mildly ECSTATIC - From the Top

The online magazine New Human City went live in August 2016. Its founding team had been meeting for over nine months, with the working title OM Union, before one of the group, Nijen Cherkezyan, decided it was time to act. With NHC a WordPress fait accompli, Nijen brought in Monica Molotkiewicz as manager, Rob Caico as designer, and Jamie Ker as editor—all OM Unionists and excited volunteers.

By September 2016 the design reached the plateau it sustained for over a year, with Rob's idiosyncratic news heading a weekly list of articles in sections with titles like Marketplace, Travel, Sustenance, Evolve, The People... and a weekly column of editorial license, called mildly ECSTATIC, written by jme.

"Head and Heart", the first mE piece—copied from a post on the Google discussion page for The Move Collective—amplified the message to the Move at the dance on May 1, 2015. "The Long Walk" was the last of the weekly mE pieces; after the May 22 2017 issue, NHC began re-publishing pieces under the heading "GREEN movement" (from a private discussion group for greenmovementtoronto), with the mE column appearing every two weeks.

In October 2017 jme decided to pursue other opportunities, continuing as editor and part of the NHC team but not actively recruiting writers or providing articles. The last mE piece, "Princely Prerogative", came out on October 2. That month, with the looming possibility that NHC might be legally bound to share content, jme hastily deleted the mE files from WordPress. The complete "mildly ECSTATIC" series is being republished here by readwritetoronto.