It's probably clear by now that I refuse to call Twitter by that other name. It's kind of like Prince: it can try to change its name and graphics, but the name remains the same. There were a few times this month where, once again, I thought the whole site was going to break down, but it persists.
I've set up shop on Bluesky and like it pretty well so far. A lot of my local folks have migrated there, so it's getting a pretty good feel on that front. Twitter is partly a ghost town and partly functional in terms of its previous function. I can't help relying on it for news, but it constantly lets me down.
This month is full of climate crisis and climate solutions, the crisis of democracy, and not much about specific news because that's the state of Twitter. Though I guess there's a bit about some of the Trump indictments.
Everything below the line is a quote from the attributed account. Tweets are in reverse chronological order except the images, which have been moved around more than usual because they were really clumped in the middle of the timeline.
_____
Building a temporary city of 80,000 people in the desert, like Burning Man, is actually bad for the planet.
@voxdotcom
A new study examined all car crashes in Belgium from 2017–21. Key finding: Pickup trucks kill. Compared to cars, pickups are:
• 90% more likely to seriously injure a pedestrian in a crash
• 50% more likely to seriously injure someone in another car
Another key finding: A pedestrian struck by a vehicle with a hood height of 90 cm (35 in) is 30% more likely to be killed than if the hood was 10 cm (4 in) lower. For context, a Ford F-150 has a hood height of 55 inches.
David Zipper
If you’re a conservative, you believe a court trial for a rich white guy is not due process and a summary police execution for a Black guy is.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat
For every $1 the federal government spends auditing the top 0.1% of earners, it makes back $6.
Jordan Weissmann @JHWeissmann
So, when anyone says "we need new nuclear," just reply "investing the same money instead in solar PV produces 5.3 x the energy over 65 years." That is due to the higher capital cost (15.7 x) and longer delays between planning + operation (17-20 y vs 1-3 y) of nuclear.
Mark Z. Jacobson
My bus delayed behind two cars on a bus-only road. This is the downtown lawlessness that needs to stop!
wpb003
New study: using EPA's $190/ton cost of carbon, a new study estimates how much it would cost businesses to pay for their pollution. Answer: it would consume 44% of corporate profits. For several highly polluting industries, it would *wipe out profits entirely*, meaning they only survive by socializing costs.
David Roberts @drvolts
I’m amazed at the shills for Big Oil — and their bots on Twitter — are suddenly pretending to care about the impacts of mining, but *only* when it’s for renewable energy and battery components. The fact that fossil fuels require far, far more mining doesn’t seem to matter.
Dr. Jonathan Foley @GlobalEcoGuy
17 EU countries generated recorded share of power from renewables in 1st half of 2023
>Greece and Romania above 50% renewables
>Denmark and Portugal above 75%
Result: EU electricity from fossil fuels collapses 17% to record low, saving citizens €100b.
Assaad Razzouk
At what point do we move beyond asking questions that already have definitive answers—
Do N95 masks really block air particles?
Is it a problem if we destroy our primary source of oxygen on earth?
Does gun violence decrease when there are fewer guns?
Are books good?
The news is like, “is climate change to blame for extreme weather??” Y’all this was known during the Carter Administration. Can we not?
Bree Newsome Bass
It should be considered an ADA violation to provide an improved / accessible path that's 10x as far as the direct path that could have been paved:
Sean Hayford Oleary @sdho
I say again: the health benefits of reduced air pollution would pay for the clean-energy transition on their own, even if climate change didn't exist.
David Roberts @drvolts
“I’m not guilty for the sins of my ancestors or people who were here before me.” If you keep their ill-gotten wealth and uphold their racists systems… yes, you definitely are lol
Bree Newsome Bass
Gonna start referring to any conservatives as They so that they can be the ones who correct me with their preferred pronouns
Wes Burdine @MnNiceFC
You have to recognize Trump should be held accountable for his crimes while also understanding the problem is much deeper than him. Relatedly, you have to stop fetishizing institutions that created this problem in the first place just because they’re holding him accountable.
Jared Yates Sexton
Inconveniencing a driver is basically grounds for summary execution to most Americans
DON FERRARI @donferrari4
“Let the voters decide.” We did. You keep overthrowing our will.
Bree Newsome Bass
Because our jobs aren’t hard enough. These are vape pens and not highlighters:
Dawn Kasal Finley
Gotta love the depravity of the tobacco industry.
