(Worth noting, as I read Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s ‘More and More and More’ alongside, that coal + gas use still goes up. More coal was used in 2024 than ever. More wood is being burned than ever. Fressoz’s position is that there is no transition & without changing system settings, it seems unlikely)

(Where Thiel grew up: “At that time, Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday. In 1976…some people in the town continued to greet each other with “Heil Hitler” and to give the Nazi salute” www.theguardian.com/technology/2... )

For the first time ever, from April 2025 to April 2026, solar energy outproduced ‘natural gas’ in Asia. First coal, now ‘natural gas’… the fossil fuel dominos are falling… and they said it cant be done…

“The head of media at the NRMA, Peter Khoury, says it opposes the “arbitrary and universal slashing of speed limits” and argues speed-limit reductions have been ineffective in cities” (That is just straight up misinformation, probably disinformation) www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

“Western Europe was already more urbanized than China by 1500, and the share of output raised in taxes was well ahead of China’s by then. So what made the difference? Two things: institutions, and the culture that sustained them” (fascinating #darkmatter example) www.the-tls.com/history/two-...

‘“It would be one of my nightmares as an ecologist to wake up and be in charge of that thing,” he said of the Reflecting Pool. “The scale of what you would have to do to keep it dead but beautiful, the scale of the toxicity, is just horrendous.”’ (Lovely, funny piece) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/s...

“Tuchel and his staff have been leaning into a military concept known as VUCA in their approach to the tournament. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and …” (England team catch up with futures and speculative design practice) www.theguardian.com/football/202...

"India’s capital will now issue new licence plates only to electric small trucks and three-wheelers, known as e-rickshaws, from 2027, and to e-scooters and electric motorbikes from 2028" (Amazing. As long as the vehicles stay small through this transition) www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

10 years ago today, my family and I joined the many thousands in central London marching against Brexit. It was a joyous mood, even righteous, but came to naught of course. For now. Here are a few of the many great signs, and faces, of the march.

I had fun with a few diagrams in Project Circle. 1) I've deployed Stewart Brand's pace layers diagram as much as any other, over the last few decades, but here I extended the diagram's building before-and-after, to reveal its lack of awareness of material flows i.e. layers often end up in landfill

Circle is a framework for a regenerative built environment sector that works well within planetary boundaries. The framework explores the rich potential of 'planet-aligned materials' (like hemp, straw, timber, earth and stone) vs current industry-aligned mainstays (1/2) medium.com/dark-matter-...

“Circle is a new research project, following last years’s Australian Reduction Roadmap, proposing a new framework for making better choices about materials, oriented towards a regenerative built environment sector that works well within planetary boundaries” (An intro) medium.com/dark-matter-...

(This is an excellent series—this episode on ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/c...

Michael Olise is perhaps the leading fine artist working today

Australia: still the #2 exporter of coal www.energyinst.org/statistical-...

I write in my critique of their book ‘Abundance’, ‘Klein and Thompson cannot resist but describe Elon Musk as “a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together”. It’s fair to say that this statement has not aged well’. medium.com/dark-matter-...

“Amid early summer heatwaves, the studio’s Passivhaus scheme for Ealing Council remains impressively cool, one of a host of features that bodes well for its longevity” www.ribaj.com/buildings/go...

“Confronting the challenges that Britain faces requires going beyond just naming the problem, and actually building concrete partnerships between the state and the private sector where business is held to its role in producing value rather than extracting it” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

(Increasingly fascinated by how good Fundación RIA is. Founded by David Chipperfield in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, a think tank for the region and much more besides, ibcluding publci programme, woekshops, garden etc) fundacionria.org/en/

The place layers thinking after my Swedish one-minute city projects now has a further outer ring, thanks to Chinese Premier Li Qiang: the "one-hour electronic information innovation circle in the Yangtze River Delta, one-hour motorcycle industrial circle in Chongqing" www.weforum.org/stories/2026...

"One potential option would allow Manchester to retain a portion of income tax revenues, as well as the uplift created by the growth that was stimulated by a new station and the development around it" (As with many European municipalities—a game-changer) giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"Researcher Shows Curved ‘Misfit’ Wood Can Bear Building Loads" (Love this. The 'ugly fruit' of structural engineering) woodcentral.com.au/aalto-misfit...

‘I was delighted when I heard that Emma Hayes would be part of the ITV line-up for their coverage of the men’s World Cup this year. But why did the set designers feel the need to put her in a kitchen?’ Natasha Chahal on women in football, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Many think that Vision Zero is simply not achievable — Helsinki showing one strategy, just as Oslo did before by actively reducing car traffic—both fewer cars, at slower speeds, are required ultimately (Interestingly, Sweden, where Zero originates, has never got close, as they struggle with that)

I just updated my piece on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s regressive ideas of abundance, and their ‘theory of no change’, with a nod to @yonahfreemark.com’s excellent recent paper on the direction of 21stC US housing growth medium.com/dark-matter-...

People also assume that the natural state of the housing market is for housing prices to just go up forever relative to inflation because that's what they've done over the last 30 years in large cities. This leads to the idea that home ownership intrinsically "builds wealth". No it doesn't.

“American philosophy graduates are more likely to have jobs than their peers who studied computer science. In 2024, the most recent year for which numbers are available, 7% of those who had studied computer science were unemployed, against just 5.1% of philosophers” economist.com/science-and-...

