It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them—including 98 fire stations,…
In this episode, I chat with author Cory Doctorow about "enshittification," his viral term for how digital platforms and smart technologies inevitably get worse over time. We explore how monopoly…
and fossil fuel waste
When the writer Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism, she wanted to distinguish sci-fi written about Africa from Afrofuturism, which is focuses on the experiences of Black people in the…
Never underestimate the power of a pile of pebbles.
Silicon Valley has long had an almost religious fixation on the concept of innovation. Venture capitalists and tech startup entrepreneurs are constantly portraying themselves as people breaking through the crust…
As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows. The pioneering study of…
All of us live embedded in webs of life known as ecosystems, and that can get pretty creepy -- or astonishingly beautiful. Inspired by the mind-blowing new animated series Scavengers…
More than half the world's population was born after 1985, which was the last year the Earth was cooler than average. The shift could potentially alter younger generations' perception of…