This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities.

"The policy tools exist to minimize the harms and maximize the benefits of a system that provides food, much of it healthy, in abundance. But first we need to stop demonizing industrial food, and instead think about how to make it better." Gabe & I for @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

If you are a rando considering emailing to insult me for whatever you quite falsely imagine my views on the war in Ukraine to be, please be aware that altho I am russophone, I am not from Russia, I'm from the only less desirable European country to be from than there (Belarus)

Cute talking parrots have gone viral on TikTok, yet these animals were likely bred in abject cruelty (or were even snatched from the wild). See for yourself in this new Vox investigation:

It is weird that we normalized keeping caged wild animals in our living rooms www.vox.com/the-highligh...

"The scarred legacy of the projects has strained public faith in public housing, but there is still an important role for government to play... cross-class living and mobility is, after all, the great promise of city life." [email protected] 🎁 www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Modern apartments have lower fire death rates than houses. Yet codes require fourplexes to install commercial sprinklers, build dual staircases, and hire architects—while similar-sized single-family houses are exempt. These costs block building smaller apartment buildings.

one of my strongest beliefs is that we're in our situation right now bc some of the most prominent talking heads (e.g. joe rogan, andrew schulz) are learning about politics in their 40s and 50s, instead of their teens and early 20s, and we have to go along for the ride as they learn basic things

Very comprehensive Vox article on building code research and reform efforts across the country, fearing John Zeanah’s report for the Center for Building on low-rise multifamily housing and Michael Eriksen’s academic work on building code costs www.vox.com/future-perfe... (gift link)

Trying to greatly simplify my cooking b/c no one has time to make a NYT Cooking recipe every day Today’s dinner was putting these 4 things in the instant pot — it looks extremely basic and that is the point! top with nutritional yeast and a bit of shredded vegan parmesan

This is unreal. An AUSA talking like that in open court is about as close as you can come to a total breakdown. Never heard of anything like it.

like this is absurd, get over yourselves

The idea that the Court should operate entirely in secret is a modern phenomenon. The idea that the Court should be separated from the public is a modern phenomenon. Earlier generations did not accept a powerful, isolated & secretive Court and we shouldn't either 1/6 www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

Ben Bikman is another one of the "Scientific Review Authors", the ad hoc committee behind our new Dietary Guidelines. Here's a video of him lying about vegetarians having smaller brains www.tiktok.com/@dr_idz/vide...

I'm not saying anything new here but the rapid normalization of open extreme racism, thuggery, & general idiocy on the American right is really astonishing! This has been the case for a while now but has become notably worse in the last year, w/ these people increasingly just sounding like

This paper, brought to you by the nutrition team who created the NOVA system & "ultraprocessed" foods, argues "don't worry about nutrients, bc even the idea of healthy processing food contradicts our narrative; any evidence that says otherwise is wrong". 1/ www.bmj.com/content/392/...

I have many thoughts on this paper but for starters, these proponents of the UPF concept have a lot of nerve basically arguing "it is the empirical evidence that's wrong for contradicting our theory," as though they have some long-accepted theory about the world like gravity or natural selection

We don't need cows for protein. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

"Neighbors for More Neighbors" MN called out, reminding us all that YIMBYism is the Doctrine of Life

We’re in our PBS supporter era and get their catalogs in the mail now. anyway, I fear this series would emotionally break me

God this piece. Ok, I will finally do what I should've done long ago and subscribe to @liberalcurrents.com

"They doubled down. Tripled down. Conjured larger confabulations. The lies became nothing more than demands to comply: “Lie. Lie with me. Lie. Real patriots lie, real Americans lie.”" www.liberalcurrents.com/he-served-th...

One reflection on this moment that I hope more in the animal rights movement take seriously is that human rights and freedom, besides being vital moral goods in themselves, are an unconditional prerequisite for being able to advocate for anything else

The other thing that really grinds my gears about the anti-"ultra-processed" crowd is the assertion that the profit motive somehow taints UPFs as a category, but not other foods. You don't think the profit motive is behind the factory farms that churn out billions of "unprocessed" chickens?

I am just gonna say it, these guys are completely emasculated by the knowledge that they have been out-organized by a group that is significantly made up of women, and all the bullshit call of duty nonsense is cope for their wounded egos bsky.app/profile/jeet...

