ projects to life on paper. His portfolio, now held by the Avery Art and Architecture Library at Columbia University, speaks to his proximity to numerous major works of modern architecture and engineering, including renderings of Rockefeller Center, Works Progress Administration infrastructure projects, World’s Fairs, United Nations buildings, and various mysterious, unnamed structures of his own imagination—visions swimming up to us through Ferriss’ dramatic wash of line and shadow.

City of Tomorrow
Metropolis is a portfolio of Ferriss’ images, annotated with reflections on the work he had participated in and the architectural changes he had witnessed during recent decades, when American cities, especially his adopted home of New York, exploded upward. He made modest trend forecasts for the near future: glass, he predicted, would be huge (true); hydroplanes would be everywhere (sadly not).

In the final, most memorable section of the book, he sketched a distant City of Tomorrow. This city would be planned along rational lines to maximize human health and spiritual happiness through a three-part plan with districts for art, science, and business, each centered on aesthetically appropriate superblocks.

Ferriss’ dramatic depictions of towering skyscrapers and lofty perspectives became, as media scholar Eric Gordon argues, the means by which “the image of the American urban future in the popular imagination took shape.” His futurism anticipated and influenced Norman Bel Geddes, as he created his Futurama for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Walt Disney Company’s Tomorrowland, TV’s “The Jetsons,” and numerous other prognostications of the rational planned city, the elevated expressway, and the heliport.

Yet Ferriss’s forward-looking vision also repeatedly evoked the ancient past. The pyramid skyscraper that he promoted was, in his own description, a “modern ziggurat,” the monumental architectural form of ancient Mesopotamian cities. Centered in modern-day Iraq, both Assyria and Babylon were geopolitical superpowers of the first millennium BCE, empires discussed in both biblical and classical traditions, which had once been considered lost to the desolating force of time. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the crumbled remains of ziggurat towers had inspired speculative reconstructions.

By the 1920s, German excavations had exposed the well-preserved urban fabric of Babylon’s 6th-century BCE city walls and gates, parts of which were also partially reconstructed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, looking rather Art Nouveau. Meanwhile, the nearby city of Ur was being excavated by thousands of workers in digs sponsored by the British Museum and the Penn Museum, turning up mass burials of gold-bedecked bodies. These new discoveries stirred those who read about them in the popular press to imagine an antiquity that was also somehow strangely modern: The women’s fashion in the Ur burials led to press jokes about the dead bodies being traces of the original flappers.

Ferriss was clearly not the only person who thought there might be some connection between the urban spaces of ancient Babylon and Assyria and the cutting edge of modernity. At a time when being modern, especially in architecture, often meant explicitly rejecting historical reference, it is notable how much the idea of an original urban form structured visions of the future. Read more

Conservation Innovations: How Sustained Resistance Is Saving One Of The Earth’s Most Critical Rainforests From Corporate Greed

• by: Laurel Sutherlin

Laurel Sutherlin ~ Rainforest Action Network

06-22-2025 ~ As profit-driven exploitation imperils Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem, some unique conservation strategies are working to save it.

In Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem, orangutans swing through the treetops, rhinos roam free, and elephants share the land with tigers. It is the last place on Earth where they still coexist in the wild—and it’s under siege. The battle to save it reveals the deep connections between consumer products, Indigenous rights, and the fight for climate justice.

In the far northwest corner of Indonesia’s Sumatra island lies a place so biologically rich and ecologically vital that scientists consider it one of the most critical rainforests left on Earth. The Leuser Ecosystem encompasses over 6.5 million acres of dense forest, peat swamp, and rugged mountains. It is a haven for life—and, until recently, a blind spot in the global imagination.

Leuser is more than a biodiversity hotspot. Beyond its charismatic megafauna, the forest is home to thousands of unique plant and animal species. The deep peat soil stores vast amounts of carbon, making it a natural buffer against the climate crisis. And its rivers and rainfall sustain millions of people in the Aceh and North Sumatra provinces who depend on the forest for clean water, medicine, food, and cultural heritage.

