it's heeeeeere, you may now read my essay about how i achieved the millennial dream of home ownership and immediately lost my mind on nextdoor. thanks to the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org crew for their ongoing support of me being Like This
How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor
“I had a panic attack. Then I wrote an apology letter.”
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Water is returning to the African Sahel. After the catastrophic droughts of the late 20th century, aquifers from Senegal to Ethiopia are refilling, water tables in Niger have risen four metres, and Lake Chad has swollen to ten times its mid-1980s size. Yale E360 buff.ly/SUrDAnL #ShareGoodNewsToo
After Decades of Drought, Water Is Rising in the African Sahel
Warming has brought extreme rain to the parched Sahel, which is seeing aquifers refill as monsoons grow stronger. But heavier downpours alone cannot explain the groundwater revival, say hydrologists,…
buff.ly
South Carolina has no state minimum wage. The floor is still $7.25 an hour. Two parents working full time at that wage bring home $30,160 a year combined, before taxes. That is not enough to cover rent, groceries, and childcare. You are not the problem. The wage is. #NewSC #JohnsonSkardon
one of my all-time favorite disgruntled reviews of THE ODYSSEY long precedes the movie & comes from my partner. His take: “Odysseus is a shit sailor. There was very little ocean to cross to get home”
I've built a map displaying where on the Amtrak network you can take your bike, line-by-line and station-by-station. This data isn't available anywhere else, check out where you can go! amtrak-bike-map.transittools.dev
Amtrak Bicycle Access
Explore carry-on, checked, and station-level bicycle access across the Amtrak rail network.
amtrak-bike-map.transittools.dev
LA County confirmed that SoCal Edison's unused transmission tower started the Eaton Fire, which destroyed much of Altadena. The tower had been dormant since the 70's, but was left up anyway. It energized in the high wind and sent molten metal into dry brush underneath. www.cnn.com/2026/08/04/u...
Southern California Edison equipment blamed for 2025 Eaton fire in Los Angeles | CNN
Sparks from an idle transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison caused the 2025 Eaton fire in the Los Angeles area that killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,400 homes and businesses, ...
cnn.com
Not sure if everyone appreciates the difference. Rooftop solar hardwires into your main panel via a dedicated breaker, so it requires a permit, an installer, an electrician, and a utility agreement. Balcony solar just plugs into a wall outlet, sharing an existing circuit with no permits or rewiring.
A new deal on balcony solar just dropped in the US
Plug-in panels can lower your bills. To boost the American market for the tech, nonprofit Bright Saver is selling kits with no markup, starting at around…
canarymedia.com
NEWS: Former Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) has endorsed Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) for re-election Flake: “I’m still a conservative Republican. But character matters. And I want someone in that seat who takes the institution seriously and will protect the institution.”
Read it here if you haven't yet. Today is the very best day of all days to read it for the first time. short-stories.co/@raybradbury...
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
The voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and…
short-stories.co
Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · yesterdayToday, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.
What do you get when you mix climate change, logistics, and fossil fuels, and a war? A Bluesky thread on the convergence between summer drought in Europe, a dam in the Netherlands, Germany's reliance on a single river, and why the US still has to care about climate change. Settle in. (1/11)
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” isn’t just a homecoming story. It asks what victory does to the victor — and what happens when those who break the rules abroad carry that lesson home. My latest for @us.theguardian.com.
Nolan’s Odyssey shows what happens when a leader’s violations are rewarded | Jamil Smith
The Greeks learn at Troy that breaking the rules works, then carry the lesson home. Nolan’s film shows how an exception becomes a habit of power
theguardian.com
I think this is fundamentally wrong but in an interesting way I will need to write about sometime. The key is a) consumers do not choose what is produced, or how, they choose between what is produced. This is a crucial difference
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d agoI think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.
No one credibly accused of holding a gun to his wife's head and breaking their two-year-old daughter's collarbone belongs in the halls of power. Help defeat Max Miller in November. https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bpx82
Help Send a Worker to Congress
Brian Poindexter is running to defeat Max Miller and bring working-class values to Ohio’s 7th District. Chip in to power a campaign built by and for working families.
secure.actblue.com
James Talarico on Texas officially banning THC: “Texans aren’t going to stop smoking weed and eating edibles because politicians in Austin say so. We are now telling full-grown adults how to live their lives. This is the nanny state at its worst; this is big government at its worst."
18Z HRRR-Smoke model predicts wildfire smoke to cause "Unhealthy" (red) to "Very Unhealthy" (purple) AQI in the major population centers of the Pacific NW and SW BC on Tuesday as a ridge of high pressure brings NE winds. Also a major heat risk for Portland, OR, with temps in the upper 90s .
Pangolins are still seriously cute though! www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY1q...
Pangolin: The Armored Mammal That Walks Like a T-Rex
YouTube video by Animalogic
youtube.com
The Southern Three-Banded Armadillo (Tolypeutes matacus) is one of the only armadillo species capable of rolling into a completely sealed sphere: #AGoodPlace Source: www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFu...
I don’t get a lot of opportunity to share the peacock-turkey battle photo I took last year, it looked like a dinosaur showdown:
Serious wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire situation in Spokane, WA amid "extremely critical/Particularly Dangerous Situation" fire weather conditions. Two separate fires, #OldTrailsFire & #FairViewFire, are actively burning near/in neighborhoods; mass evacs ongoing. #WAwx
Wrote about Nolan's Odyssey and what it tells about both the Bronze Age Collapse and our own age of wreckers and destroyers. Christopher Nolan's Collapsing Worlds: www.patreon.com/PastLivesMed...
Christopher Nolan's Collapsing Worlds | Past Lives
For Past Lives subscribers, an audio version of this episode will appear on the bonus feed this coming Thursday. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey
patreon.com
I do wonder sometimes whether Augustus gets upset that so many professors & teachers curse his month (as of 8 BCE) and thus name—once they actually remember what the date is. Good luck on your syllabus due in like two weeks, amici (*sobs into hands*).
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
Chaperoning a preschool trip to the aquarium and one of the other dads who is vaguely familiar with what I do comes up to me and goes “man I sure hope we get some Nuremberg-style trials at the end of all this”
this is the kind of obstreperousness, don't tell me what to do-ness, i got rightsness that is the sheet anchor of American liberties.
Soraya Nadia McDonald@soraya.press · 5d ago"WE THE FUCKING JUDGE SON" New York, I love you. I love you so fucking much. Via wali_talks on IG
DID YOU KNOW IF YOU FIND A HORSESHOE CRAB THATS BEEN TAGGED BY THE FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE AND SUBMIT THE LOCATION YOU SAW IT USING THE FORM ON FWS DOT GOV SLASH CRABTAG THEY SEND YOU A BEAUTIFUL CRAB PIN
New post out on Weather West on the upcoming intense, double-peaked heatwave event in the Pacific Southwest. What are the (indirect) links to Hurricane Genevieve? (Substantial.) And also: will California see an uptick in wildfire activity? (Probably yes.)
Building Western ridge will bring double-peaked Southwest U.S. heatwave into August, with elevated humidity persisting in SoCal due to very warm ocean - Weather West
July 28, 2026 - Daniel Swain - Continued ocean warming brings increasingly warm and humid conditions to coastal SoCal In recent weeks, the Pacific Ocean along the immediate Pacific Coast has continued to warm. Earlier this year, I mentioned that this was not yet due to El Niño because...well, El Niño had not developed yet (and was, instead, related to other patterns #
weatherwest.com
