"If nobody hires junior programmers then pretty soon we won't have any _senior_ programmers!" said members of a species that has known about climate change for decades but is increasing CO2 and methane output anyway.

"Faced with unrelenting state violence, Chicagoans have refused to be cowed," says Mariame Kaba.

Readers beware—and be on the lookout for the “departure.”

In a series of experiments, chimpanzees revised their beliefs based on new evidence, shedding light on the evolutionary origins of rational thought.

Exactly one hundred and fifty years ago John Muir walked around in the same grove of giant sequoia trees that I walked around in today, and stood next to the same two thousand ton behemoth that had been growing for two and a half millenia. It has only been known as the General Sherman tree for a tiny fraction of its immense lifespan. I imagine it standing there blissfully unaware of its association with a cruel and destructive human being, indeed unaware of any human activity at all. But we are making our presence known. _ “Death of large sequoias (over 4 ft in diameter) in wildfires prior to 2015 was very rare” _ This was my first trip to Sequoia National Park. I explored the tiny section shown on this 1927 USGS topological map. (_Wikipedia_) It’s worth clicking through to the high-res version, zooming in, and imagining what it was like to reach that place in 1875 before there were roads and cars never mind GPS-connected handheld computers. On the Congress trail in this densest of Sequoiadendron giganteum groves, other magnificent specimens suffer by comparison to notable Americans, most painfully this cluster called The House. (There’s a Senate too.) I live among coast redwoods and was delighted to finally meet their shorter and stouter cousins. If you’ve been thinking about a visit, know that the park is open but unstaffed. I only saw one ranger and he was on latrine duty, nobody is collecting the entrance fee, yet another bit of economic fallout from the shutdown. After walking the Congress trail I headed down to the museum (which is closed), hiked over to Moro Rock, and walked up the steps to take in the view. (_Wikipedia_) Someday I hope to ascend Half Dome using the cable hand rails but this was an easy way to enjoy the view from a big granite dome. Whitney is only a dozen miles away but “the Great Western Divide rises high enough to block it”. My day started in Three Rivers and ended in Tehachapi after a long and rewarding detour into another section of the park. The road up to Lake Isabella winds gradually through Sierra foothills that seemed mellower and more mesmerizing than the ones I’ve seen farther north. The road down follows the Kern River as it flows over endless pillows of granite. There’s nothing like a big dose of the majesty of California, a friend likes to say. It sure was powerful medicine today. ### Share this: * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * ### Like this: Like Loading...

The Volts podcast continues to be my favorite listen. Climate change will wreak ever more havoc on the world, that’s just baked in. But the transition to clean energy is also now baked in. David Roberts delivers a steady stream of hopeful news on that front: plummeting prices for solar panels and batteries, “reconductoring” to grow the capacity of the existing grid, agrivoltaics, new geothermal techniques, and much more. Cars are a big part of the story. Switching to EVs is great but if we only do that we are still stuck with too many large heavy vehicles that clog roads when moving, waste vast amounts of space when parked, and harm people who move through the world on foot or on bicycles. We don’t just want cleaner cars, we also want far fewer of them. This episode, with the authors of Life After Cars, explores the “tyranny of the automobile”. American car culture always seemed wrong to me, for many reasons. On this show David Roberts crystallized one of them. > When you ride a bike through Amsterdam, you are a dozen times every minute making small adjustments to other people, and you are accommodating yourself and coordinating with other people in these micro ways over and over and over again as you ride through Amsterdam. > > And it just has an effect. You realize you’re living among other people and you’re involved in a common project and you live in a common place and you’re together in the place. I have long been fascinated by a video called A trip down Market Street. Filmed in San Francisco in 1906, shortly before the great quake, it’s a long shot that moves down Market Street toward the Ferry Building. You see a free-for-all of trolleys, pedestrians, bicycles, horsedrawn carriages, and cars. You can already tell that the cars are going to win but in this moment cars are not yet hermetically sealed shells, they have open tops so drivers see one another and make the same kinds of micro-adjustments to cyclists and pedestrians. In a San Franciso with fewer and more autonomous cars, can we imagine a way to recapture that kind of sociality? ### Share this: * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * ### Like this: Like Loading...

The story of how TikTok changed everything you see online.