Save the city, save the climate. This starter pack, connects the dots…

Brent Toderian@brenttoderian.bsky.social · last wk.

I’ve created a handful of them, but this might still be my most unusual STARTER PACK! A team-up with world famous climate scientist @katharinehayhoe.com, these are folks connecting the dots on climate action via better cities! Please follow these great folks and share the pack! go.bsky.app/7Wh2uvp

Social trust grows when we meet face to face, and it dwindles when we are separated by screens or windshields. Loved my rapid-fire convo with with Naomi Cohen, the 15-year-old wunderkind host of Realtopia Podcast. www.spreaker.com/episode/epis...

Episode 16: Charles Montgomery (Author) — Happy Cities, Trust & the Design of Belonging - Realtopia - Real Estate for Teens

spreaker.com

Despite Elon Musk's declaration that empathy is our weakness, it is actually our species' super power. A juicy read from Net Mirth HQ @manderson98.bsky.social mitchellanderson.substack.com/p/exploratio...

Explorations in Empathy (Part 1)

Is Being Nice Evolutionary Emergent?

mitchellanderson.substack.com

Perth is what you get when wealth, beauty and extreme dispersal collide. Chris Arnande explains: "you begin to believe you’re in a stage setting of a city, where two-thirds of the actors have been plucked out, removed to play some sort of trick on you." walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/perth-aust...

Perth (Australia) -- The Beautiful Lonely City

Giant trees, odd birds, and few people living next to valuable rocks

walkingtheworld.substack.com

Chatbots often deepen extremist beliefs. But if they were designed differently, they could disrupt them. open.substack.com/pub/techands...

Inside the Chatbot Extremism Loop

Chatbots can deepen extremist beliefs—but new research from ISD suggests they could also help disrupt them.

open.substack.com

I need a tool to block supposed science and design accounts which are actually just nonstop American politics. Help!

Teenagers are spending as much time on social media as they would for a full-time job. Girls are spending 35+ hours a week on social media and boys are close behind. If they keep it up, the average teen will spend more than 10 years of their life doomscrolling www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

Most single people say they want to have romantic encounters in public spaces--just like in the movies. That rarely happens to people who are forced to drive everywhere. Meanwhile, people in walkable places depend less on dating apps for connections. www.planetizen.com/features/137...

Planning for Love, Part 2: What happens to dating in a car-centric world?

A survey of over 150 adults about their dating lives reveals stark differences based on their neighborhood's walkability.

planetizen.com

I was sunning by the pool when the boxes arrived. And here in my hand is my life’s work: “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War On Democracy.” Coming 8/18. Pre-orders make a huge difference! Make a fascist sweat—pre-order today! www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Ne...

Unbelievable.

Darren Buck@bikepedantic.bsky.social · last mo.

Trump’s war on science comes for bikes and Vision Zero. Proven Safety Countermeasures are a set of street design tools that FHWA career engineers judge to have been proven to improve safety. They delisted Bike Lanes, Road Diets, and three speed management tools. highways.dot.gov/safety/prove...

Oregon’s model multifamily zoning code regulates size with “FAR.” What do floor area ratios look like? I went to one of the very few small-lot neighborhoods where Portland has re-legalized apartments, right next to I-5 in NoPo. See alt text for their FAR

Finally a Vancouver starter pack!

Bryn Davidson - Lanefab@lanefab.com · 2y ago

ok... my first stab at a Vancouver starter pack. Attempting to recreate twitter from days of yore, when there was a good mix of Vancouver media, politicians, experts, frustrating blowhards, and interesting weirdos. A strong housing and sustainability bias, of course. go.bsky.app/PzH4RoP

Want to be happier and less full of extremist rage? One efffective trick is to unfollow the most extremist accounts on your social media feed, and follow more educational/uplifting ones. Thanks @jayvanbavel.bsky.social ! osf.io/preprints/ps...

When opportunities for collective fun dry up, happiness falls and extremism rises. Cities need to tackle the fun drought. Start by investing in public space, sports, and...yes, legalizing dancing again. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

The Fun Shortage Is Real, and It’s Making America Miserable

With fewer places to relax and socialize, and steeper prices for entry, having fun is quantifiably harder than it used to be.

bloomberg.com

Your AI is not a tool. It is an environment that is absorbing you. (Thank you @lmsacasas.bsky.social for making sense of this new world. And friends, find more on his Substack.) open.substack.com/pub/theconvi...

