All the controversies over Mayor Bass' ED 1 obscure the big headline: it's a hugely successful program that has already led to thousands of affordable apartments built at zero taxpayer expense, and it's just getting started. A 🧵:

“As we lift our gaze toward him, the crucified and risen One, let us commit ourselves to lifting up those who lie in the dust. “Sagrada Familia is the tallest church in the world, not so as to stand out in worldly rankings, but rather to guide the steps of the People of God.” — Pope Leo XIV

Good morning with good news: Biggest solar cell factory in US history starts making solar cells and every major piece of a solar panel! Qcells will annually make in Georgia 8.6 GW of modules and 3.3 GW each of cells, ingots & wafers. It will employ 4,000! electrek.co/2026/06/11/g... #energysky

This is wild: essentially every LLM—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—keeps using the same character when asked to make up a story, a guy called 'Elias Thorne'. He appears so much it's impacting Google Trends data and the self-published book market. Now we might know why www.404media.co/elias-thorne...

The bounce house always wins. Once a niche, experiential, family entertainment—trampoline parks, escape rooms, fun zones—have become a core part of the retail economy. There’s 10 million square feet of trampoline parks currently in development. My latest for Bisnow www.bisnow.com/national/new...

PBS: Solar power hits new milestones in the U.S. even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy www.pbs.org/newshour/nat...

The planned gas-fired capacity **JUST FOR DATA CENTRE ON-SITE USE** in the US is the same as *all* planned gas capacity in India, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea and China *combined*.

Pope Leo is holding mass at Sagrada Família today, the 100th anniversary of the death of Antoni Gaudí. The architect's genius is debated — in fact he's being considered for sainthood — but imo we don't talk enough about his structural engineers www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Robotics & automation typically recalls auto plants or warehouses filled w/machines zipping across the floor. However, as prices drop & robotics rentals become popular, this tech may help small businesses fill crucial labor gaps. My latest for @sherwood.news sherwood.news/tech/robots-...

A boom in marquee new basketball training facilities in Brooklyn highlights a growing divide in youth sports. For @bloomberg.com I looked at the explosion upscale facilities & mega complexes within the $40B youth sports industry, and the drive for sports equity www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Simple is powerful. In Riverside, California, there’s a new exhibit of Chicano art at the Cheech Marin Center; one of the paintings is of an abandoned ice cream cart in Culver City after the vendor was detained by ICE (art by Lalo Alcaraz, hat tip to California Sun for highlighting the exhibit)

This thing is adorable. electrek.co/2026/06/08/9...

I really enjoy EB White's take on New York and New Yorkers.

SignalTrace "links devices that regularly travel together, correlating them to license plate." It is a surveillance product that will sweep up and add all sorts of Bluetooth and other data to license plate readers, linking specific devices—and people—to cars.

"Something remarkable happened in April. For the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas across the entire planet. Not in a country. Not in a region. Globally." Tons of great news here from Danny Kennedy (via @billmckibben.bsky.social's newsletter, which rules).

Just need everyone to know that the Belgium men's soccer team has new jerseys based on the art of Rene Magritte and this is the official photo shoot

"Once we incorporate employer-sponsored health insurance in this way, we see that American workers earning the average wage pay just as much, if not more, in labor taxes as Nordic workers who earn their country's average wage." peoplespolicyproject.org/2026/06/05/u...

What happens when a human band covers an AI track? The Played by Humans project by Jazz is Dead asks interesting questions about human creativity in an AI age, right when artificial intelligence is literally flooding the music biz. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91554821/thr...

Imagine the pure joy of getting to write this www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/u...

Big Tech is increasingly redirecting its political firepower to the places where its data center projects actually live or die: statehouses and municipalities. My latest for @bisnow www.bisnow.com/national/new...

A new era of AI-generated public comments and automatic replies threatens to diminish our ability to track and respond to the public will. Planners–and any local government that relies on online comments—should take note. My latest for APA www.planning.org/planning/202...

‘Every year I get new pictures’: the fight to preserve the memory of Tiananmen

Architects are now doing more work on adapting existing structures than on building new ones! Sure it might be the poor economic outlook ... but it also reflects changing green norms www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Really delightful story. Feels like a long summer day hanging out at the baseball field. Also a really cool project with i interesting tensions about what authenticity means in the age of brand deals and influencers.