For the Indigenous Gayo, Alas, Kluet, Aneuk Jamee, and Karo peoples, Leuser is not merely a forest—it is sacred ancestral land. Their stewardship has kept the ecosystem intact for centuries. But in recent decades, an insatiable global hunger for one cheap commodity has pushed Leuser to the brink: palm oil.

Conflict Palm Oil: The High Cost of Cheap Convenience
From cookies and instant noodles to shampoo and lipstick, palm oil is everywhere. Found in nearly half of all packaged products on supermarket shelves, it’s the most widely consumed vegetable oil in the world. It’s also one of the most destructive.

Indonesia and Malaysia produce more than 85 percent of the world’s palm oil. To meet rising demand, corporations have cleared vast tracts of rainforest, often illegally, to plant monocultures of oil palm. The result has been catastrophic deforestation, widespread human rights violations, and the draining of carbon-rich peatlands that accelerate global warming.

Nowhere has this destruction been more visceral than in the Leuser Ecosystem. Fires were raging in the Tripa peat swamp—a part of the Leuser Ecosystem—set intentionally to clear land for plantations. Endangered orangutans were dying in the flames. Smoke blanketed nearby villages. The world wasn’t watching—yet.

In 2012, an emergency call from Indonesian allies reached the offices of my organization, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) in San Francisco. We responded by launching what would become a decade-long campaign of investigations, corporate pressure, grassroots action, and international media advocacy aimed at defending this last wild stronghold from the bulldozers of industrial agriculture. Read more

Israel’s Assault On Iran Is Unambiguously Criminal

• by: Alexandra Boutri & C.J. Polychroniou

06-21-2025 ~ Israel’s attack on Iran was completely unprovoked and constitutes an act of calculated aggression. As such, Iran has every right to defend itself.

Scores of countries across the world have issued a sharp condemnation of Israel’s attacks on Iran. So what? There have also been sharp condemnations all along by members of the so-called international community of Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Do such condemnations amount to anything?

Apparently not, as political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou alludes to in the interview that follows with independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri, when Israel enjoys the full support of the biggest bully in the world (a.k.a. the United States of America). Nonetheless, Israel’s latest adventure by the Netanyahu government is unambiguously criminal, says C. J. Polychroniou, and may ultimately change the strategic reality of the Middle East.

Alexandra Boutri: Fears of a broader conflict in the Middle East are rising fast following Israel’s large-scale military attacks on Iran, which targeted key nuclear and missile sites and resulted in the deaths of Iran’s top military officials and several of that nation’s nuclear scientists. Why is the West silent over Israel’s engagement in state-sponsored terrorism and its genocidal campaign against Palestinians? Why are there no efforts to isolate Israel diplomatically?

C. J. Polychroniou: Israel is a powerful nation and the closest ally of the United States, while its economy is fully integrated into the global economy. Due to the backing of the U.S., Israel feels that it is immune to any measure of international accountability. Indeed, as the Israeli dissident and genocide expert Raz Segal has explained, Israelis feel they are above the law. So, Israel can act like a rogue state with no fear of punishment. Western governments won’t engage in any course of action to isolate Israel diplomatically, even when they know that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is committing genocide in Gaza and engaging in state-sponsored terrorism, because that would mean going up against the United States. Needless to say, that makes all Western governments, including mainstream Western media, complicit in Israeli crimes. But what is even more infuriating and morally reprehensible is that “the more Israel kills, the more the West portrays it as a victim.”

Alexandra Boutri: Is there evidence that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons? In either case, can Israel’s assault on Iran be justified?

C. J. Polychroniou: There is a long history behind Iran’s nuclear program. With assistance from the United States and Europe, Iran had launched an ambitious nuclear project under the Shah. But the Islamic revolution in 1979 and the subsequent war between Iran and Iraq put a halt to that project. However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Iran started working on a covert project to develop nuclear weapons called the Amad Plan. But the Amad Plan was abandoned in late 2003, perhaps due to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that same year. But Iran’s nuclear program went on, and the official position of the Iranian government has been all along that it is solely for peaceful energy purposes. The country’s nuclear facilities have been operating under the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed, even on the eve of Israel’s bombardment of Tehran, that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Read more

Were Canadian Elections Existential In the Context Of US-Canada Tensions? (Part 2)

• by: P. Ambedkar & Arnold August

06-22-2025 ~ Editor’s Note: This interview is part two of two and was edited for length, clarity, and style.