Your AI Is Not a Tool

The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 5

open.substack.com

america has a fun shortage and it's important we talk about it (decline in third spaces, etc etc)

What if the stuff we did to save the world also happened to make us happier and healthier? New book out now: happyclimate.org @dunnhappylab.bsky.social

Leave the Lights On - Make Climate Action Joyful

What if the most effective ways to fight climate change made you happy? Psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and climate behavior scientist Jiaying Zhao challenge everything we think we know about sustainable ...

happyclimate.org

It took an indigenous nation--and land not ruled by municipal zoning--to provide the housing that Vancouver desperately needs near downtown. Free link to story with wise words from @khelsilem.bsky.social : www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/o...

Opinion | One City Might Have Just Cracked the Housing Crisis

nytimes.com

Hawaii just passed the first state law in the country banning corporations from making political donations in state elections. Now a Koch-backed legal group is suing to overturn it. Big Money won't get out of our politics without a fight — one that we the people must win. (via @levernews.com)

There are now more bots online than humans, and the Internet is being reconfigured to serve those bots. So if you are wondering how to best use your time today...try meeting a human in person. www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

Bot (automated) vs. human HTTP requests are split 57.5 vs. 42.5 percent, according to the firm’s latest data.

tomshardware.com

Hello!

Jonathan Berk 🏠@berkie1.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A new @pewresearch.org study finds that infill housing near jobs, stores, and transit costs governments ~$21,000 less per home to serve, cuts long term infrastructure maintenance costs in half, and generates 13% more in annual property tax revenue per acre than sprawl.

In Vancouver, the redeveloped Oakridge Mall replaced parking lots with with residential towers and rooftop park. It’s meant to be a green oasis. Here’s how it’s going. Not finished yet, but it is going to be challenging to draw people to this space.

Cities face uneven penalties under Ottawa's Housing Accelerator Fund www.nationalobserver.com/2026/06/04/n...

Cities face uneven penalties under Ottawa's Housing Accelerator Fund

Ottawa’s housing fund was meant to reward cities for making it easier to build, but uneven penalties are raising questions about what happens when they fall short.

nationalobserver.com

ABC and CBS paid Trump. NBC gave to his ballroom. Scott Pelley took a stand and was fired. CNN is next. When Trump sued me, I fought and won. It is that spirit I brought to Democracy Docket. Fearlessly independent, always pro-democracy. Help it grow by subscribing now. bit.ly/4qmEiFz

Drivers who also cycle have fewer accidents and lower insurance claims. Another reason to get more people biking! www.forbes.com/sites/carlto...

Cyclists Are Better Drivers Than Motorists, Finds Study

Cyclist-drivers tend to have faster reaction times than motorists who don't cycle.

forbes.com

The US is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure

They let AI agents loose in an artificial world. Grok immediately turned to crime. Claude was honest--until it had to interact with other agents like Grok, then it became criminal, too. www.emergence.ai/blog/emergen...

EMERGENCE WORLD: A Laboratory for Evaluating Long-horizon Agent Autonomy  — Emergence AI

Most evaluations of AI agents look like exams: a discrete task, a clean environment, a score in minutes or hours. Emergence World is built for the opposite question—what happens when you let agents ru...

emergence.ai

“The countries where children have the most independence [are] the ones with traffic calming, lower speed limits, separated cycling infrastructure, and a driver culture that expects children to be present in the road environment.” livewirecalgary.com/2026/05/28/p...

Perspectives: I Want My Kids to Roam. I’m Afraid a Driver Will Kill Them.

A new survey of nearly 24,000 American parents found that at age 12, one in five children still aren’t allowed to leave the house without an adult. Only two percent can go anywhere on their own. At 17...

livewirecalgary.com

If you care about the future of human trust, read Eli Pariser @newpublic.org remarks at the Vatican. "AI is capable of supporting human connection or eroding it. There’s nothing inherent in the technology that says which of these directions we will head." newpublic.substack.com/p/what-eli-s...

✨💬🇻🇦 What Eli said at the Vatican about AI

Sharing about prosocial AI as Pope Leo changes Catholic doctrine

newpublic.substack.com

Watch the review of the book "Happy City" by @charlesincities.bsky.social ⤵️ #UrbanismBookClub #urbanism

EIT Urban Mobility@eiturbanmobility.eu · 5mo ago

Is your city making you unhappy? "Happy City" by Charles Montgomery examines the impact of urban design on our happiness, prompting us to consider the cost that #automobility is having on the satisfaction of a city’s inhabitants. Review by George Liu ⬇️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4Sd...