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking
The perspective of the Florida Department of Education is that students cannot learn anything about history that might lead them to question existing social arrangements so, you know, they can't learn anything.
Jamelle Bouie @jbouie
There is absolutely no reason to assume Trump or any Republican can win the popular vote. So for the third time in 8 years, we’re talking about overruling popular will in some form or fashion, most likely with violence, to install a far-right Trump (or Trumpian) presidency.
Bree Newsome Bass
Mississippi has significantly higher rates of drug use, mental illness, unemployment, and poverty than California. But homelessness there is a whopping 10x lower, because at the end of the day homelessness comes down to whether someone can afford to pay the rent.
Aaron Carr
My only hot parenting take that will probably help me lose followers: You cannot love your child the way a child needs to be loved *and also* believe their natural behavior is sinful and needs salvation.
@life_she_wrote
Humans who bike: “Can we get something other than plastic posts to protect bicyclists?”
Traffic engineers: “No! That poses a danger to motorists.”
Also, traffic engineers: Here’s a substantial bollard to protect our precious traffic signal equipment. This is a must for safety:
Don Kostelec @KostelecPlan
BBC Science Focus Magazine article: 20mph speed limits do save lives, and most road users respond to them well, study suggests.
20's Plenty for Us
One of the funnier aspects of American politics is how Republicans have no idea why red states are successful. They think it's tax policy when in reality it's almost 100% housing costs. For the typical family, the gap in taxes between Texas and California is minuscule compared to rent
Swann Marcus
The real trolley problem is we don't have enough trolleys
Chris Steller
The right-wing version of the First Amendment allows for unlimited dark money and political corruption, but not small signs protesting gun violence.
David Roberts @drvolts
Now that reproductive rights have become a winning issue for the left, it's important that liberals sell out the women who support them by making a compromise that the right will never stick to, for the good of the country.
New York Times Pitchbot @DougJBalloon
"Wider streets are better for the environment because they eliminate idling."
@Qagggy
If we made the police academy a 4-year program I bet we'd get rid of a lot of the "bad apples." I don't understand how a lawyer has to go to school for 8 years to understand the law enough to practice it, but it only takes 6 months to learn it enough to enforce it.
Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa
A fun fact about Japanese public schools is that many are located about a 15-minute walk from the nearest train station, and in Tokyo at least, both teachers and students are required to walk or bike to school
@pastoralpunkdys
The idea that art should be apolitical is a fundamental misapprehension of art.
David Ulin
If you think you love "freedom" but you don't care if it applies to everyone, what you actually love is "PRIVILEGE." Read that again.
@wordsRmightier
So far this year, wildfires in Canada have burned a land area larger than 140 of the world’s 230 countries. The season has months to go, and, as has been the case for months already, more than a thousand wildfires are burning across the country, more than half “out of control.”
David Wallace-Wells
'the driver was an instructor' at the driving school. SUVs. so unsafe even instructors can't safely handle then:
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
A Climate Nexus poll found that 52% of Americans consider natural gas "clean energy" while only 19% consider methane gas clean energy. That 33% bump up in positive mental associations with the term natural gas was paid for by, you guessed it, the (dirty) methane gas industry.
Ed Maibach
LA Metro estimates it will spend up to $25M on a CEQA study to build a bus rapid transit line. India just landed on the moon for $90M.
Armand Domalewski
If we persist in declaring politicians "winners" in debates despite those candidates spewing blatant lies, we only have ourselves to blame.
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD
Republicans know climate change is real. They also know their political fortunes are chained to lying on behalf of the fossil fuel billionaires and corporations. The entire point is to profit off the cause of the destruction and then pivot to profiting off the destruction itself. We spend most of our time and energy treating GOP positions as if they’re real instead of cynical and strategic. There are no principles. They’re all cudgels. The quicker people start to understand this the better.
Jared Yates Sexton
Today's three snapshots of what is happening to this country:
Alfie Kohn
Drivers think they're entitled to free plentiful parking, cheap gas, high speed limits, no congestion, and unlimited funding for projects that benefit them. Meanwhile all I wanna do is have a safe and uneventful bike ride to work.
Milwaukee Ave Bike Lane
Might as well report Trump's height is 10'13 and weight -130 lbs if Fulton County jailhouse is going to let him self-report fake stats.
