Good showing at the Khatsalano Festival! If booth line-ups are any indication, it's hard for the World Cup to compete with free stuff.

Sweet clouds out there this evening. And what's this? It appears that SFU has obtained the mandate of heaven...

The June 2026 Issue of Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de politiques is now available, with free access. utppublishing.com/toc/cpp/52/2

Interesting peek into residential conversion & the building inspections regime in NYC. So tricky to separate minor from major infractions (or which were fined & paid!) Reminder of local debate over whether overlapping professional certifications were needed in BC. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/n...

The bees they are balming...

Very nice summary from @michaelwiebe.bsky.social of the evidence about how broad upzoning works in practice (rather than a few parcels here, a few there — the typical rezoning) www.buildingabundance.ca/p/upzoning

Multiculturalism is, in fact, the thing that I celebrate most about my Canadian identity. Happy to see I'm not alone! environicsinstitute.org/wp-content/u... Happy Canada Day!

Cypress Bowl to Eagle Bluffs and back. About half the trail is not bad for barefoot hiking (between Sam Lake & Eagle Bluffs), but definitely needed the sandals for the other half.

Reminded of the James Green / Jim Green 2005 mayoral run controversy in Vancouver, a city coincidentally with about the same number of people living in it as the state of Alaska. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

I love that this is a real campaign post by a real former mayor of BC’s second largest city who is running again this October

All sympathy to Europe. BC's devastating late 2021 June heat wave remains seared in my memory. But at least our wildfire fighters at the time didn't have to deal with "unexploded ordinance" leftover from WWII. www.cbc.ca/news/world/f...

"In March, council members refused to endorse zoning changes... This week, however, council members were willing to reconsider... councillors said they were voting for the changes because they feared whatever the province might impose if they didn’t would be worse." [sickos.png]

Nice. And looks like Greek Day in Vancouver picking up some of the post-match overflow.

Jazz Fest free concerts at the old Art Gallery are a lot of fun, and there's shade to be found on the steps! Especially fond of Bonnie Northgraves & the Big Loud here, and their jazzed up cover of Tom Petty (Mary Jane's Last Dance). www.coastaljazz.ca/event/bonnie...

CBC calling out the Weekend Warrior dynamic "In past cases, including both of the last two weekends, bitter words on Friday and Saturday were followed by more ameliorative positions from both sides in time for markets to reopen on Monday." www.cbc.ca/news/world/i...

We're totally going to join the glorious mess of Eurovision, and I'm all in support. I mean, the CBC can't even resist turning Canada Reads into a lurid competition, there's no way they're going to hold us back from this, right? www.cbc.ca/news/enterta...

Russian love for Butter has a fun Vancouver connection! It was also at the heart of the Hudson Bay Company's deal with the Russian traders in control of Alaska, leading to Fort Langley's sizable dairy operation after 1839. fvcurrent.com/p/langley-hu...

We have studied the Montreal shooter's manifesto, discussed it in a community of experts, and read the coverage and reactions. This article is a good start. Other commentary has focused on the wrong parts and covered up violence towards women. So let's talk. 🧵 montrealgazette.com/news/local-c...

After witnessing a man be detained & handcuffed by police, who also searched his bag, @michellegamage.bsky.social looked into what police can and can’t do when they detain, but don’t arrest someone thetyee.ca/News/2026/06...

⚒️ 🧪 A catastrophic earthquake just struck northern Venezuela. Large buildings have collapsed, and the USGS PAGER is forecasting thousands of fatalities. Our colleague in Caracas, Dr. Frank Audemard, has shared with us what the earthquake felt like and footage from the region. Here’s what we know.

Late west coast time contribution to Make a Terrible Comic Day 1/ #makeaterriblecomicday2026

Ok you guys. Here’s the deal. The M7.1 in Venezuela was upgraded to a M7.2. AND it was followed shortly by a M7.5. Not good.

Two big ones, back-to-back, but pretty far apart!

"Okanagan Falls... includes lands with longstanding significance to the Osoyoos Indian Band, which has worked closely with the Province throughout the development of the letters patent." Watching how this shakes out, esp. with an eye to evolving Band relations, would be a fun research project.

Checking in on housing policy in Auckland, which has already become a key international case study in large-scale zoning reform.

