So, about those Eid prayers in London... "What's the highest thing in Trafalgar Square?" "Nelson's column, innit?" "And the highest thing on the column?" "Nelson." "And on Nelson?" "His hat." "And the highest thing on his hat?" "That bit that sticks up." 1/8

They get far less attention than the people who ordered bombing, shooting and starvation in Gaza, but those Israeli officials in charge of the pervasive torture and starvation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons need to be held accountable.

THE BIG ONE: The left has kept Paris. Emmanuel Gregoire has won a 3-way runoff, beating conservative challenger Rachida Dati. Gregoire is from the center-left PS, the party of the retiring incumbent Anne Hidalgo (well known among US urbanists).

_Four Colors Suffice_ is a history of the Four Colour Map Problem, from its origins in 1852 down to its proof in 1976. Along the way it develops enough of the mathematics to give a broad understanding of how the proof works. dannyreviews.com/h/Four_Color... (my review) @princetonupress.bsky.social

NSPCC calls for walkable, low-traffic & car-free streets to safeguard children “walkable neighbourhoods, with low-traffic or car-free streets, strong visual connections between homes and shared spaces and micro-scale features such as small play pockets, to support children’s everyday independence”

🚨 Final report on the massive 2025 Spain and Portugal blackout www.entsoe.eu/news/2026/03...

The certificate you need to get to have the right to own a car in Singapore is now S$111K (US$85K). That’s on top of the price of the car. To be clear, I support this. You do not need a car in Singapore. It’s 30 miles wide […]

“As well as quants and accountants, risk management should have dramaturges and clowns.” backofmind.substack.com/p/the-naked-...

Significant road safety win in Norway! 30 km/h is now the default for built up areas 🚴‍♂️🚶‍♂️ Norway's public roads administration have just turned the way speed limits are set in built up areas on it's head. From now on, traffic engineers now have to meet clear criteria to use any higher speed limit.

Am I right in thinking that this - like a fietstraat - has no legal status in the Netherlands? If so, I can’t see any barrier to Oxford doing this, except possibly getting approval for the signs and road markings.

Eight year old Mustafa Bani Odeh. His parents and two siblings murdered in front of him by plainclothed Israeli soldiers, while he was beaten up by them. West Bank. The same unit executed two Palestinians three months ago after they surrendered. Every. Day.

“…disabled people are actually less likely to drive than nondisabled people and more likely to get around by walking and rolling and taking transit. Car-heavy cities are also disproportionately dangerous for disabled folks…”— @nondriver.bsky.social Don’t use accessibility “as a political football.”

Go Paris!

In England a driver can be speeding, using cannabis and a phone, overtake another vehicle, mount the pavement outside a school playground and kill a 4-year-old girl while uninsured — and receive just 3 years 10 months for causing death by careless driving. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The data from six local bus companies including Oxford Bus Company and Thames Travel shows overall year-on-year passenger numbers are ~8% up since the introduction of the congestion charge. A third of this increase is on park and ride services news.oxfordshire.gov.uk/more-people-...

The gaping hole in this is Oxford's main roads, most of which remain 30mph. On a more policy-driven approach, these would have been among the first changed to 20mph since they have large injury clusters, people crossing everywhere, cycling movements in and out of side streets, lots of schools, etc.

All reports in this thread are from the collections of Northwestern University's Transportation Library. Materials we've digitized can generally be found in HathiTrust. Learn more and search our catalog here: www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-co...

Today's Mail on Sunday is going full-on MAGA with a claim that "foreign-born voters" stole the Gorton and Denton by-election... With advertising from Staysure, Trailfinders, Sky, British Gas, Boots, P&O, Great Western Railway, Tesco, Holland&Barrett, Gtech, Artemis, Cruise Club, Avalon, Insure&Go

Sinkholes are eating farmland in eastern Turkey www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Apparently chemical disasters are one of the things that will make America great again.

How much did Cantor copy from Dedekind? www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-...

"Reform takes negotiation, and sometimes that means playing hardball. In this case, that means giving the Machine a budget greater than the GDP of Chile." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-...

This is brilliant. And the effort required to display a twenty year old webpage kind of mind blowing. www.vam.ac.uk/articles/acq...