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking
People have to die before you'll act. That's not vision zero. It's zero vision
@Jrock08
Quite extraordinary that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice relentlessly lobbied Mark Meadows to commit the alleged crimes that landed him in jail today.
Mark Joseph Stern @mjs_DC
Canada’s fires have this year produced about twice as much carbon as the entire rest of the country—its power sector, its transportation sector, its industry and infrastructure and agriculture forestry, all combined.
David Wallace-Wells
During my 20 years in politics, two destructive trends stand out: the steady radicalization of the Republican Party and the trivialization of politics, particularly the way it is covered by US media and how politicians respond to that dynamic.
Ben Rhodes
Oil energy is a tremendous slow motion explosion. It’s like being hit with over 90 million atom bombs since the start of the industrial revolution.
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!
The G20 agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies in 2009, 14 years ago. They then said they're accelerating this at the Glasgow COP26 climate conference in 2021. Result: In an amazing act of self-harm, the IMF says we subsidized Big Oil with a record $7 TRILLION in 2022. Cash subsidies have, incredibly, more than DOUBLED since the previous IMF assessment, from $0.5 trillion in 2020 to $1.3 trillion in 2022. Global fossil fuel subsidies and costs hit record $7tn in 2022, IMF reports. Government efforts to cushion prices for consumers lead to even higher amount paid from warming and air pollution. The irresponsibility of our political classes is a sight to behold.
Assaad Razzouk
Take away the metal bits, along with the sofa and two armchairs, and you realise how much of our urban space is taken up by something that transports so few people:
A56 Safety Campaign
How zoning guarantees a housing shortage:
• Want to turn a dozen small apartments into a mansion? Here's your permit.
• Want to turn a mansion into a dozen small apartments? Do an environmental report, attend multiple public hearings, pay $500K in fees, bribe council...
M. Nolan Gray
It's kinda amazing how little thought is given to the true macroeconomic risks of the climate crisis. The potential "costs" are often thought of as a one-time hit to GDP. But that's not how things are, or will continue to, unfold.
@MarkVinPaul
There's a great study...recently at California YIMBY showing that while people correctly understand supply and demand elsewhere in the economy, they flatly refuse when it comes to housing
Robert Cruickshank
"It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country." –Howard Zinn, born on this day [August 22] in 1922
Radical Reads
Radley Balko’s questions include this one on the death penalty: “If you don’t trust government to, say, regulate the environment or promote public health, why do you trust the government to justly, fairly, and competently take a life?”
Robert Dunham
Imagine the trauma of being told [you'll face an early grave if you clown around and don't perform] as a Black kid in school. But DeSantis is worried white kids are uncomfortable with true historical facts.
Judith Browne Dianis
Mainstream narrative:
Tom Flood
[There is] a specific kind of backlash politics, driven by a logic of defeatist appeasement and pre-emptive abandonment of justice, equality, and progress in the name of “unity” or to prevent “backlash.”
Thomas Zimmer
It is very hard to write about the projected catastrophes of 3°C of warming. I keep having to step away from my desk to cry. Mad respect to the scientists and journalists who write about this stuff, rather than the comparatively (emotionally) easier stuff of political malfeasance. Anyway, let's get rid of the sociopaths and inexcusably ignorant power brokers who are trying to keep fossil energy in our systems. It's the fight for the very survival and *meaning* our species! This planet is a miracle, our presence here in the vast darkness of space is a miracle, and no flight on a private jet or other consumer convenience is worth destroying that miracle. The end.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive
most US leaders are deathly afraid of sticks [vs. carrots]. but it's the only thing that really works
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
E-bikes are the EVs we need.
John Lloyd @boyonabike62
It really was so foolish to design our housing system around home values serving as a de facto social safety net. Imagine how messed up the US would be if enjoying a stable retirement depended on food prices outpacing incomes. We'd be in a famine—not unlike our housing crisis.
M. Nolan Gray
Portland, Oregon is 25°F hotter than normal right now. The only other time Portland has ever been this hot was during a 1-in-10,000 year heat wave that happened — two years ago. We are in a climate emergency.
Eric Holthaus
Thinking about the man I represented charged with stealing red bulls and cigarettes from a Brooklyn store and then spending 1.5 years on Rikers for it pretrial because he couldn’t afford $7,500 bail. At a cost of $180,000 to NYC taxpayers.