From @jerusalem.bsky.social: “The problem for elites who wish to silo their politics in the realm of pure economics is that it is not actually possible to cleave the “rule of law when it comes to dealing with protesters” away from the “rule of law that enforces contracts.”

Hey an important memorial from someone who knew him

Great piece. A notably important case of how the red tape that keeps housing unaffordable is a problem of lack of state capacity rather than overregulation is that building codes used across the US that saddle apartments w/ unnecessary requirements are written by a private organization that is (1/2)

L.A. Metro, the main transit operator for Los Angeles, just voted to oppose SB 79, a law legalizing the construction of housing near stations. You can't make this stuff up. Legislators should remember this the next time they come to Sacramento begging for more money. laist.com/news/housing...

If this were happening in another country, we would call it what it is: ethnic cleansing.

Nasra Ahmed, a 23-year-old US citizen, was arrested and detained by ICE. She was held for TWO DAYS. ICE agents handcuffed her, called her a racial slur, and she was knocked to the ground so hard she got a concussion. This cannot continue happening. ICE needs to leave.

They are targeting children because they are trying incite violence. I have talked to many journalists today, and they all made the same observation: Border Patrol and ICE have been rolling around with maximum aggression, lingering for ages as crowds, gather, seemingly trying to cause a riot.

The TACO cycle: Markets want to price in TACO. But TACO only works if Trump sees stocks tank. So we get a loop: Trump does things → nothing happens (markets already priced in TACO) → that emboldens him to do more → until markets start to think he might not TACO → stocks fall → TACO is restored.

Why is the modern American built environment overwhelmingly ugly & soul-deadening? And should YIMBYs care? Our housing crisis is a nightmare for millions of Americans, but could it also, maybe, be a rare invitation to rebuild the way we live? Beauty matters! I wrote about it here (gift link):

Read @mbolotnikova.bsky.social excellent new story on housing aesthetics and housing politics, covering my work w/ @dbroockman.bsky.social & @jkalla.bsky.social, the advocacy of @urbancourtyard.bsky.social, and more! Gift link: www.vox.com/future-perfe...

The president is all-but encouraging pogroms against specific Somali-owned businesses, on the grounds that they serve customers who pay in food stamps (much like countless Walmarts in heavily Republican rural areas)

Can someone who has access to food service industry data (not more anecdata pls) let me know whether the death march of vegan restaurants has been more pronounced than restaurant closures in general?

You can judge a person by the size of their moral circle. Trump, for instance, has the smallest possible moral circle, containing only him. Be the opposite: expand your circle. Include, for example, animals currently raised for food. We shut them out of our consciences. It's time to bring them in.

it is genuinely comedic how they keep trying to make beef tallow happen (this list is total misinformation also)

The race to publish results may have produced weak evidence — and unnecessary panic — about plastics inside the human body. From our friends at @climatedesk.org and @theguardian.com www.vox.com/climate/4750... @vox.com

Canada's is maybe my fave dietary guidelines visual

Many reactions to this situation but it's hard to see the vibe shift as anything but, at bottom, the product of deeply rooted societal carnist antibodies. I do think the vibe will shift again! Meantime, I cherish my vegan friends & group chats & internet besties so dearly💚 & increasingly just (1/2)

I've been working for ages on a comprehensive revamp of the Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on "Animal Consciousness", with new sections on non-Western perspectives, methodological challenges and evolutionary big pictures, and it's out today: plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons.... Hope you find it useful!

Nothing new under the sun — dairy farms of all sizes are horrific, as this important new Animal Outlook investigation shows for raw dairy production www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Eah...

The new food pyramid has little to do with the new guidelines (themselves the product of a botched scientific process) and is more totemic than anything else. Very post-literate in that sense!

"To the extent the guidelines ... represent an agenda, it is not simply to facilitate a particular outcome favored by meat corporations but also to invert good governance liberalism." @gnrosenberg.bsky.social & I on the new food pyramid for @newrepublic.com. newrepublic.com/article/2051...

“Sometimes public service requires standing firm in the face of threats, which is what this unambiguously is” How did the banker dude get here before the leaders of every self-mythologizing media organization or even Congress

The thing about all these people they hate — the Somalis, the Haitians — are some of the most generous people you’ve ever met. Whose cultures are predicated on hospitality, whose kindness is entirely unmatched.