Pace Layers 02025 Annual Journal

Long Now’s annual print journal explores the ancient past and distant future of the present moment through essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, and visual art. The journal takes its name and shape from Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand’s pace layers framework — a tool for thinking about how civilizations work. 

Why make time for long-term thinking in a time of crisis? The second issue invites readers to drop out of crisis time and into the long now  — a perspective spacious enough to hold memory, imagination, and responsibility across time. It moves from synthetic minds and human identity through new roadmaps for economic and geopolitical consensus to art, science and stewardship at 11,000 feet on Long Now’s Bristlecone Preserve. Through it all is a focus on honoring what endures without resisting what evolves. 

Featuring an excerpt from Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand; Long Now Talks by Ahmed Best, Kim Carson, Alicia Escott & Heidi Quante, Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson, Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Roman Krznaric & Kate Raworth, Mariana Mazzucato, Jennifer Pahlka, and Julia Watson; essays by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, K. Allado-McDowell, Josh Berson, Benjamin Bratton, Paul Constance, Taras Grescoe, Anne Heggli, Johanna Hoffman, John Last, Rick Prelinger, and Sara Imari Walker; poetry by Devon Balwit; art by Casey Cripe, Jonathon Keats, and Ian van Coller; and photography by Christopher Michel.

Learn more about Pace Layers