Scott Hechinger
car prices might be unsustainable for buyers
cars are definitely unsustainable for the planet
car bloat is destroying lives, roads, a livable climate, and peoples' wallets. congress should do something about it.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
Pay close attention to people who rush to justify hitting children and dogs ... let's you know a lot about them
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD
it is actually astounding that abortion clinics and funds are doing what they’re doing, on the scale they’re doing it, when you consider that every human being who works to keep clinics and funds running is traumatized and burnt out beyond what most folks could probably imagine
@hannahmsays
“We did not build places like this because we were rich, we became rich because we built places like this.” –Chuck Marohn
Strong Towns
There aren’t “two sides” when one group fights for all people’s right to be who they are and love who they love, and the other murders folks for flying a flag representing that inclusion. There’s only justice or bigotry. And it’s very clear where God calls us to be.
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis
Gonna guess that the two kinds of progressives are:
1. The naive, unreasonable ones who refuse to yield on gay/trans rights and abortion;
2. The savvy politics knowers who would trade rights *that don’t affect them* for their own pet policy wins like high speed rail
The Queso
Ok I give up: What are toilet trees?
Chris Steller
By destroying the mechanisms that enable free thought and foster scientific curiosity, the right-wing is clearing the ground for the expansion of superstition and emotionality as primary drivers of behavior. They’re laying foundation for theocratic rule and cult mentality.
Leah McElrath
This explains some things. Turns out humans are wired for optimism. When hooked up to an MRI, researchers found the brain "fails to code errors in estimation when those call for pessimistic updates." The only people who accurately code for risk? The clinically depressed
Nate Bear @NateB_Panic
The rare non-despair-inducing hockey stick graph:
Quinn Slobodian @zeithistoriker
It's still incredible to me that Uber set up what were obviously illegal taxi operations, called it something else and eventually got virtually every city in North America to roll over, say "okay!" and either tear down taxi regulations or set up two parallel regulatory regimes.
@ryan_hassett
By the first anniversary of the climate law Republicans opposed, their Congressional districts had captured the majority of new clean energy jobs created.
Inside Climate News
1. Make daycares difficult to start on most land
2. Daycare becomes scarce, so parents drive long distances to get it
3. Observe parents driving to daycare, conclude that daycare = traffic
4. Use this observation to justify making daycares more difficult to start
Repeat forever. The opposite case:
1. Allow all land uses w/small externalities everywhere
2. People who need specific land use find it nearby, little or no travel
3. Everyone, even the nimbys, lives happily ever-after because even if some land uses r annoying it's much better than a city full of cars
YVRYIMBY
I will never understand the complaints about homelessness matched with the vitriol towards affordable and permanent supportive housing. Shame on the electeds without courage to lead and tell their constituents the truth!
Michael Tubbs
don’t worry guys. the climate change hurricanes will put out the climate change fires.
Ally Maynard @missmayn
This curve of US Pedestrian Fatalities is shocking. 22 people being killed per day! But why call them Pedestrian Fatalities? Walking isn't what killed them. In line with other violence, we should call them Car Fatalities. And address the source instead of the victim:
Cycling Professor @fietsprofessor
One thing few people seem to realize is that even as solar cells have gotten way cheaper, they have also gotten steadily better at converting light into electricity.
Noah Smith @Noahpinion
"The number of jobs plausibly at stake in a green transition is almost certainly less than one-tenth as large as was the case with the China shock."
Nick Johnson @nickj_econ
The potential job loss from going green is nothing like the hit from trade in the first decade of this century
Dean Baker
I saw a tiktok where this guy travels to the year 2073 and humanity is thriving and he was shocked that humans still exist and asked how it was possible. The future guy said ‘the Rapture, all the Christians were taken and society progressed’ and I can’t stop thinking about it
@pot8um
'I’ve gone on the record as being extremely skeptical about a society-wide transition to EVs. I think it’s just lazy, more-of-the-same thinking, a classic technofix that... does nothing to diminish sprawl, congestion, and road deaths.' –Taras Grescoe. It's really critical that we not only need to shift to drastically reduce the number of VMTs travelled in our urban areas — but also just the sheer number of cars.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
If you design a car for mass consumption that weighs >9,000 pounds and goes from zero mph to 60mph in less than 3 seconds, then it's on you when that car kills someone. There's no good reason to put something this dangerous on the road. None at all.
Omari Hardy
18 homes.
