Datacentres using 6% of electricity supply in UK and US, research says

Please read this thread before and after you hear PM Christopher Luxon say in a pre-Budget lunch speech today that the Government has no choice but to 'tighten its belt' because our debt is too high and we could be downgraded. Just. Bullshit. #nzpol

Design legend Margaret Calvert is 90 today. Look at that cake! If you've ever admired a road, rail or metro sign in Britain it's likely she had something to do with it. One of Britain's design heroes - happy birthday to her. Photo by: @oshgallerylondon (IG) Cake by: mybaker.co

Ask him about “boot camps”…

I can tell you now its the cost and lack of subsidies not red tape Never once in all the time I have talked to people about solar has red tape been an issue www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

I've also written up an analysis on the implications of these findings for MPs: The report must be a wake-up call to politicians. Decisions around cost-sharing and managed retreat may be unpopular, but kicking the can down the road is an abdication of responsibility. newsroom.co.nz/2026/05/07/t...

Good morning! The Climate Change Commission has just released the first National Climate Change Risk Assessment in six years – and I've read the key document. In short: Climate change is here, we're not ready, but there's lots we can do to prepare. For more: newsroom.co.nz/2026/05/07/l...

Pierre Bourdieu once argued that the question of whether something is art isn't answered by the artist's intention or even the object itself. Instead, the quality of being "art" is conferred by a community — curators, dealers, auction houses, audiences, etc. 🧵

This is a total disaster for the country and it is not an accident - it is policy. We have knowingly created a 'buffer stock' of unemployed people desperate for work because ghouls think that this is the best way to stop wages/prices going up. Who suffers? The young and the marginalised. Disgusting.

Art exists that may recover the sensation of life: to make one feel things, to make the stone stoney. -- Victor Shklovsky

Um...so I accidentally stumbled onto the UVA law library's collection of 6,000 drawings by courtroom sketch reporter Ida Libby Dengrove, who worked in NYC mostly in the '70s & '80s, & they're kind of...amazing..?? This one is tagged "Clown Attack" (thread) archives.law.virginia.edu/resources/18...

I know it's my thing but GOD DAMN the ferries thing is so fucking emblematic of this government. While they're being implored to spend more money to prop up horse racing they've fucked the key infrastructure project linking the mainland to the north, come on man this is mental

If the problem is universal superannuation might be paid to billionaires, why is your answer means testing instead of taxing the shit out of billionaires

A very cool thing to support young writers who want to do an arts degree: spread the word and get those applications in!

Switzerland is putting solar panels on all the empty space between train tracks. If done in the UK this would take 20,000,000 Solar Panels and would provide 8GW of electricity.

This is quite the graph (from newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/30/t...)

I keep thinking about this because 1. it's ghoulishly creepy, why are we still objectifying Marilyn 2. basically the anti-thesis of why most of us love stories. This would be one of the least comforting & most upsetting things I could experience, personally.

Fifty years ago today, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" was published in the pages of @newyorker.com. What a poem!

NEW REPORT with two findings: 1) Data centers cause health and environmental problems in the communities where they are sited; and 2) data centers are sited in communities that already have a lot of health and environmental problems techpolicy.press/data-center-...

Tania Roxborogh has become the first Māori author shortlisted for France’s Étoiles Bleues literary award, with young readers helping decide the winner.

Is nobody is immune to Frank O'Hara's charms? Here he is allowing the late great J H Prynne to talk seriously about pleasure & fun – and the place of these, with misery & terror, in the dialectical work of poetry: 'the pursuit of fun was a fragile affair... your friends kept falling by the wayside'.

😆👏!

There's a graphic in the new Ember report showing what happens if current demand and clean power growth rates continue: fossil fuels plateau by 2030. I think it highlights something kind of important, but probably not what you think

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes and designs is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song. -- David Byrne

Losing my mind reading Dann, Malpass, Tibshraeny, (etc) sweating about Govt 'returning to surplus'. Surely the reckonomics commentariat should understand balance sheets? Let's see if I can make it simple. Here's how much we spend offshore and how much we earn. Take a minnit... [🧵 1/n]

We will give you less money than you need to survive and, if you withdraw KiwiSaver funds to stay afloat in the face of extreme hardship, we WILL reduce your benefit or claw it back #nzpol Benefit warning for KiwiSaver withdrawals www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

Quiet, sweeping changes to Treaty clauses could lower te Tiriti to its weakest legal standard in #NZ. The change shifts the Treaty to just another factor that can be considered before any decision Govt ignored advice from its advisory group, which recommended no substantive changes and no repeals

A storm every eight days needs a systemic response- I could not agree more - and hope people are ok here in NZ in the Wellington region after last night - www.rnz.co.nz/news/environ...

I don't want the left to sleepwalk to victory off the back of Luxon being so bad. I want them to present an alternative with vision and increased equity for society. I don't want Labour with their milquetoast "we couldn't possibly raise taxes on the extremely rich".

We can stop the ongoing wealth theft & planetary destruction simply by insisting on alternative clean & sustainable sovereign energy sources. We can change all of this. Please join in the call to scale up solar & free ourselves from the chains of OILigarchs past. #nzpol #NZ greenpeace.nz/wpymib

Lines co's scamming 95% of the ticket on home solar exports #NewZealand has about 860MW of installed grid tied home solar that is *never* reported on official energy sources and is at the moment significantly under valued, and short changed #nzpol newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/14/l...

I didn’t know this, did you? Amazing!

Octavia E. Butler, 1998:

This is 100% how it works, and I can’t express strongly enough how rigidly this idea holds up. I didn’t have the money to float my bookstore through the pandemic. Now I work for someone who had the money to float a company through the pandemic

This may be a fundamentally new kind of sin blending blasphemy, idolatry, divination, and simony, among others. Those who are not horrified at this may be entirely lacking in authentic religious awareness and feeling.

The way our towns and cities are developed makes green spaces less absorbent and more prone to flooding – but a few changes could make urban land spongier.

This is excellent www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Chorus out: PM says lower fuel excise or RUCs relief for households & businesses would be "irresponsible & unaffordable," for Govt finances, even though Govt debt barely a quarter of household debt #nzpol open.substack.com/pub/thekaka/...

Yes, they are. And it’s demonstrably worse since 2023-it’s genuinely alarming. Think about how big tech has control over how and what this generation thinks, and how they make decisions. And it’s why I think AI free classrooms are necessary and anyone who wants to tell me otherwise can kick rocks

The government is obsessed with fighting ghosts of covid’s past, cause they have no new ideas. But are they really saying they would’ve magically disappeared the inflationary impact of the pandemic? Which happened worldwide. They also advocated for more spending the whole time!

these are so beautiful

God this poem is haunting me again.

they really said "they should have sent a poet"

Humans are fucked up. fortune.com/2026/04/01/a...

happy national poetry month to all of us with supportive partners who do not actually “get” poetry

Lorde’s breakout 2013 single “Royals” has officially surpassed 1 billion views on YouTube, marking her first entry into the Billion Views Club

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

On the overemphasis of clarity in writing: A. J. Liebling said the only way to make clear pea soup is to leave out the peas. -- J. D. McClatchy

newly posted: Lydia Unsworth : At Last I Have Been Here Long Enough: some notes on an urban poetics / @lydiaunsworth.bsky.social @versefest-ottawa.bsky.social ; periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2026/04/lydi...

I recall a poetry prof from another life, who said that you're not a writer if you don't love words, and I don't think you love words if you're letting a computer pick them for you.