The Observatory is a free digital education resource. It offers the public useful information to help them both better understand today’s issues and navigate life in the modern world.

Visitors engage with the Observatory:

Via Search: For expertise by keyword, topic area, or a favorite author.
Via Guides: To get the big picture.

The Observatory uses MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia, to publish content by a team of expert contributors.

Our doors are open: The Observatory is designed to incorporate reader feedback, and for input and collaboration with volunteer researchers and editors.

Our goal is to be an audience-supported education resource that can make a difference.

The Observatory Team

Jan Ritch-Frel

Observatory Co-Founder and Publisher

Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit organization that educates the public through a diverse array of independent media projects and programs. He has worked in independent media for more than two decades and has advised dozens of media companies.

Reynard Loki

Observatory Co-Founder and Environment and Animals Editor

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. His work has appeared in dozens of U.S. and international publications.

April M. Short

Observatory Co-Founder and Local Peace Economy Editor

April M. Short is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and the editor for Local Peace Economy. She has led editorial projects on consciousness, plant medicines, care, and well-being, including Reset.me and Lucid.News (which she also co-founded). Her work has appeared in dozens of U.S. and international publications.

Types of Content

Guides

The guide tools that provide audiences with an expert-curated collection of content that provides a more intensive or big-picture education on a particular topic.

Collaborative Research and Mainframes

The Observatory’s ongoing Collaborative Research projects, edited by a scholarly community.

Collaborative Research: an open-ended investigatory tool that allows multiple contributors to explore a topic, deciding what to share with the public through a peer research and editorial oversight process. Interested audiences can access the prepublication draft text and deliberations. Audiences have the option of supporting the Observatory’s Collaborative Research through a growing range of donation tools, including Crowdfunding.

Contributors can also use this tool to develop Mainframes, knowledge-gathering projects that can be largely expanded on by future scholars and researchers who want to expand or pursue a creator’s initial information project. The Mainframe publishing tool allows for future researchers to expand the scope of inquiry that the original author began, while holding to the initial line of inquiry and methods of communication.

Classics

The Observatory makes well-known works by historians, journalists, and researchers from the past accessible through its convenient long-form text reading interface.

Area Media and Events Calendars

Media guide and events calendar for the Observatory’s Areas that help audiences track conferences, presentations, podcasts, and other listings.

Authors Spotlight

Ed Simon

Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine.

Michael Erard

Michael Erard is an author, journalist, and linguist known for his deep exploration of language, culture, and the human brain.

Tia Schwab

Tia Schwab is a former news fellow for Stone Pier Press, a San Francisco-based environmental publishing company with a food focus. She is a graduate of Stanford University, where she studied human biology with a concentration in food systems and public health. Tia was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and she is passionate about using storytelling to create a healthy, just, and sustainable food system.

Josh Klemm

Josh Klemm is co-director of International Rivers.

Alicia Graef

Alicia Graef is a guardian and dog meat campaigner at In Defense of Animals. A lifelong animal lover and freelance writer with a Bachelor’s degree in animal and veterinary science, Alicia has covered issues relating to animals for more than a decade.

Marjorie Hecht

Marjorie Hecht is a longtime magazine editor and writer with a specialty in science topics. She is a freelance writer living on Cape Cod.

Adam Frank

Adam Frank is the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester and a winner of the Carl Sagan Medal.

Claire Preston

Claire Preston is a professor of early modern literature at Cambridge, specializing in the intersection of 17th-century science and rhetoric. Renowned for her award-winning work on Sir Thomas Browne and Edmund Spenser, she explores how the “New Science” and the era’s information overload shaped English prose and the cultural history of the natural world.

George Prochnik

George Prochnik is an award-winning author and essayist whose work explores psychology, intellectual history, biography, and culture.

John Feffer

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and Global Just Transition at the Institute for Policy Studies.

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