There was a lot of talk in the media about Trump’s desire to annex Canada and make it the fifty-first state of the United States. Even the 2025 Canadian elections were fought on this line. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned and appointed Mark Carney as his successor. Even though many say that Canada is inherently opposed to the United States’ big brother attitude, the ruling elites are hand in glove with the US.
To learn more about this, P. Ambedkar of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research spoke with Arnold August, writer, political commentator, and analyst of the North American continent, on the mood of the people and what lies in store for Canada.

How Did Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ‘Anti-Trump’ Narrative Play Out During the Campaign? Also, Former Prime Minister Trudeau Reacted Sharply to Trump’s Statements on Canada.

The liberal ruling elites faced a formidable challenge in the face of widespread public hostility to the US throughout Canada. How should [ruling elites] portray Carney as a patriot standing for Canadian sovereignty? Yet even the Carney ‘anti-Trump’ narrative was shaped in the US. In April, the New York Times set the tone for Canada, dictating to their Canadian counterparts: ‘Canada Votes: What’s at Stake? Many Canadians believe Monday’s election is the most important of their lifetime. It will determine who will take on a stagnant economy and deal with President Trump’.

In a 22 April 2025, Wall Street Journal article headlined ‘How Canada’s Trump-Style Candidate Blew a 20-Point Polling Lead’, it concludes that ‘[Conservative Party leader] Pierre Poilievre’s populist message was resonating until Trump’s antagonism pushed Canadians toward former central banker [Mark Carney]’. The New York Times also chimed in by anointing Carney in this way: ‘Canada’s Anti-Trump Finds His Moment… Mark Carney, the new prime minister seeking a full term in the elections, has built his campaign around President Trump’s threats to the country’. The state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) took the cue from the US media: ‘Trump reinserts himself into Canadian politics, saying ‘as a state, it works great”’, by positioning itself and Carney as opponents and not subservient to Trump’s policy.

The reality is that Canada’s Trump-style candidate did not blow a twenty-point polling lead. Instead, the US-Canada elites switched from the Conservatives to the Liberals. Why? The reason is that they figured that Carney would be in a better position to co-opt the rising anti-US tide in Canada, rather than the Conservatives, in being compatible with Trump, while at the same time not allowing this treason to be so obvious. Trump himself let the cat out of the bag. Trump, speaking to reporters during a cabinet meeting at the White House after the election results, said, ‘I think we’re going to have a great relationship… He called me up yesterday and said, “Let’s make a deal”… He couldn’t have been nicer’. ‘He was running for office’, Trump said, speaking of Carney. ‘They both hated Trump, and it was the one that hated Trump, I think, the least, that won. I actually think the Conservatives hated me much more than the so-called Liberals’. Read more

How Much Of The Past Should We Bring Back To Life?

• by: Brenna R. Hassett

Brenna R. Hassett – Photo: en.wikipedia.org

06-20-2025 ~ There is an incredible amount of scientific effort put toward understanding the past and bringing some of it back to life. Everyone agrees it’s nice to have some old structures around—like the pyramids at Giza and the Great Wall of China—but what about the living creatures we once lived alongside? With recent advances in genetic technology, de-extinction may be a possibility—but should we be doing it?

Several scientific disciplines are currently geared specifically to provide us with realistic insights into what life would have been like in the past. Archaeology in particular has rank after rank of specialists tuned toward reconstructing the built environment—monuments, houses, caves, and even whole towns—and the ways people would have lived in those environments. We conduct these experiments to understand the choices our species has made as we evolved into the cultures and societies that exist today, and we conserve the walls and temples of our pasts because they mean something to the people who visit them.

