All posts tagged: Radical

Radical Healing: From the Clinic to the Classroom

Radical Healing: From the Clinic to the Classroom

Post by Janet Gu, Saleha Mian, Soe Young Lee, and Michael A. Medina (Boston University). For youth of color, psychological well-being is often a community effort. Whether they live in an ethnic enclave or attend a racially diverse school, a young person’s emotional health may depend largely on their engagement with the communities around them. Yet supporting this process may require educators to deviate from traditional teaching methods that focus primarily on avoiding discrimination or reducing harm. While necessary, these approaches rarely envision schools as sites of empowerment, agency, and joy. A potentially more positive alternative for educators may already exist in the counseling practice of radical healing. What Is Radical Healing? The radical healing framework defines psychological well-being and community advocacy as complementary (French et al., 2020). Initially applied in counseling psychology, this practice encourages clinical practitioners to guide youth in drawing strength, support, and well-being from their social connections during times of cultural trauma. For youth of color, this trauma can take many forms: experiences of discrimination, exposure to negative stereotypes, erasure or …

How DeepSeek’s radical architecture is shattering Silicon Valley’s token moat

How DeepSeek’s radical architecture is shattering Silicon Valley’s token moat

DeepSeek’s announcement over the weekend that it has made its 75% price cut permanent on its flagship V4 Pro model is a disruptive assault on the capital-heavy business models of Silicon Valley’s frontier labs.  The reduction on DeepSeek V4 Pro directly undercuts comparable Western models used as workhorses for enterprise production. It is 7x cheaper on inputs and 17x cheaper on outputs than Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT 5.5-Med, while the lightweight DeepSeek V4 Flash undercuts entry-tier alternatives like Claude Haiku by 10x to 25x.  The price cuts are enabled by a series of hardware-software innovations, especially around cache, that make DeepSeek’s models radically more efficient to run. When hosted natively in China, DeepSeek’s cache-read pricing is a whopping 87x cheaper than Western clouds — a deflationary floor so aggressive that handset giant Xiaomi just moved to match the exact pricing tier for its newly deployed MiMo architecture. DeepSeek V4 Pro’s performance is ranked almost on par with Western frontier models, hitting 80.6% on coding-agent tasks via the SWE-bench Verified leaderboard and an elite …

The radical act of slowing down

The radical act of slowing down

This essay is an installment of The Long Game, a Big Think Business column focused on the philosophy and practice of long-term thinking by Eric Markowitz, a partner at Nightview Capital. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter, The Nightcrawler, in the form above. Follow him on X: @EricMarkowitz. I want to tell you two stories. The first began in 1921, when a traveling salesman named William Barnard, nicknamed “Papa,” walked door to door in Ohio selling a 25-cent can opener. He called it the Polly. He believed, earnestly, that a better can opener could improve the health of the American family — that safer access to canned fruits and vegetables, year-round, would help people eat better. Sixteen years later, in 1937, he met an engineer named Al Bersted. By then, Barnard and his wife had turned vegetarian, cut sugar and caffeine, and watched a sick family member recover on whole foods. Barnard had become a health-food evangelist, selling vitamins out of the back of his car. Bersted introduced him to a new invention: the blender. Barnard …

One of the most radical reinventions in evolutionary history

One of the most radical reinventions in evolutionary history

Excerpted from How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David George Haskell. Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Groups, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved. Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors. But marine mammals surface for air. Seagrasses often live entirely submerged. Why did they take the plunge, turning their back on the land to become sea creatures? The world’s continents are fringed by vast expanses of sand and mud. Until seagrasses came along, no plant or seaweed could grow for long in such shifting, unstable conditions. Seagrasses brought to these sea bottoms buried creeping stems, strong roots, and pliable leaves. Not only could seagrasses tolerate this oozy, muddy habitat, they built more of it. Alongside their sinewy body form, the ancestors of seagrass carried with them from dry land two useful features that no sea creature possessed. The …

Julie Campiche: Unspoken review – a harpist’s tender, quietly radical hymn to women who endure

Julie Campiche: Unspoken review – a harpist’s tender, quietly radical hymn to women who endure

When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever. The artwork for Unspoken by Julie Campiche Campiche’s extra-musical agenda here is a celebration of sisterhood, dedicated to women in public and private lives who have inspired her. The opening Anonymous is built around a Virginia Woolf quote – “for most of history, ‘anonymous’ was a woman” – repeated by a chorus of women’s voices in different languages building to a clamour. …

Tending to ‘rough sleepers’ and finding Heschel’s radical amazement

Tending to ‘rough sleepers’ and finding Heschel’s radical amazement

(RNS) — The doors to St. Andrew’s Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which open at 7:30 a.m. on weekdays, opened to a crowd that had been gathering since 6 a.m. in the autumn chill. They were there for a hot breakfast. I was at the church with my daughter, Anna, a fourth-year medical student, one of a team of three volunteers with Wolverine Street Medicine, a favorite extracurricular activity of University of Michigan medical students. Today they were providing foot care in a makeshift clinic they had set up behind a screen in the church’s vestibule. We had to unpack the trunk of Anna’s car. First was the collapsible green cart that we unfolded and stocked with gauze, Band-Aids, anti-fungal lotions and then the instruments she picked up from the autoclave at the medical school. Watching her organize these supplies was among the many moments of “radical amazement” happening that morning, a term first coined by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man,” Heschel wrote in his …

Who Was Dorothy Day? The Radical Life of a Catholic Anarchist

Who Was Dorothy Day? The Radical Life of a Catholic Anarchist

  Dorothy Day lived nontraditionally for a Catholic, yet she has a profound influence on many Catholics today. She is even being considered for canonization. She founded the Catholic Worker Movement, including the “hospitality houses” that serve as purposeful communities.   Catholic Social Justice Press photograph of Dorothy Day, Kadel & Herbert News Photos, August 5, 1924. Source: Swann Galleries   In order to understand Dorothy Day, it is necessary to first have a brief primer on Catholic Social Justice. Catholic Social Teaching is a canonical set of beliefs about social issues. The modern history of Catholic Social Teaching began in 1891 with the publication of Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII. This papal encyclical (a letter written by a pope) responded to problems caused by the Industrial Revolution. Common themes of Catholic Social Teaching are caring for the environment, somewhat left-leaning economic views, caring for the poor, and pacifism. Catholic Social Justice is simply Catholic Social Teaching put into practice.   Whereas the clergy are primarily responsible for coming up with the theological …