1 stair.
illegal to build in the US:
push the needle
An observation: Over the last few weeks we literally just had a much more robust and nuanced collective national conversation about a movie about Barbie than we’ve ever had about climate breakdown, even as the nation and the world burns and floods and dies all around us.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman
Semi-engaged voters who end up thinking "Dems are too woke" are almost certainly responding to the avalanche of propaganda to that effect from right & center media, not to anything actual Dems are actually saying.
David Roberts @drvolts
Male loneliness isn't some thing that's imposed on men. It's the result of a lot of men making stupid, short-sighted lifestyle decisions. You're lonely? Stop staring at glowing rectangles every waking minute and join an advocacy/volunteer/faith group, join a sports league, start a social hobby. Then regularly get beers/meals with the people you get along with. It isn't complicated, but it does require effort. And stop living in places where you're spending an hour every day in a car, where there's no public realm, where your best possible relationship with your neighbor is avoidance, where there isn't a bar that's open after 9pm. Move back into your natural habitat: a city. I don't mean to be callous, but I think the way we solve this problem, to at least some degree, involves heaping social shame on men who are developing basically-lazy and unhealthy habits. Call your grandpa weekly, loser. Man up and make friends at a local bowling alley.
M. Nolan Gray
Xtian: They're tearing down my Christian values!
Me: They're tearing down peace, joy and love for all?
Xtian: No, not those Christian values
Me: They're tearing down kindness and humility?
Xtian: No, not those
Me: Which ones are they attacking?
Xtian: Oh, you know the ones.
John Concannon
Our Climate Policymakers:
Dr. William J. Ripple
“A study…tested the effect of Washington D.C.’s juvenile curfew on gun violence...The authors found that gunfire incidents were significantly more frequent when the curfew was in effect. Curfews remove bystanders and witnesses from the streets...”
DC Justice Lab
It's quite a rich historical coincidence that Georgia took away the Governor's power to pardon because of the corrupt actions of a Klan-linked governor who was caught selling pardons in the late 1930s.
Seth Cotlar
My view is that just what Trump did to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss alone should make him unfit for office and unelectable for life.
Mehdi Hasan
No one thinks drug possession is a crime on the same moral ground as other crimes. They just want carte blanche to arrest drug users, since it’s easier than doing actual police work.
Morgan Godvin
Trump, today: It's outrageous election interference to bring charges against a Presidential candidate just 15 months before an election.
Trump, 2020: There are only two weeks to go before the election, DOJ has to investigate Biden RIGHT NOW.
Orin Kerr
Any dot above the line is a county where the margin in support of expanding abortion access was larger than Biden’s margin in 2020:
Philip Bump
but the idea that states qua states need representation separate from the people who inhabit them didn’t make a whole lot of sense in 1787 and doesn’t make sense now
Jamelle Bouie @jbouie
“If you look at it from the perspective of the status quo, it will always feel like the right thing to do is to widen the road,” said @BrentToderian… But he characterizes highway expansions as giving car addicts “another hit.”
Brent Toderian
I’ll never understand this both-sidesing the fight to end gun violence, someone recently described “radicals on both sides”. One side is kids and parents begging for their lives not to be shot, and the other side men are cosplaying as a civil war militia. These are not the same.
Rep. Justin Jones @brotherjones_
1. GOP demands special counsel in Hunter Biden case.
2. Biden administration names special counsel.
3. GOP outraged that it got what it asked for.
4. NBC says handling of the case “raised questions.”
5. GOP, which raised the questions, quotes NBC saying questions were raised.
@MarkJacob16
Imagine if consumers worldwide looked at fast fashion and instead of ‘made from polyester’, they saw ‘made of plastic derived from crude oil and produced using harmful chemicals, including carcinogens’? That would dampen sales. Plastic is an evil tour de force of branding
Assaad Razzouk
Virginia argues a teacher is not entitled to extra compensation after being shot because the shooting was a "hazard of the job." The school board's attorney says it's an "unfortunate reality" that teaching is "not without its dangers."
Celeste Headlee
In defence of the status quo, we are made to belief that asking for richer public space, safety for our children or a higher quality of live is 'Radical Activism'. You are not a radical. They are!
Cycling Professor @fietsprofessor
People are disturbed and empathetic when they hear adult domestic violence survivors say: “I deserved to be hit. I made them angry.” But y’all don’t bat an eyelash when you hear adults survivors of parental aggression say: “I deserved to be whupped as a child. I was bad.”