We have highly trained conservators who carefully rebuild, brick by brick, the great Mesopotamian temples of 5,500 years ago (alongside conservators who are not as well-trained but whose good intentions outstrip their abilities, as seen with the case of the Ecce Homo reconstruction in Borja, Spain). There are also an extraordinary number of experimental archaeology projects aimed at unraveling even the most intangible mysteries of the past—helping us see that the beautiful Paleolithic art in caves like Lascaux may have been an early form of animation when seen under a torch, or that making some stone tools requires special cognitive abilities.

Advances in technology make the reconstruction of the past increasingly realistic. But what if we could recreate the living environment of our evolutionary past? What if we could bring back species that haven’t been seen since the last Ice Age?

This is exactly the question that a major new research effort is asking. The Colossal project is a private enterprise that wants to use advances in genetics to attempt the “de-extinction” or “resurrection” of an iconic Ice Age animal: the woolly mammoth. De-extinction has certainly grabbed imaginations (not to mention headlines), but as research funding is squeezed by economic conditions around the globe, scientists must ask themselves: what will this achieve?

For Colossal, there are clear benefits. There is the wow factor of creating a cold-adapted elephant that has not existed for thousands of years, and of course, there is the potential of developing new and, possibly, incredibly lucrative bioscience tech based on modifying genetics. Perhaps these technologies could save animals from extinction and bring back the past, even if many scientists are concerned about the prospect due to ethical and technical reasons.

However, as archaeology has learned, bringing back the past is never as straightforward as it seems. Something as obvious as preserving 1,000-year-old ruins for future generations to marvel at becomes less clear-cut when future generations might need to build their own monuments and walls (or even just roads). How much of the past should we bring back? The debate over how much of the Stonehenge prehistoric landscape should be sacrificed to build a tunnel for one of the most congested roads in England has shown that even trained professionals can’t agree on what is “enough” of the past to save.

This makes for some tricky questions for those who want to rebuild and recreate the past. What will happen if we really do succeed in the ‘de-extinction’ of a woolly mammoth—an animal that will be born alone into a world that it is not adapted to? Will it help us save the elephants that are under threat today? Colossal is putting a lot of effort into elephant conservation, but how will creating a genetically cold-adapted elephant address the habitat loss that has led our big-bodied species to face extinction? Would we be better off spending our research efforts on recreating the environments of the past, or the charismatic animals who once roamed them?

What parts of the past to preserve—and which to leave behind—remains a complicated tangle of ethical, practical, and even philosophical quandaries. The toppling of a historic statue of a slave trader into Bristol harbor in 2021 by outraged citizens is a clear example of how governments, citizens, and professionals are still grappling with how we bring the past into the present. As technology advances, we will be confronted with even thornier issues—like the ethics of bringing animals or even people back to life. If we cannot agree on the morality of preserving the past as a cold metal statue, how will we resolve the question surrounding the consequences of bringing something that lives and breathes back into the world?

By Brenna R. Hassett

Author Bio: Brenna R. Hassett, PhD, is a biological anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire and a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum, London. In addition to researching the effects of changing human lifestyles on the human skeleton and teeth in the past, she writes for a more general audience about evolution and archaeology, including the Times (UK) top 10 science book of 2016 Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death, and her most recent book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood. She is also a co-founder of TrowelBlazers, an activist archive celebrating the achievements of women in the “digging” sciences.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.

How Inclusionary Social Movements Succeed

• by: Colin Greer & Eric Laursen

06-20-2025 ~ Social movements are powerful engines for change, and they coalesce around a vast range of issues, causes, and communities. But they fall into two basic categories: inclusionary and exclusionary.

Inclusionary social movements attempt to “widen the ‘we.’” That means they work to expand the circle of power, securing the allegiance of a widening galaxy of groups by appealing to their material needs and desire for participation and empowering them to make decisions, thus building a caring society and driving democracy forward. The examples are legion, especially in the U.S. postwar decades: the labor movement, civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and the anti-nuclear and environmental movements.

