"The way we’ve organized housing for the last century has given us not only pervasive unaffordability, but also too few versions of the American dream." @mbolotnikova.bsky.social on the last hundred years — and next fifty — of housing in America 🎁 www.vox.com/the-highligh...

A SIDEWALK REPRESENTS PUBLIC SAFETY and don't you forget it

As long as people are allowed to leverage seemingly “woke” or “progressive” language to make the argument for the stagnation of infrastructure, it puts those who want to invest in upgrading roads and amenities in a real optics bind. See: resistance in Seattle to weekend closures of LWB for cycling.

pandering to the utilitarian vote by showing he will jump into a pool while wearing a nice suit (drowning child not required)

NYT investigates US car bloat: “About 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”

Changing our cityscapes so that 44% of Americans lived in walkable areas would be the greatest sea change in American urbanism since the automotive revolution.

I'm very struck by the research asking Americans if they prefer to live in a walkable area even it means having a smaller home. Pew has lowest percentage I've seen, with 44% of Americans preferring walkability, & even that is way higher than the share who actually have access to such housing

“What matters to me is that those of us purporting to stand for gender equality reject the kind of cruel, juvenile misogyny on display from Kulinski, Klippenstein, and others.” @aselrod.bsky.social www.liberalcurrents.com/the-men-defe...

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

Good piece from @mbolotnikova.bsky.social. Reporting is always better when a journalist is on the ground & has been consistently following a topic (she was standing next to me at the post-action press conference).

Still putting my thoughts together on this (very!) imperfect book, but I think dismissing it as mere "Calvinism" is mistaken. The various contradictions Harden struggles with are interesting precisely b/c she is a microcosm for our conflicting collective impulses lareviewofbooks.org/article/orig...

I weighed in on the situation (and got to invoke Dinesh Wadiwel while doing it!) www.vox.com/future-perfe...

"[such] brutal tactics hadn’t been used on animal rights activists before, and the action’s organizers didn’t adequately prepare. In that sense, the movement may have underestimated its own growing influence and power to elicit such a response from law enforcement" 🎁 www.vox.com/future-perfe...

This NOT FLYING TODAY? sign is in all sorts of stock images for flight delays/cancellations but if you actually read it (or, like I did, violate it) it's also just kinda a bleak statement about what our society imagines airports to be blog.bennettmcintosh.com/2026/04/25/O...

"America ought to have bigger aspirations for the future of walking ... Countries that have minimized pedestrian deaths have embraced walking as a wondrous, efficient transportation technology, wrongly sidelined by the automobile." ~ @mbolotnikova.bsky.social 🎁 www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I went to the Midwest Junto for the History of Science last week and the best bus route from Madison WI, to Lafayette, IN required some light trespassing at ORD. blog.bennettmcintosh.com/2026/04/25/O...

This is a major indictment of federal inaction re: car tech. For years, automakers sold consumers on Level 2 systems by implying (seldom outright saying) that drivers need not focus on the road. The feds -- NHTSA, FTC, Congress -- have never forced the car co's to stop. Now confusion reigns.

Ok fine if I MUST, allow me to be the one to bravely say that veg*n men are super hot!!! Only a beta loser would mislead you into thinking otherwise!

Many highly developed (& correct!) consequentialist arguments for how veg(itari)anism helps animals, workers, or environment through social, political, or economic mechanisms But what made me take the leap years ago was much simpler virtue ethics: "I don't like this & I don't need to be part of it"

you can opt out of participating in this system entirely and it feels so great! important story here by @jesslsr.bsky.social

Finally wrote about this mbolotnikova.substack.com/p/ridglan-ma...

I have never written one of these Substack things before but will be out with a debut piece soon (about the mass beagle rescue in Wisconsin, of course) - pls sign up here to get it!! (this is free, so skip anything that asks you to pay for it!) mbolotnikova.substack.com/subscribe

In an in-depth investigation about the lives of calves born into the dairy industry, @voxdotcom.bsky.social reporter @mbolotnikova.bsky.social exposes systemic abuses that are hidden from the public. cc: @dylanlscott.bsky.social @paigeblank.bsky.social @katherinecourage.bsky.social

Just had one of the most intense experiences of my life watching activists break beagles out of Ridglan, one of the biggest breeders of dogs for animal experimentation. Here are police who showed up to stop them, dragging one of the dogs into their car:

AMA HERE! www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comme...

