"How the advent of widespread access to air conditioning in the twentieth century proves that losing your job to robots is fine, actually." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/o...

"Starbucks later said they 'take issue with the methodology' in this study." 🤨 www.theguardian.com/business/202...

OK, first off, how many times does this have to happen before we all understand that generative AI cannot be relied upon in this way? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...

The price of USAID cuts... "At 38, she had lost four children to disease and hunger. Now, she cradled her newborn son, Noor Mohamed, against her chest. He had entered the world in a moment of extraordinary vulnerability." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/b...

A rare example of a quality full redesign of a street in Italy. Via Amedei, Mantova. First pic, how it was, i.e. the typical oversized street of postwar peripheries. Other 3 pics: how it's now, turned one-way, depaved and traffic-calmed.

"...She told an officer she had a 19-month-old who would be expecting her back home. 'The officer said my child and I could die for all he cared,' she said.... Hundreds of parents do not know when they will be able to hold their children again." www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Our society has a massive blind spot when it comes to how dangerous these giant trucks and SUVs are to everyone outside of them.

Don't miss the final paragraph.

Fighting doom with coral concerts: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Trump is screwing over farmers, and long-standing US farm policy has made them especially vulnerable to Trump's Middle East warmongering. newrepublic.com/article/2094...

You may have read about the growing fertilizer crisis. I asked experts what it would take to wean the U.S. off of this type of fertilizer and build a more resilient system. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the answers involved corn! newrepublic.com/article/2094...

Paris did this to huge success.

"What and whom, in other words, is all this stuff actually for?" From @katearonoff.bsky.social: newrepublic.com/article/2089...

For more than a week, Amazon has managed to keep a death at its Troutdale, Oregon, facility out of public view. Workers I spoke to are pissed.

Under the second Trump administration's immigration crackdown, far more people are having to pony up bond money to get out of detention--and the amounts they have to cobble together have absolutely skyrocketed talkingpointsmemo.com/news/under-t...

"Critics question the need for these bills and some have panned them as potentially market-disrupting measures that could ultimately provide tax havens for the wealthy. But proponents say they can help bring gold to the masses..."

"Four of the five known emperor penguin breeding sites in the Bellingshausen Sea collapsed in 2022, with the loss of thousands of chicks." God, this is so grim. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

If I was a member of the cabinet or Congress. I would be asking myself what I would say to my grandchildren when they asked, “what did you do when the president of the United States threatened to destroy a whole civilization?”

"Perhaps the problem is that you don't like how humans perceive you." Oh boy. I'm so glad I didn't have this line from @marisakabas.bsky.social in my head yet during some recent convos. The temptation to haul it out and drop it like a live snake into a tea party would have been *huge.*

"U.S. Customs& Border Protection have awarded a contract to build 34 miles of border wall through the Rio Grande Valley, including the National Butterfly Center, and other areas that previously had been exempted by Congress..." www.valleycentral.com/border-repor...

"Ohio has seen a 58% rise in the firearm death rate, which was 2.6 per 100,000 children between 2015 and 2019, then rose to 4.1 per 100,000 children between 2020 and 2024."

also, the idea phase is the most fun part of the work and the most rewarding. Why would you give up the greatest reward of the work? "Hell yeah, here's the machine that gets massages for me and eats ice cream for me and watches the sunrise for me, and in exchange it destroys the earth"

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.

Today's Politico poll (www.politico.com/news/2026/03...) confirms what Jane Black outlined in a prescient piece for @newrepublic.com & @thefern.org last month: MAHA votes are up for grabs in 2026. Dems could peel away a vital segment of the Trump coalition. newrepublic.com/article/2065...

I've seen it argued that personal how-to guides distract from the need for policy reform. BUT this particular one is so overwhelming it's practically a political rallying cry. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/w...

The earnings gap between men and women slightly widened last year, according to a new analysis published Thursday showing women last year earned 18.6% less than men per hour on average ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/03/23/r...

I wrote about James Talarico's blasphemy against meat and barbeque revival on the Texas campaign trail. newrepublic.com/article/2080...