Exclusionary social movements attempt to concentrate power and privilege in a narrow but fiercely loyal category of people. They do so by embracing—in the most negative form—the three perennial drivers of individual and social development: the impulse to bond, the scarcity mind, and historical and trans-historical trauma. The Ku Klux Klan and other racist movements of the first half of the 20th century are examples of social movements driven by the scarcity mind, as are the Tea Party and today’s Christian nationalism, QAnon, and MAGA.

The driving force behind inclusionary and exclusionary social movements is a desire to control the center of power. We define the center as not just the government and the commercial sector, but the common sense that people carry with them: how they view the world and human society, and what they believe is their responsibility toward them. The degree of influence they exercise over the center—their ability to govern—is also the degree to which a social movement can realize its vision for the whole society.

Given their desire for control, movements inevitably clash, and in the process, attempt to expand their base by building off their adherents’ antagonism. The New Deal/Great Society administrations exploited the hunger for change provoked by the Great Depression to build a coalition that eventually spanned farmers, industrial workers, and underserved racial and ethnic groups and brought about enormous social advances. The conservative 1971 Powell Memorandum was, in effect, a blueprint for building popular opposition to the New Deal/Great Society consensus. The waves of right-wing populism that followed moved the Republican Party toward nativism and xenophobic nostalgia while targeting the inclusionary impulse as un-American.

Is There Hope for a New, Inclusionary Social Movement?
Inclusionary and exclusionary impulses occupy two poles on a spectrum of social and political consciousness: the former, as historian Linda Gordon writes, driven by disappointments, the latter by grievances.

With a malignant, grievance-fueled, exclusionist social movement in the political ascendancy today, this may seem to be a less-than-ideal time to launch (or relaunch) a movement founded on inclusivity. Any effort to do so must confront toxic elements, including:

– Rejection of empathy for poor, marginal, and traditionally disempowered groups;

– Alienation from a wider collective social identity not centered on grievance;

– A punishing brand of religiosity;

– Loss of faith in government as a tool for implementing broadly inclusionary social programs; and

– A culture of debt and austerity that reinforces the scarcity mind.

There are reasons to believe, however, that a new inclusionary movement is not only possible but also practical. While political polarization and an appeal to nativism and culturally narrow nostalgia have enabled exclusionary movements to gain and consolidate power over the past five decades, they only paper over an increasingly widespread understanding that people’s material needs are being ignored. This manifests itself as:

– Immiseration: an eroding standard of living for working-class Americans;

– Vast economic inequality and barriers to upward mobility, affecting even the upper-middle-class;

– Relentless austerity, creating a sense that the economic and social problems the government traditionally has addressed are insoluble;

– The undermining of basic services—Medicaid, Disability Insurance, and public infrastructure—that an increasingly broad range of people have come to rely on materially and morally; and

– Alienation generated by the right’s relentless efforts to keep its base loyal by scapegoating racial and religious minorities and the LGBTQ+ community.

Addressing these disappointments is impossible without the widest possible social consensus. That being the case, they constitute an invitation to propose changes that bring society back together, even when the dominant movement is authoritarian and exclusionary.

There are deeper resources as well that an inclusionary movement can draw upon:

– A reservoir of goodwill and legitimacy that popular government enjoys even in the worst of times.

– The historical achievements that confirm social policy driven by inclusionary social movements can improve the lives of the majority.

– The plasticity of the human mind. Our minds are more flexible, capable of more transformation and growth than we think, and human interaction is often the leverage that enables us to change our minds.

– The persistence of variety. While the range of political and economic structures on offer has lately appeared to narrow, this has not been the case for most of human history. Even today’s mainstream political parties—in the U.S., Republicans and Democrats—were founded in opposition to the existing political establishment or in a conscious effort to address issues and conditions it was ignoring. There is no reason to believe our choices or our inventiveness are more limited now.

This places the inclusionary impulse in the mainstream of our expression as a human culture: something that an exclusionary movement can only occupy partially and temporarily. Read more