The carnivore promoters seem simply unable to comprehend that their preferred human diet is impossible to have without farming animals in this manner!

Join me for an ~Ask Me Anything~ about this story on the extreme confinement of dairy calves: Americans ditched veal, but what replaced it is just as bad On the r/iama subreddit, TODAY! at 12pm ET!! reddit.com/r/IAmA/

"The dairy business is, at bottom, organized around the hyper-optimization and commodification of one of life’s most intimate processes: pregnancy, birth, lactation," writes @mbolotnikova.bsky.social for @vox.com:

Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

I tried to do what we call, if I may be so bold, a "conceptual scoop"!! Pls read my story on the most overlooked form of extreme confinement of farmed animals—the routine caging of millions of dairy calves in tiny crates less than 1/10 the size of a parking spot. It's not about veal! (🧵)

Big belated congrats to @jandutkiewicz.bsky.social and @gnrosenberg.bsky.social on FEED THE PEOPLE! a book that everyone should read and will get a lot out of. It might surprise you to know that they call for throwing away the "broken food system" cliché but they have a GOOD POINT!

"AVs almost by definition lower the friction and costs associated with driving ... And we already know, from the last century-plus of experience in the US, what happens when we make driving easier: We will get more of it. And more concrete and asphalt infrastructure to accommodate it."

new from me: a story about VACANCY CHAINS, the idea that underlies the argument that more housing is good even if you can't afford it www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

There's considerable ignorance about animal agriculture practices People overestimate the prevalence of high-welfare practices and underestimate low-welfare ones

Some of the replies are incredible. It may be true that some of the land used as pastures are not suitable for growing crops, but we don’t have to use all the land. We could just leave some places to be wild.

pour one out for DOGE

"Improving the American food system further will require engaging, improving, and fairly distributing modern agriculture’s productivity, not tossing it on the compost heap." @gnrosenberg.bsky.social and I on the concept of democratic hedonism in food system reform. newrepublic.com/article/2067...

Here's a thoughtful take on a contentious topic by @mbolotnikova.bsky.social .... www.vox.com/future-perfe...

The biggest university monkey lab in the country is working with the NIH to potentially end its experimentation on monkeys and transition to being a primate sanctuary. It's a big deal, and I had thoughts! Pls don't yell at me until you've read www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I love @theguardian.com so much lmao

This is such a waste of everyone's time and of government resources. Let people use normal words that have been flexibly used in many contexts for centuries ffs www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Clear (and distressing) example of animal waste. 18 billion animals were found to be wasted every year, but I bet things like this weren't always counted. As I mention in the blog, animal mortalities on farms are excluded from most global measurements foodwastestories.com/2026/02/03/f...

Dallas may tear down its IM Pei-designed City Hall for a development site for the Adelsons, "raising the possibility that City Hall might ultimately be razed for a casino—a perfect symbol for our era of civic impoverishment and gambling addiction." Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

“It costs significantly more per square foot to build multifamily homes in the US (and in Canada, which has similar codes) compared to single-family homes.” www.vox.com/future-perfe... By @mbolotnikova.bsky.social

Someone replying to this thread asked me about organic milk but I can't find it now. The answer is that organic doesn't bar most of the things that make dairy farming so cruel, like cow-calf separation & housing calves in solitary confinement. See this canonical story:

This is part of the sexual politics of meat, so many ads for mammalian milk show cows happy to share their nursing product; smiling, skinny, thinking only of the consumer. Most ads omit, of course, their children for whom the milk was meant.

Before I wrote this last year I knew a lot about the horrors of dairy but didn't truly know what it means to be a herd animal. We think humans are intensely social, but cows are another level entirely I think it's pretty much impossible to do dairy farming humanely, but the way we do it seems 1/

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