Love this archival gem: 1967 Maclean's: "why doesn't everybody live in Vancouver?" Folk history still heard regularly around town: "remember the good old days before Expo 86 made everybody want to live in Vancouver?"

Missed this earlier, but great peek at the headaches that can come from imposing arbitrary used-based zoning rules - often meant for cities - on low-intensity agricultural practices in rural areas. (As an aside: I'm curious how this intersects with ALR land up there) www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Burnabarian done right

"Radio-Canada was able to confirm that the shooter distributed a violent incel manifesto targeting women. The manifesto called for a violent revolution, invoking masculinist arguments." Don't know why minister is saying this wasn't a terrorism case. Looks like one to me. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

We have way too many of these things menacing our streets, even here in Vancouver. They're not safe. Ban. Tax into oblivion. Up licensing requirements. And open up international trade to welcome safer competition. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

In general, governments bringing counter-cyclical weight to our system of housing production so we don't stop building the housing we need is a good thing. Surely plenty of devils in the details, but the "villainous developers" morality play here ain't helping. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Metro Vancouver held a special meeting today where the other municipalities told Surrey to stop pretending that region wide water restrictions didn’t apply to them www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

TIL Science has discovered Bird Yuppies "Based on... city birds' longer lifespans, we predicted that urban birds have a slower pace-of-life compared to rural birds of the same species, and thus invest more in self maintenance and less in annual reproduction." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

McSweeney’s on the economics of the AI bubble. This description of AI driven layoffs is excellent satire.

The top scorers at the World Cup right now, with 3 goals each, are Jonathan David and a guy named Messi.

Yes. For the last year I've been shouting: The Feds should buy empty / distressed developments at firesale prices to convert to non market housing vs trying to build it from scratch (prefab or otherwise). (Also glad to see the plan to reduce development fees)

Congrats to all of the people who have worked so hard to brand Vancouver as "towers full of vacant luxury condominiums" I guess. Anyway, here's the map from 2025's Empty Homes Tax report. Once again, very little empty, with the mansion hoods in the SW leading the pack. vancouver.ca/files/cov/20...

"Well, well, not so easy to find a map that doesn't suck, huh?" -Ernest Burgess (1925) writing for the Chicago School of Sociology

And another international news publication reporting on Sen̓áḵw. There are several reasons this project continues to capture international attention. The history of the land, and the stark contrast in land use enabled by the Squamish Nation compared to surrounding Vancouver are probably the top two.

Stuff not to sleep on! UBC has been seismically upgrading its own buildings for awhile now (ask me how I know, but not at my usual office) Here's Vancouver's estimated seismic risk prior to carrying out the building level inventory, from report to council. council.vancouver.ca/20260602/doc...

New quarterly population and migration estimates out today, another quarter of negative net external migration for Canada. (And net population loss, not shown here.) Immigration saw a slight reduction, this is driven by a net outflow of non-permanent residents.

Soccer in the Square seems to be a hit at UBC's Wesbrook Village, drawing a pretty good crowd for France v. Senegal on the big screen (it was still 0-0 at time of photo).

Wild to remember that the US sanctions on Iran apparently about to be lifted (item 7) were how Canada got drawn into placing Huawei's Meng Wanzhou under sensationalized house arrest here in Vancouver (even though Canada wasn't party to the sanctions).

"State Rep. Brent Money, a Greenville Republican who founded the Sharia-Free Texas Caucus..." Seriously? That's his name? And from Greenville? Aside from everything else, it feels like the writers for this season of Texas are running on fumes at this point.

New essay with @lauraknelson.bsky.social on AI and cultural sociology. Revisiting what made word embeddings so useful for cultural sociology, we argue that contemporary LLMs risk collapsing perspectival differences and discuss provisional solutions that might help recover cultural variation.

Great to see Sen̓áḵw getting some love here, featuring @khelsilem.bsky.social along with lots of other great local housing voices (e.g. @1alexhemingway.bsky.social @tomdavidoff.bsky.social & @christineboyle.bsky.social) thrown into the mix. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/o...

New World Cup team about to drop

I'm really vibing with this collection of essays on the Future of Quantitative Social Science. It flat out has me buzzing. As Kevin Munger says in Chapter 14: "But AI will soon make it impossible for us to ignore the absurdity of the status quo..." rohanalexander.github.io/notes_on_the...

TFW you show up early to the "invasive species" conference, but you know you're still not the first one to get there.