Stacey Patton
Two prominent conservative law professors who are members of the Federalist Society have concluded that TRUMP IS INELIGIBLE TO BE PRESIDENT under a provision of the U.S. Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding office
Steven Greenhouse
“By just the year 2000, Bor and his colleagues discovered, about 400,000 Americans were dying each year above the number projected by peer countries’ mortality rates. By 2010, it was an extra nearly 500,000 deaths. In 2019, it was 622,000.”
David Wallace-Wells
I detest paying higher gas prices too but it’s incredible that people will buy GOP outrage on gas that’s $3.73 instead of $2.73—but then excuse GOP for keeping the min wage at $7.25 instead of $15, insulin at $1200 instead of $35, and paid leave at 0 weeks instead of 12 weeks.
Qasim Rashid, Esq.
The American dream: a chicken in every pot, and two cars on every square inch of the planet until it is rendered utterly uninhabitable. We're getting there!
Eric Allix Rogers
"Cyclists don't pay road tax." It would take a large cyclist 16,667 trips to cause the equivalent damage to a road as one trip in an average car. Just to put this in a different context. If registration of vehicle ($86.85) is to pay to maintain the damage caused to roads by vehicles (it doesn't cover it at all), was applied to bikes. Registering a bike for $1 would cover it for 192 years. Just saying...
J. Dirom @paininc
I feel like over the years we’ve been regaled by 1000 libertarian takes like “ID cards are a slippery slope to authoritarianism” meanwhile leading Republicans admit to a plot to stage a coup and suppress subsequent protest with military violence and somehow that’s no big deal.
David Menschel @davidminpdx
Conservatives who spent years bewailing Obama’s $500 million government loan to Solyndra have nothing to say about Trump’s $700 million government loan structured to benefit Trump’s private equity donors as thousands of truckers are now laid off.
David Sirota
E-bikes are displacing twice as much oil as all the world’s electric cars, buses, vans, and trucks combined:
Bike Commuting Ireland
Traffic violence is so normalized that cops practically ignore a hit-and-run even when they know who did it. Meanwhile everybody is losing their minds over car theft. Property > human life exhibit 1000
Jeremy Glover
Next time Ohio politicians start lecturing you about the importance of fiscal responsibility be sure to remind them that taxpayers just shelled out roughly 20 million dollars to pay for a special election that simply maintained the same voting rights we've had since 1912.
Mike Polk Jr.
lol of course the "they don't even teach shakespeare anymore!" people in Florida are banning shakespeare
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark
And people complain that most cyclists they see are aggressive and fearless. If your infrastructure dares people to ride, you get only daring riders.
Fietser Nicole @GoingDutchDEN
Extinction Rebellion Global
If we truly understood climate change and its implications, this would be viewed as sociopathic, an explicit endorsement of crimes on the scale of the 20th century's worst. But it our world, it's just an alternative "climate strategy." One thing I see a lot of these days and expect to see much more of in the future is people displacing their anxiety about climate change into anger at climate protestors.
David Roberts @drvolts
An often overlooked aspect of these voucher programs is they end up being publicly funded education discrimination programs. "Voucher programs are publicly funded education discrimination programs. Every private school told my special ed son he wasn’t a fit for them and we were discouraged from even applying." –@PamelaL515
Public Voices for Public Schools @PV4PS
Really didn’t anticipate spending the final third of my life fighting for the survival of secular democracies, I must admit.
Leah McElrath
Regulatory capture isn't automatic: it's what you get when companies are bigger than governments. If you want small governments, in other words, you need small companies.
Cory Doctorow
This little guy. Can we add 1 million of these everywhere as well?
Angie Schmitt
Children disproportionately experience authoritarian parenting, authoritarian religion, and authoritarian education while growing up. And then we demand that they magically become autonomous adults
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD
The Venn diagram of the fervently “anti-woke” and vehement racists is
close to a circle. While the cultural left has its excesses, anyone who
makes it their life work to combat what is basically an egalitarian
project (however misguided) is almost certainly someone with an animus.
Nils Gilman
This image breaks me. At 2.7 degrees of warming, which is our present policy trajectory, two billion people will be exposed to extreme heat. 99.7% of those people live in the global South. People who have done nothing to cause this crisis. The injustice is staggering:
Jason Hickel
Democracy supporting a pluralistic society by maintaining a separation
of church and state has always been an experiment and an ideal. Recent
history may be proving it is a delusion. Too many people fail to see
that to protect their own freedom they must respect everyone's freedom.
