I remember when the future ended at Tomorrowland, and Walt’s sunny postwar future was mostly replaced with a Jules Verne retro-Victorian veneer, since the actual future was too grim. This revision of the future in Tomorrowland (even if spurred by air quality concerns) is a more promising portent.

Why did they use AI to read the grads’ names at all?!? Why even have a commencement? Why have a university? The floundering administrator reminds me of the “Hymn to the Engine” scene in Snowpiercer. (Though to their credit, the college kids are much less cooperative.) youtube.com/shorts/PUQ4m...

I feel like the task of our lifetimes is to make fossil fuels fossils again. Like let’s stop running our economies by exhuming the corpses of Devonian creatures and lighting them on fire. They’re dead bodies in a stony graveyard, not divinely ordained fuel reserves. That’s just a story we made up.

Less research and data & more reliance on AI trained on old weather data may not predict our weather now: “Weather times time equals climate. Cutting climate research impacts the skill of our weather forecast, and it arrests our advancement of weather forecasts.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

But I thought MOLOCH was speaking at OUR college’s graduation!🤪 “When someone offers you as sacrifice to MOLOCH’S unquenchable thirst for world-annihilating extraction, you DO NOT ask why the world must be annihilated, you simply fling your worthless corpse into his abyssal furnace!”

Too old to be trendy, but too new to be historic, Brutalist architecture and public spaces are often in danger of demolition. This fountain was weird, scruffy, and beloved by skaters, a reminder of an older San Francisco erased by the billionaires. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Historic preservation is often complex and wildly expensive. But placing an exclusionary private beach club at the People’s Beach, named for Jacob Riis, author of “How the Other Half Lives,” is . . . dubious. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/r...

Gift article. “It was envisioned as the first in a wave of retreats from the dangers of rising seas and intensifying storms.” But as one community shows, money and planning can’t make up for the loss of home. And many communities won’t have money, planning or time. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/c...

“Far from being a fading priority or fake news, climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to health, economic, food, water, environmental, personal, community and national security.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

In the Colorado Upper Basin state of Utah, for example—one of the driest places on earth, with an environmental catastrophe unfolding at what’s left of the Great Salt Lake, adjacent to a metropolitan region of 2.8 million—70% of the water goes to raise alfalfa for cattle feed and export.

This also illustrates how all the efforts to stop funding/documenting/talking about environmental justice and environmental racism, from universities to funding agencies to governments, were all just part of the larger neoconfederate project to roll back Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction.

The declyne of readinge ys caused by manye thinges. One major cause ys a systematic & decades-long devaluinge of literature at all levels of educacioun. We kan not put instrumentalitye above meaninge and still thrive. Fundinge the humanityes ys key to a just societye of well-informed citizens.

Since everything is awful and the discourse is terrible, here’s Michael Jeter, gloriously being all 6 genders in The Fisher King. My favorite thing about this is that once Jeter called him, Sondheim not only gave permission to use his lyrics, he rewrote them for the movie. youtu.be/rmfGLfWqlzA?...

Residents liked Altadena because it was semirural and independent, but a patchwork of small water and sewer systems in an unincorporated area are now obstacles to rebuilding: “What once felt like quirks of their Altadena neighborhood…have turned into nightmares.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

The Trump administration told leaders of western states it’s drawing up a 10-year plan for dealing with water shortages on the Colorado River. Arizona’s negotiator says rules requiring water reductions would be reassessed every two years. www.latimes.com/environment/...

“There is so little snow in the Rocky Mountains that this spring and summer, the runoff reaching Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reservoir, is expected to be just 13% of average, the lowest on record.”

“Campaigners began fighting for bathing water status for rivers six years ago under the EU-derived bathing water directive, in an attempt to drive a cleanup… Campaigners hope the more rigorous testing which is required for bathing waters will force water companies to reduce sewage pollution.”

“A combination of widespread drought, sharply lower production forecasts and historically high abandonment rates is sending shockwaves through the U.S. wheat industry.” USDA projects “the smallest U.S. wheat crop in decades…the lowest production estimate since 1972.”

“Experts have long expected global warming to produce less frequent but more intense precipitation. The study shows that rainfall consolidation is already happening across much of the western U.S.” — with implications for water infrastructure and storage, disaster planning, agriculture, and more.

The fact that a Chinese leader asked an American president this at the same moment US universities are eliminating history, classics, literature, languages, philosophy, Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, and all the other humanities fields that help us actually understand the world is WILD.

If built, this data center would use more energy than the entire state of Utah, hoover up scarce water, and create a huge heat island near the dwindling Great Salt Lake. If reliably docile Republican voters in *Utah* are enraged, maybe our inevitable AI future isn’t so inevitable after all.

