In Reinventing Collapse, Dmitry Orlov compared the US to where his native Soviet Union was in the mid-1980s--near the edge of imperial collapse. He used to expect five stages of gradual collapse; he explains why the Euro crisis now leads him to believe that industrial civilization will fall apart very rapidly.

Do you want to take your money out of Dow Jones-listed corporations and put it into locally owned start-ups? Sorry--that's against the law unless you're a millionaire. Federal rules designed to protect small investors keep us from putting our money where our values are--but new sources of crowdfunding are finding some ways to get around them, and a rare bipartisan effort in Congress is working to change the law. Alex Goldmark, a contributing editor at GOOD magazine, explains how you can use crowdfunding now and the bills to loosen restrictions on crowdfunding.