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD
continuing to drive into deeper and deeper water [during a flood] instead of avoiding it. a good metaphor for our collective reaction to climate change
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
"People seem to thrive — not always in high salaries but in health and life chances — when inequality is low; when landownership is widespread; when social connection is high; and when corruption and violence are rare"
Derek Thompson
Korcula’s Roman plan is subtle genius. Ring street, N-S spine street, central square, E-W cross streets 6’ across and 50’ apart. But wait. Western streets arrow-straight to catch summer winds. Eastern streets curved to foil winter wind. Slight stagger at spine. A delight:
Jeff Speck
"Every day, with remarkable specificity, Trump sets an example of the kind of person we desperately hope our children will never grow up to resemble." That realization grew into an article that I published a few years ago called "Raising an UnTrump":
Alfie Kohn
The best argument against IQ as a useful metric of value to society is to look at what people who never shut up about their IQ have contributed to society.
Radley Balko
this highway can carry about 10,000 people per hour in each direction at full capacity. a single subway line can carry 30,000 people per hour in each direction, all without tearing a neighborhood in half. cars are just fundamentally super inefficient. it’s basic geometry:
@sam_d_1995
The point of urban highway monstrosities like this isn’t to accommodate car trips — it’s to create car trips. And we should tear them all down. In cities, take the fucking train.
Travis R. Eby @travis_robert
might be a hot take but i think you should be able to walk around distracted and not have to worry about dying
micycle bichael @bikevnooj
Florida has banned AP Psychology courses throughout the state.
philip lewis
It’s extremely obvious that we’re in the middle of another Red Scare, this time with DEI and ‘gender ideology’ swapped in for communism. Congratulations to everyone who helped launder the ‘threat’ of drag queens and diversity trainings into the mainstream!
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark
I found all the best urban design moves in one spot (Korcula gate). Just kidding, it’s only half of them:
Jeff Speck
I've been playing around with ChatGPT, asking it questions about social justice, racism, police reform, systems change, and health equity...and it just all feels like I am talking to a Neoliberal Robot with zero substance. Like I am talking to Amy Klobuchar.
MollyPeonies
"Donald Trump has a first amendment right to commit crimes" is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard. This would invalidate every fraud case in history. Bernie Madoff was also just telling people to do stuff! Enron was expressing itself through faked annual reports!
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark
NYT: Diane Feinstein's daughter has power of attorney over her mother, a sitting senator
T.J. Ortenzi
So outrageous to invoke federal conspiracy laws against the most powerful man on earth just because he openly conspired to steal a federal election. We should use these laws only as they were intended --to imprison the girlfriends of accused drug dealers for answering a phone call.
Radley Balko
Ron DeSantis vows to slit the throats of federal employees on the first day he's president. Completely normal statement from a normal human. Totally normal political party.
Dean Barker
Engineers often prioritize people creating traffic over those living next to it, disconnecting them from their neighbors and neighborhoods. Where cars are tamed, a sense of community flourishes, and streets become places to stay rather than pass through:
Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife
Torn meniscus sounds like something on a restaurant salad.
Chris Steller
It's pretty wild that there's absolutely no consensus, even within the publishing community, about whether "copy editor" is one word or two.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
"Whenever someone says, 'we’ll adapt to climate change,' 100% of the time it’s a rich person. Poor people never say 'we’ll adapt' because they know they can’t afford it. For them, adaptation = suffering."
David Wallace-Wells
A great irony of the law: it purports to set a very high standard of evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt) to convict a person of a crime, but it allows the caging of millions of people without a shred of evidence that it does any good.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec
I feel like our society is slowly normalizing the extrajudicial killing of citizens who dare to not “comply” with police. I’m not sure about you, but I’m not willing to live in a society that accepts that.