“What’s frustrating to somebody like myself is this is all foreseeable,” said Udall. “Those of us who are kind of in the know, and that includes a lot of people in the Colorado River Basin, have seen something like this coming for a long, long time.” grist.org/drought/this...

Poor planning, political dysfunction, infrastructure not designed for current and future climate realities, and prioritizing water use by industry instead of long-term sustainability have all led to this: A major Texas city on the brink of a drought disaster. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/u...

The valuable resources and energy regimes may change, but the appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous land, resources, and rights does not.

“Some local environmentalists said Segura’s departure brings more upheaval for a city already grappling with worsening climate challenges.” Leaving this and other positions empty while rolling into a potentially record-breaking summer and El Niño seems dubious. www.latimes.com/environment/...

Dubious FEMA “reform”: “Local governments will also have to prove they can’t handle the catastrophe on their own. Meanwhile, the panel also calls for making it harder for disaster victims to get help with housing. …it mostly raises the risk those [disaster] areas won’t obtain any relief at all.”

"The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary." -Ursula K. Le Guin, *A War Without End*

Wrote about why the insane psychic damage we take from the news paralyzes us www.late-review.com/p/fear-of-br...

“Repealing the rule means less protection for clean drinking water, less protection for endangered wildlife that depend on healthy habitat, and less accountability when corporations leave these landscapes damaged and degraded.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

New FEMA head nominee: Previously fired for saying it was a bad idea to eliminate the agency. (So…good?) Prior disaster/emergency management experience? Dubious. Ability to self-teleport to Waffle House: Unknown. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05...

Dude *what*?!?

Opening day at last for the extended Metro D line under Wilshire Boulevard: “This was LA at its most kinetic: crowded platforms, packed train cars, jammed bike racks…are these new stations going to be big enough for a city that's finally been set in motion?”

Besides demanding more policing or reduced funding, Republicans have often expressed little interest in public space. Not so the president. Once you remember he’s a real estate developer who sees public space as future profits or conquered territory, it all makes sense. apnews.com/article/trum...

It looks like the pool at an Airport Ramada after a failed attempt to make it look less dumpy.

“The entire state is experiencing moderate/high levels of drought & Gov. Kemp declared a state of emergency last month in response to one of Georgia’s worst wildfire outbreaks in years…Frustration with data centers boiled over after officials told community members to scale back their water usage.”

“One thing I hope I may without offense affirm of these swamp-dwellers--they were pious. To what deity their veneration was given--whether, like the Egyptians, they worshiped the crocodile, or, like other Americans, adored themselves, I do not presume to guess.” Ambrose Bierce, What I Saw at Shiloh

Drawing on Mike Davis’ work, David Wallace-Wells warns that a looming El Niño is a portent of our chaotic climatic future: “We are going to learn an awful lot about how much climate disruption we can manage at the moment—and, presumably, how much we cannot.” (1/3) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/o...

Oregon allocated $10 million for the 2024 wildfire season. It cost more than $350 million.

“Droughts and storms have long affected prices. But as extreme weather becomes more common, [temporary] price spikes…may be turning into something more lasting…that could further disrupt household and national budgets already beset by an affordability crisis.“ www.latimes.com/environment/...

“The transformed agency would require states to meet higher thresholds for the disaster declarations that unlock federal support, would leave evacuation and emergency shelter at the local level and would severely cap payouts to affected homeowners and renters.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The Wilshire subway—a saga befitting Hollywood, and the city that struggled to build a Metro line under a street that began as an Indigenous Tongva trade route and is named for a radical labor socialist wellness influencer and real estate developer. (Only in LA!) www.latimes.com/california/s...

The richest of historical ironies: An Anglo-Californian architectural fantasia of the Spanish Missions and Californian leisure culture will now be owned by descendants of the Indigenous people brutalized by the mission system.

“What happens if you deposit that much [heat] energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies wondered. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?” www.sltrib.com/news/environ...

After a trip using the Paris Metro, London Underground, the Eurostar Chunnel train, and rail systems in France and the UK, I know I’ll likely never see an equivalent transit system in the US for most cities or national travel. This article helps explain why. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A crater “becomes a biodiversity hotspot. At the bottom of these explosions, which go three to eight metres deep, there will always be water in the end, even in very dry periods. It is like establishing a small wetland.” He pauses. “And that is a place where animals are always eager to come.”

The long history of Texas not enacting legislation or regulations that could have prevented last summer’s flood disaster, in a place infamous for flooding.

New Orleans, “the most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world…requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

They’re sacrificing their water to alfalfa for export and AI, so why worry about air pollution in AZ or UT? And all that dust blowing from the bed of the dying Great Salt Lake *definitely* came from Asia. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/c...

“Representatives of the three states negotiated the short-term deal after they deadlocked in talks with four other states on a long-term plan for sharing the river’s diminishing water.”