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

Calling all Scientists! Research Administrators! Deans! Fans of Science! No one is coming to save us. Here is your assignment. I have written a step by step, easy to understand "how-to" document to help you comment on the proposed OMB rule. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

SoFi workers will hold their strike authorization vote next week, on June 4 and 5, one week before the first U.S. match of the World Cup is held at SoFi, ahem, Los Angeles Stadium. Workers are demanding a cut of the stadium's luxury packages and safety protections from ICE activity

The U.S. is seeking to close a massive gap in drone production; for Detroit startup Birdstop, the answer may be found in retooling parts from the auto industry. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91549940/thi...

Luxury bottled water used to be about some ineffable quality of place — Icelandic glacier, remote Pacific island aquifer. Now, a pair of new premium brands define luxury as what isn’t there, namely PFAS or microplastics. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91549498/loo...

idk why everyone is complaining, i think it's cool that they are building the ship from CONTACT (1997) on the white house lawn. the liberal media says it won't work again but they are IGNORING that approximately 18 hours of static was recorded on that fateful day. explain THAT

In 2024, nearly half of U.S. households did not earn enough to cover their necessities. n.pr/4nTWPcA

Important to remember we can do big things — a revolutionary, large-scale new thermal energy storage system for excess wind power — even when national policy seems stacked against any advances in this sector www.sdnewswatch.org/south-dakota...

Literally terminal NIMBY brain. “It's not to do with housing, per se,” said Frank Gruber with the Santa Monica Great Park Coalition. “Somebody could say to me, we need 20 acres to build a laboratory that will guarantee that we will cure cancer — we'd still be opposed to it” laist.com/news/housing...

If you’ve ever taken your child, struggling to breathe, to a hospital, this may resonate. It’s not the most important building/real estate news, but I can’t help but think how something as simple as better enforcement can prevent traumatic childhood trips to the ER www.medscape.com/viewarticle/...

What is today’s American architecture? It’s a fraught, diverse, messy & frankly impossible question to answer — but after reading a new book, I think part of the answer is resilient, resourceful, community-minded work. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91547128/wha...

While DEI pushback has dampened enthusiasm for more socially focused investment, some apartment investors see a lot more value in following their values. And now an NYU business school study backs them up. My latest for Bisnow on impact investing www.bisnow.com/national/new...

Rising U.S. homelessness has bred a backlash w/a new approach — sobriety, increasing civil commitment & involuntary mental health treatment, criminal penalties for camping — ascendent in many cities. For @bloomberg.com I explore how the idea took root in Utah www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The Trump playbook for America’s homeless—camping bans, more arrests, treatment before housing and more involuntary commitment—is making headway in Utah. For @bloomberg.com I looked at the philosophies, think tanks, and politics behind this sea change in strategy www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

just remarkable that this keeps happening with, so far as I can tell, no major national developments in terms of police, courts, or anything else

Utah’s proposal to build a homeless campus was a big story last fall. But it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to larger push to significantly change how the country fights homelessness. My latest for @bloomberg.com on the story behind the strategy shift www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

They really did it. Would love any recommendations about articles/analysis/etc about the Keepseagle case highlighted here www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justi...

EVs are suddenly the hottest used-car option—and the most affordable in total cost of ownership. Christopher Mims explains what to watch out for, including battery health, insurance and more. 🔗 on.wsj.com/43bAkq8

A new crop of mayors promises more building and better tenant protection/affordabillity — for @bisnow I look at why real estate groups see that as a formula for financial pressure, or as many quipped, “capitalism for builders, communism for operators“ www.bisnow.com/national/new...

The ups and downs of studio and soundstage real estate is a story we’ve heard before. But Hollywood’s production slump is becoming a singular tragedy, despite efforts to increase incentives and save jobs, My latest for Commercial Observer commercialobserver.com/2026/05/holl...

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Geothermal has liftoff Not quite the largest clean tech IPO ever, but (I believe) the largest public offering raise *ever*. business.columbia.edu/insights/cli...

Cleveland is launching an effort called the Midline — an effort to assemble 350 acres former industrial land, all rail adjacent, and make them shovel-ready for new factories and manufacturers. Super-compelling, very novel pro-business pitch: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

“This is the first energy shock with a superior alternative” www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/daw...

NEW: i took a look at a chevron power plant designed to power a data center that is asking for a school district tax break in texas — the plant's probable client is microsoft, which made a series of promises around tax breaks in january my dive into tax breaks for data center power: