Deb Chachra
@debcha.bsky.social
Engineering professor. Author of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS (on Riverhead in the US+, on Torva in the UK+). Interested in embodiment, materiality, metacognition, and systems. All enthusiasm is 100% genuine. debcha.org
'You'll choke too' - an aerial embroidery landscape inspired by all the wildfires happening right now... I'm upset every time I smell smoke outside and somehow we have people starting them maliciously too! But we all breathe the same air so they'll choke too (1/2 - see thread for close-ups)
Fae: “Tell us your true name.” Me: “…Just my name? No birthdate, no SSN, no fingerprint scan, no address, no mother’s maiden name? Are you sure you’ve even got the right Olivia Waite? There’s like six.” Fae: “What the hell kind of bargains have you been making?” Me: “They call it health insurance.”
Um, a blog post I wrote in 2012 is cited by an author I admire? This the internet I once knew and loved. ✨💙
Deb Chachra@debcha.bsky.social · 2d agoHello! I'm (finally!) reading Virginia Postrel's THE FABRIC OF CIVILIZATION and was delighted to see you in the citations! alyssaharad.com/2012/11/blue...
Tomorrow (first Monday in August) is a Civic Holiday in Canada; AFAICT, it’s just so we get another long weekend in the summer. Americans, we all deserve this too. Please join me in my decades-long mission to make this happen. 🇨🇦🇺🇸
Jerry Chen@jcsalterego.bsky.social · 3d agohere to remind you that monday is a social construct and one we can all band together to reject
Bumping for the Sunday evening crowd: this newsletter is a bit of a catch-up, with links to pieces about energy, matter, data centres, wooden Pacific halibuts and more, for Dezeen, the Design Museum London, to accompany a solo exhibition by lens-based artists Kaya+Blank, and other outlets.
Deb Chachra@debcha.bsky.social · 4d agoAs of this weekend, I've been based in Vancouver, BC for a year. To celebrate, I wrote a newsletter about @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social's THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT, having a garden, and some of the things I've been up to this past while: buttondown.com/metafoundry/...
Cincinnati has developed a Climate Migration Readiness Plan to absorb as many as 525,000 newcomers by 2050. It calls for building much denser housing, expanding public transit and decreasing the city’s reliance on fossil fuels.
A City With a Plan (Gift Article)
Cincinnati wants to take in people fleeing climate disasters. Plus, the latest on fires in Europe.
nytimes.com
If you want a big spectacular book-adaptation American movie about a reluctant clever hero on an impossible journey through weird places (which I do), Project Hail Mary is great.
I wrote this for the Guardian about the Couch to 5k for Reading. You can start today, I have a whole 'read across August' idea in this week's post: naomialderman.substack.com/p/ovids-exil... and here is my Reading Clinic: substack.com/chat/2882751... www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...
Could a couch-to-5k for books get you back into reading?
With smartphones stealing our attention, we’re picking up fewer books than ever. A novelist shares her eight-week scheme to get you back into the habit
theguardian.com
But then also all the careful citation, and translation, and editing involved. Even the communal valuing and building of the library and of the road to the library and the patient work of teaching children to read. The entire experience a sort of telescoping wonder.
The idea that you can open one of these time crystals and meet someone’s thought, sometimes a thought that is hundreds or thousands of years old will never stop astonishing me.
Sometimes in a library I imagine each book as years of an author’s life such that you are standing amidst uncounted hours of effort and concentration like some oasis of meaningful time.
As of this weekend, I've been based in Vancouver, BC for a year. To celebrate, I wrote a newsletter about @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social's THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT, having a garden, and some of the things I've been up to this past while: buttondown.com/metafoundry/...
determinate tomatoes
on cities, matter, energy, roots, and dragonflies
buttondown.com
I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful
Believe it or not we have addressed this! Here you go: single gar = gar multiple gars, same species = garrison multiple gars, different species = garmada
Frank Hogan@charleyphogg.bsky.social · 5d agoA group of Gar can not be called a school it’s not tough enough
I need to spend a lot of time at my desk for the next few weeks, so I have the second-screen portal open to my favourite virtual co-working companions, the salmon-fishing bears of Katmai National Park: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Zr...