“Goop Kitchen’s expansion was made possible by a $15m investment from former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who is developing robots for use in dark kitchens through his latest venture, Atoms” (#2026) observer.co.uk/news/interna...

One very gratifying thing is to see in our Melbourne School of Design end-of-semester show is the effort we’ve been putting into shifting the emphasis towards deeper engagement with materials being playing out across the many more physical models being produced in studio…

“Across rich countries some 8% of students in tertiary education notch up a score in literacy no better than one might expect from a ten-year-old child…The share of very poor performers in literacy has more than doubled” (some shocking numbers in this OECD survey) economist.com/internationa...

Glimpses of the launch of our end-of-semester show at Melbourne School of Design, MSDx Winter, last night. Amazing work by students and staff, and brilliantly supported by our exhibitions and engagement crew. Congrats to all involved-a semester of hard work, beautifully realised and celebrated

"Specifiers warn that timber, already used less since the 2022 restrictions, risks becoming a costly and heavily scrutinised option viable only for a narrow band of schemes" (Absurd, focusing on engineering rather than holistic approach incl. safety + climate risk) woodcentral.com.au/england-four...

"Shawmut Design and Construction is threading 190 tons of reclaimed Chicago Common Brick through the laminated mass timber structural frame now rising at Harvard University’s new American Repertory Theatre" (#circle) woodcentral.com.au/harvards-mas...

"Australians could be unwittingly funding Russia’s war through the engineered timber in their own homes" woodcentral.com.au/up-to-6-of-t... versus "The DNA Test That Could Catch Russian Wood the Paperwork Hides" woodcentral.com.au/russian-timb... (Better we sort out our own #timber sector)

“China’s forest stock volume rose towards 21 billion cubic metres in 2025… That greening has run far enough to reshape the country’s water cycle, with forest cover climbing from about 10 per cent of the land in 1949 to more than a quarter today” woodcentral.com.au/china-three-...

Setting up for MSDx Winter, our end of semester show at Melbourne School of Design. 48 hours to go before Thursday’s launch party!

"What if the spaces we often overlook—beneath power lines, alongside rail corridors and along busy roads—could become some of Melbourne’s most valuable green assets?" (Nice report, noting how our Connected Corridors research project links to teaching at MSD) msd.unimelb.edu.au/news/announc...

“…the air taxi industry…trying to position its technology as an important new mode of urban mobility with the ability to whisk passengers across cities without any of the noise or carbon pollution of a traditional helicopter” (That’s setting a low bar) www.theverge.com/column/95097...

“the “hard truths case” is the first legal claim in an international court or body against a state for climate harm since the International Court of Justice released an advisory opinion that found states had a legal obligation to take measures to prevent it” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

“The scale of the damage bill illustrates the potential revenue if polluter-pays principles were applied to high-consuming groups,” the authors said.” (Very powerful, useful research, noting the authors state it is even ‘conservative’ in its estimates) www.theguardian.com/environment/...

New paper out: The environmental bill of the top 10% of consumers is more than $1.7 to $5.7 trillion a year. "The top 10%" sounds like billionaires but it's essentially the middle class of the wealthy world & up: more than 60% live in the US & EU, 2% in India 🧵 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Gina's "Sweet Child o'Mines" from Sammy J's 2013 ABC comedy 'Wednesday Night Fever'. Still freakishly relevant today over a decade later. 🤣 Absolutely brilliant.

“For Fox to turn a man as partisan, bullying and unlikeable as Lalas into American soccer’s figurehead is the media equivalent of getting John Wayne Gacy to perform at a children’s birthday party.” www.theguardian.com/football/202...

“Irish-grown timber would become the first material considered in every publicly funded building under a seven-point roadmap that went to cabinet this week” (This is excellent, following France’s regulation to some extent) woodcentral.com.au/ireland-wood...

(Fascinated by these ‘Woodhenges’, as Roger Deakin refers to them in his brilliant book ‘Wildwood’, which predate Stonehenge by centuries) woodcentral.com.au/stonehenge-t...

(I just chanced across this earlier today. I wrote it almost 20 years ago—and it shows, in its clumsiness and earnestness—the previous time I lived in Australia, in Sydney. But equally, I'm not sure we've resolved much in terms of tactics for communicating climate crises) medium.com/iamacamera/a...

(Excellent new research by @ianwalker.bsky.social): "Drivers who are told about the safety risks posed by SUVs to cyclists and pedestrians are very unlikely to be deterred from buying one, a new study has found." (Shocking, really. Motornormativity indeed) www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

"The British state was unmade by the collapse of the municipal project and can only be remade by its revival; public ownership and democratic accountability, and the clawing back of national capacity ... are fundamental to the change Britain needs" www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

🚨 New research by us! 📣 Most British drivers don't know how dangerous SUVs are to other road users, but adding information to SUV marketing materials seems to do almost nothing to change people's plans to buy SUVs Here's a 🧵 on why harder action is going to be needed 1/10

"Resilient, adaptable, extensible, hackable, seamful, open, accessible, taking advantage of the body and its multi-sensory interface, combining physical materality and digital flexibility, and an ability to age well and fail gracefully, or at least interestingly" (1/2) medium.com/a-chair-in-a...