Reed @TheSotaSwede
vienna: 60% of residents live in social housing (passivhaus! co-ops! baugruppen!), bike infra is light years better than anywhere in the US, annual transit pass is a whole euro a day (shudders)
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
i love the "trump TRULY believed he won the election and therefore did not commit a crime" angle because it's basically an argument that if you have narcissistic personality disorder you're allowed to commit fraud
Law Boy
Cul-de-sacs are like that friend who always needs to borrow money and promises to pay you back, but never does. They eat up more revenue in maintenance than they generate and take up land that could be developed more productively. They’re financially unsustainable, period:
Strong Towns
Luke Harris: "We can’t fight for racial justice, if we can’t talk about racial injustice…we know that teaching about racial justice issues sharpen critical thinking skills”
African American Policy Forum
In Iowa, we are banning "Ulysses," "The Catcher in the Rye," and "The Color Purple." Honestly, if you are a kid and turning to Ulysses for titillation when the internet is everywhere, we should be giving you a medal and a full-ride scholarship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop
Kombiz Lavasany
Another thing is abundantly clear, police will escalate a situation to the point of panic, and then summarily execute or harm Black people for any panicked reaction. Panicked reactions are based on fear and are often not rational.
D.A. Bullock @BullyCreative
'Schemes' is an interesting word choice.
'Crimes' would also have fit.
Or 'Felonies'
[Felonies is one character longer, but L and I together take less space than M]:
James Fallows
some straight/str8 men hate flamboyance in gay men because gay joy reminds the straight/str8 man of what he has suffocated himself in exchange for social acceptance or power. he folds himself into whatever shape a real Man looks like and yet he is neither Real nor Happy
jaboukie
Imagine running for Presidential primary against a guy who is under two federal indictments, being too chickenshit to bring it up for fear of what the indicted man will say about you, but trying to convince voters that you're "strong" enough to lead the country.
Elie Mystal
The first US President, George Washington, lived from 1732-1799. The discovery and acknowledgment of dinosaurs happened in 1842, therefore George Washington never knew that dinosaurs existed.
Morgan Cameron Ross
In retrospect, the US and the EU shouldn't have wasted the 2010s
indulging in misguided neoliberal austerity while China invested in
total dominance of the solar energy supply chain. I wonder if any of the
authors of that austerity — a mind-bogglingly self-defeating strategy
in the face of chronically low interests rates and dirt-cheap money —
will apologize or engage in any self-reflection.
David Roberts @drvolts
Remember, 8 years ago Uber insisted it would reduce traffic. Instead, Uber drivers cruise without passengers 40% of the time. Uber and Lyft no longer claim they reduce traffic. They now admit they increase congestion. So much for “making cities better…”
Brent Toderian
The religious right is a blight on this country. It's responsible for a long series moral panics. It basically encourages spousal and child abuse. It rejects science, elevates and celebrates an endless series of grifting charlatans. What is it good for? I've never understood why we're supposed to bend over backward to accommodate cruelty and bigotry and misogyny just because they present themselves as "religious."
David Roberts @drvolts
An area of boreal forest the size of Southern Ontario has burned this year. 13.2 million hectares:
Ryan Katz-Rosene, PhD
And that is the most primal and formative feature of reactionary psychology: the belief that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, it's a zero-sum world in which tribes compete for dominance, and all the progressive talk about universalist values is just a clever con. [It's] the World Biggest Whatabout. It's "we're rubber, you're glue"... It's just how their brains work. It's never "people should be good." It's always, "you can't call us shitty because you're shitty too." They *have* to believe that. Their worldview has no room for people of good will trying earnestly to do good for humanity. They *need* for all the Others they hate to be sinister and powerful and right on the verge of taking over and destroying everything.
David Roberts @drvolts
Hot take: middle class people need housing, too, and we should let the private market build homes for them in existing urban neighborhoods rather than putting all the new housing in exurban sprawl.
Max Dubler
We need multi-solving, hyper-local, transformation-unleashing cooperation: retirement savings won't offer much to enjoy with a planet at 500ppm CO2. Instead, leverage what you have NOW to strategically design and implement your post-carbon good life (better yet, involve others!).
@juliejunket
NEW: As the world boiled, BP distributed $3.3 billion to shareholders, 17 times more than they invested in “low-carbon” in Q2 ($190m). How can we trust Big Oil to deliver a fair energy transition when its priorities are so misaligned with what the public and planet need?
Common Wealth
The top 1% emit more carbon than the entirety of the bottom 50%. This truth is not “uncomfortable.” It is unconscionable. Those who have been given the most are TORCHING the most vulnerable. Where is your indignation? Where is your outrage?
Climate Defiance
Marie Antoinette says: 
Extinction Rebellion Global
Management consulting logics are now the beating heart at the center of so many institutional decisions that don't make sense. Public education is no longer a public good, it seems. Suddenly, it needs to be efficient, pay for itself, and if it turns a profit, so much the better.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @Ebonyteach
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