NEWS: The rumors are true, @maustermuhle.bsky.social reports 👇 The National Park Service is removing a popular section of the 15th Street NW protected bike lane, saying that it will cause more traffic during cherry blossom season.

Call me naive, but I genuinely didn't expect the Epstein cameo in this one.

The timeline of MAGA pro-solar statements is pretty weird. So I took a look at state-by-state solar development numbers. newrepublic.com/post/207978/...

NEW: To dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence, the Trump administration is rewriting thousands of pages of nuclear power regulations while downplaying safety issues and focusing on industry incentives.

Paging all toddlers-at-heart... this thread is wild.

Big Oil is no longer trying to convince us they want to preserve a safe & stable climate Now, they're focused on convincing us that the world is only safe & stable if they're in charge That's the thesis of a new @cleancreatives.bsky.social report analyzing 2000 oil ads, exclusively in HEATED today

"There’s no crisis in the world that causes me as much existential anguish as this one, and yet I barely ever speak about it, post about it, write about it." @aaronregunberg.bsky.social writes about the experience of watching Hoppers with his animal-loving kid newrepublic.com/article/2078...

“At four schools studied, the program decreased overall vehicle use for drop-offs and pick-ups by 35 per cent, vehicle emissions by 31 per cent and related ambient air pollution in school boundaries by 93 per cent." - @utoronto.ca h/t @greencommunities.bsky.social www.utoronto.ca/news/do-scho...

In trying to educate myself about how the advent of these products change my professional life, I've been 'shadowing' my work, particularly using Gemini and Claude, and it has been..........instructive. newrepublic.com/article/2076...

"Unlike OpenAI, which wields sycophancy to the extent of inducing deadly parasocial relationships, Claude seems to use the tone of a shameful, coy intern, unnervingly well-calibrated for the ego of Gen X and millennial professionals." 🎯 from @ketanjoshi.co newrepublic.com/article/2076...

"These workers are required to stare at horrific content for many hours straight with few mental health resources, are largely managed by opaque algorithms, and, crucially, are the workers powering the runaway valuations of some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world."

A bill that would have required recreational crabbers to add terrapin by-catch devices onto their pots to prevent accidental drownings of the reptiles failed to pass out of the Virginia Senate, stalling the measure for the year. virginiamercury.com/2026/03/13/v...

The city’s transition away from the car, tho fantastically chaotic, has become a global role model. Under mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social, Paris was “the most influential city in the world”, says Canadian urbanist Brent Toderian. Hidalgo, stepping down after 12 yrs, exulted: “The bike beat the car.”

Trump-era FEMA "dodged a bullet" last year, with no U.S. hurricane landfalls, said former FEMA deputy administrator Tim Manning. "I and most of the emergency management community have great concerns for FEMA’s readiness." newrepublic.com/post/207650/...

just uh. re upping this bc the fertilizer situation is getting Worse

"In Georgia, some watermelon growers report they can no longer afford to plant a crop because of fertilizer prices."

YIKES. This, too, is wild: "Handheld X-ray devices can establish the composition of seafood tissue by identifying chemical markers unique to certain environments, while MRI technology can analyze water molecules to verify if a product has ever been frozen."

FYI the 1970s oil crisis was the impetus for Copenhagen turning into a cycling city

[checks gas prices, insurance prices, howls of rage from rush-hour traffic] Believable.

This is such an important interview. (Heated's new podcast is really worth your time.)

Last year when I was checking into a hotel, the desk person was wearing Meta glasses. I kindly asked them to take them off. They were annoyed. I said, “I do not consent to you looking at my credit card and ID with Meta glasses on.” My instincts were correct: www.bbc.com/news/article...

"In other visits, she has seen 'people so stressed out they pulled the hair out of their skull.' She said she met a mother who’d been rationing her child’s seizure medicine despite the child having experienced 'one seizure after another.'"

and finally: yes, using less nitrogen fertilizer is a good idea for the environment — that's a shift that needs to happen over the long term, however. this is an immediate shock! which isn't great