This “main road desire list” is just as applicable in Oxford, or indeed most urban areas.

Grazalema, Spain, received over 2,000 mm (78 inches) of rain in just the last 20 days. Over a year’s worth of rain — and it’s only early February. This is hydrologically absurd.

Oxford’s cycling demographics are closer to Amsterdam’s than London’s. open.substack.com/pub/urbancyc...

The number of trans youth suicides in the UK quadrupled in 2021 following significant restrictions in access to care. The NHS tried to cover this up with a fake report that tried to hide the truth. goodlawproject.org/new-data-sho...

“You know it’s wrong so please move along!” Children and parents at Windmill Primary School and Headington Nursery School staged a protest this morning against inconsiderate and dangerous driving outside school. They cite the volume of cars coming off the ring road and cutting through these streets.

Some thoughts on the Local Government Reorganisation wanderingdanny.com/oxford/2026/... - from a transport perspective, only the One Oxfordshire proposal makes any sense.

Low Traffic Neighborhoods! Low Traffic Neighborhoods! All in one mega blog post is a huge resource containing the most popular films, photos, diagrams & links on LTN's. Bookmark. Share. Link to it. Host a screening. Advocate. @talyaschwartz.bsky.social @solomonge.bsky.social @openplans.org

_How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor_ dannyreviews.com/h/How_Drive_... (my review)

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Oxford’s cycling demographics are closer to Amsterdam’s than London’s. open.substack.com/pub/urbancyc...

Ok, let’s do this🙄 We’ll start with an explainer covering: 🕒What is a 15-minute city 🏫What on Earth is going on with Oxford 👽Where the conspiracy theories have come from And then we’ll look at the Telegraph article 🧵 1/25

1/ Donald Trump's ambition to take over Greenland has done severe damage to right-wing Danish parties, according to a new poll. Almost the entire right wing has suffered a drop in the polls, with the MAGA-aligned Danish People's Party particularly badly hit. ⬇️

Labour keeps talking about saving the high street without naming the real problem. Car dependency. You cannot fix town centres while planning everything around driving. The internet is permanent. Retail only survives where footfall is dense, local, frequent, and cheap to access.

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

£10 million would have covered half of it - from St Giles to Oakthorpe Rd maybe - but that would still have been huge. The major block is getting enough car traffic off the road that the bus companies will accept losing the bus lanes.

Oxford needs to be building like this, not using up its last sustainable locations for low-medium density housing. This is 12x the planned density of Land South of Grenoble Rd.

Oxfordshire County Council is leaving X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter. It says it is “deeply concerned about the rise in online hate speech and abuse targeting women and girls… we must make clear and principled choices about how we communicate”.

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

An overnight minimum of 36!

_Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome's Empire_ (Armstrong, @oxfordunipress.bsky.social ) dannyreviews.com/h/Children_M... (my review) - "The Roman Republic was a federation of elite families who worked together for mutual benefit, but in a highly competitive environment"

"The car is being pushed out of Dutch cities because doing so offers answers to several of the challenges these cities face today." bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2026/01/21/w... (Bicycle Dutch)

“Foreign exporters absorbed only 4% of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%. “Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans.” www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

It will not surprise you to learn that Toby Youngs 'Free Speech Union' has obtained a High Court injunction banning the publication of a list of its donors open.substack.com/pub/democrac...

🚨 BREAKING: A legal bid to halt Oxford’s congestion charge has been turned down. The High Court today refused an application for judicial review by Open Roads For Oxford Ltd, which had raised £60,000 “from private donations, transfers from aligned funds, and our GoFundMe campaign” to bring the case.

Richard Davis' _Religions of Early India: A Cultural History_ (@princetonupress.bsky.social) offers a nice combination of broad themes and illustrative details, in their social and political contexts. dannyreviews.com/h/Religions_... (my review)

_Great Fear on the Mountain_ - a novel of an Alpine village and the mountain above it dannyreviews.com/h/Great_Fear... (my review)

“In like 95% of situations where a disengagement or accident happens with autonomous vehicles, it’s a very regular, routine situation for humans … These are not challenging situations whatsoever.” www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...