LIVE Brooks Falls - Katmai National Park, Alaska 2026 | explore.org
YouTube video by Explore Live Nature Cams
youtube.com
After my parents were visiting set for the first time, I asked my dad what he thought. He said “I didnt realize, it’s like you’re building a house, and once an hour good looking people run in and put on a play for five minutes. Then they leave and you go back to construction.”
Alvaro M. Bedoya@bedoyausa.bsky.social · last wk.People think "Hollywood" is rich and famous. The reality? Film and TV is a national industry. It's a blue collar industry. And it is an industry free fall. My latest for @newrepublic.com on how the Paramount merger would crush blue collar workers who can not afford it newrepublic.com/article/2136...
At long last, we have invented Maxwell’s demon from classic physics book Theory of Heat
Kevin Riggle@kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 7d agoI don't know how many times I need to keep repeating that these systems will not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics until people get it. This is an incredibly important constraint on genie-like behavior! No free matter, no free energy, no seeing backwards or forwards in time
Q: Doug, did you spend months researching the cultural history of salted caramel? A: Sure did. Here's 3,000 words on this oddly fascinating subject!
The long, sticky rise of salted caramel
Investigating a modern candy’s origins and evolution from Brittany to Blumenthal to your local candy aisle
snackstack.net
You don’t want hands free driving, you want trains. You want trains you want trains you want TRAINS
This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b
every outcome is a choice, or at least an accepted risk, and a society incapable of applying accountability for those decisions in system design/implementation is just gonna keep stepping on rakes like sideshow bob forever.
This may be the most irresistible pitch I've ever seen. So psyched for this.
Annalee Newitz@annaleen.bsky.social · last wk.Did you know I have a new book coming out about a graduate student who is a slime mold from beyond the galaxy? Who comes to Earth to do fieldwork and meets a badass sex worker in ancient Pompeii? It's called "A Wall Is Also a Road." You should pre-order it now! torpublishinggroup.com/a-wall-is-al...
The advent of e-bikes and e-micromobility make vast swaths of suburbia accessible without a car. Infrastructure change needs to reflect this reality.
Cross-laminated Tinder@nickhasthoughts.com · last wk.our ability to reshape our cities in the vein of destination-rich high transit use is pretty close to zero in the majority of this country but giving people safe, enjoyable, personalized low-carbon options to get to their spread-out destinations is much more achievable. 2/2
May you never have the entirely unearned self-confidence of Google Maps telling urban cyclists that it’s showing you the “best” route.
Someone said to me, "I'm sorry but I got your book from a library." Nobody should ever apologise for that. You read my book! That's brilliant! I grew up hanging out in libraries and the idea of a world without them fills me with dread. Without libraries, authors, like readers, will only suffer.
Some orcas have figured out how to turn an ocean sunfish into sunfish tartare: one orca holds the carcass and then another rams into it so it explodes. Watch the video (audio on to hear the marine biologist OH MY GOD OH MY GOD’ing into their regulator) [🎁] www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/s...
How to Eat a 2,000-Pound Fish? These Orcas Choose to Pulverize It. (Gift Article)
Marine biologists in Mexico captured video of a strange maneuver that killer whales used to shred their meal.
nytimes.com
Thinking about the fact that Toronto has two 70MM IMAX projectors - at Ontario Science Centre and at Ontario Place, the world's first IMAX theatre - that have been closed by Doug Ford for nonsensical reasons.
Nina Metz@ninametz.bsky.social · 2w agoWhy Aren’t There More Imax 70mm Screens for ‘The Odyssey’? variety.com/2026/film/ne...
