Pedestrians and cyclists are told to be careful, to wear high-visibility clothing. When an on-duty crossing guard, whose job it is to keep children safe through intersections while carrying a stop sign and wearing a high-vis vest, is killed by a truck it shines a light on the lie in that advice.

AI companies really trying to get them young

Remember when the conservative talking point was free speech? Free speech on campus? What is happening here? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u...

Diane Seuss’s sonnet “[The problem with sweetness is death]” includes the line “And here/ I am, broke, barely able to count to fourteen.” And it’s great but oh man my childish brain really wanted the poem to then have thirteen or even fifteen lines

Six people died from tampered Tylenol and the company pulled 30 million bottles off the market. ChatGPT is accused of urging seven people towards suicide, and OpenAI just assures us they’re still working out the kinks. Billions in investment, zero accountability.

"We are in some danger of believing that the speed and wizardry of our gadgets have freed us from the sometimes arduous work of turning pages in silence." (Birkerts 1994). I often think about this line from over thirty years ago

Is… is the NY Times okay?

Don’t forget your bike lights today! Happy November

Now that there's an influential wellness grift telling people they don't have to eat their vegetables, I want a new movement about how really very healthy candy is. It makes me feel good so it must be healthy! Someone with the clout needs to get on that.

“Developing our linguistic capacities — to master diverse concepts, to follow an intricate argument, to form judgments, to communicate those to others — is the development of our capacity to think.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

In 1850 the weight of all the world's wild mammals equalled the weight of humans and our livestock Today they are outweighed 1 to 20 Reconfiguring life on this planet to produce cheap meat and dairy www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Generative AI is nothing more than a form of social suicide that must be reined in before it’s too late. It cannot be allowed to reach the level of proliferation that social media has achieved”

Another excellent essay by @unpopularscience.bsky.social - on sentience and much else. "Other life forms cannot describe their pain to us, yet we can still listen.... Our world is so much more complex and wondrous than the myth of human supremacy would have us believe." shorturl.at/F38aV

Bacon kills more people from cancer than tobacco and asbestos ever did. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Some bad bike news stuff in that too (on page 18)

“I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I'm 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. ... The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, ‘What is your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I'd rather die.’” 🫡

This is so good. But whoever wrote the italicized preamble was dreaming when they put the commas around Oswald’s name. If only!

I have a friend working on a fascinating historical family memoir (not Holocaust related this time). He's in Toronto and looking for a good writing group. Does anyone know any relevant writing groups or how to find one?

One intersection on Bloor saw average daily bike ridership consistently hover around 6000 for the past 4 months. This is a 20% increase over last year. Yet, Premier Ford wants to target this lane for removal. I wanted to highlight this, one year after the passage of Bill 212.

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

I like to think Beckett himself would have delighted in this review (via @luxalptraum.com ht @ykomska.bsky.social)

Love it when they let is into their world view.

The story as it's told is that some soy farmers are losing and some are benefitting from a reshaping of the global value chain for soy. Yes, true. But the bigger story is that the global appetite for soy is a result of the global appetite for meat, which is driving ag beyond planetary boundaries.

Here are some of the automated speed enforcement tickets given to vehicles assigned to Ford cabinet ministers. #OnPoli Story ▶️ globalnews.ca/news/1146373...

Using the serial comma is either a personal aesthetic choice or deference to a particular style guide. So is its omission. Ambiguity is so easy that both omission and use of the serial comma can lead to it. (More in comments.)

🤤 (shocked, shocked I tell you)

Life vs death

Meat is a blind spot for people who care about climate. When I used to have dinner with my colleague Wally Broecker, the climate scientist who coined the term “global warming”, he would always order a steak.

Microsoft shoved their AI Copilot into everything in Windows 11. Which lead to an increase in Windows 10 use. So they announced they'd stop support for Windows 10, but its usage was still strong. So they started to put Copilot into Windows 10. Windows 7 use is surging 5x now. AI is product poison.

This "priority removal section" for the bike lane on Bloor W demonstrates that Ford and Sarkaria were never serious about finding parallel secondary routes. Where is the parallel route here? They don't care. www.thestar.com/news/gta/the...

Makes me feel old when people send me a video that could just be a clear and concise article.

☝️ Important point @macmargolis.bsky.social @theguardian.com "only about 20% of soy is used in products for humans, with less than half of these for vegetarian and vegan products. The vast majority – nearly 80% - of soy is grown to feed animals." www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2023...

This story isn‘t about ‘the world‘s taste for soya‘, it‘s about the world‘s taste for meat. The vast majority of soya is grown for animal feed. Less than 10% is for direct human consumption. A shame it‘s not mentioned in the story. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

This post was heavily ratio'd yesterday because of its blatant victim blaming and windshield bias. So @npr.org decides to double down and repost this crap again today. 🙄

Are Conservatives really now against law enforcement and basic traffic laws? Are they also against parking tickets, because they’re a cash grab? Fining speeders is good. Ford is removing city revenue as well as a basic tool of traffic laws enforcement. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Car drivers are so uncoupled from the responsibility of life and death that not only is the solution laid on cyclists and pedestrians but the word ‘Car’ never appears in the article’s summation.

Imagine if NPR had actually talked to safe streets advocates for this story and learned how the solutions to drivers killing people is not, in fact, victim blaming

So just to be clear, all taxpayers will pay for traffic calming instead of fining the people that speed and leaving everyone else alone. We like this for a policy change? Are we so afraid of going after the actual rule breakers that we would rather put it on the back of everybody?

Repeat this over and over. Doug Ford will kill people.

Shanah Tovah, New York City. Here's to a sweet and hopeful New Year.

Shana tova, everyone! Check out the incredible vegan challah my wife baked. (Context: we like to cook but are very much not bakers.) Wishing everyone a sweet new year and holding a pinch of hope today that the new year will see some building of peace in this violent world.

Shana tova, peeps. May it be a year of health, of safety, and of collective liberation. ❤️‍

The extinction impact of the beef industry is immense. Eating even a little bit multiplies a diet’s impact on endangered species. insane chart from a new open access study comparing extinction impacts of different food production systems t.co/Nc7c8ynR0N

Neverending death and injury caused by drivers and road design and not a thing we can about but allow cars to go faster and ticket cyclists in parks.

This has to stop. The cops are creating a hostile environment in High Park. They are validating the overblown, disingenuous "concerns" about cyclists being spread by people against motor vehicle restrictions in the park. Release some stats to support this disproportionate response, or stop.

Scientists: We need to reduce meat consumption to keep food production within planetary limits. EU consumers: We like alt protein and know what's meat and what isn't since it's obvious. EU politicians: Let's legislate language to protect the meat industry. www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025...

Just so obvious now that it was never about "free speech" www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/u... #cancelculture #woke #politicalcorrectness #freespeech #academicfreedom

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Toronto Police were ordered by Rob Ford, Toronto's mayor ~10y ago, to stop enforcing moving violations. With that, we saw a rise in pedestrian/cyclist injuries. My take is that this got the city used to lawlessness around abiding by road rules. This can't go on www.dlsph.utoronto.ca/2019/12/12/u...