Beware the power of prediction What do the story of Oedipus and your insurance premiums have in common? They are both driven by self-fulfilling prophecies. Philosopher and TED Fellow Carissa Véliz traces the hidden power of predict...

"Social predictions sounds like descriptions of the world, like facts, but they're not... They are 'speech acts' [and] veiled commands..." @carissaveliz.bsky.social www.ted.com/talks/cariss...

Free Electricity. Like, at no cost. For everyone. Now. Let's talk about affordability, abundance, and Australia--and why thanks to Trump we can't have nice things

Now Australia has so much solar that they're *giving away electricity*, with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes-dryer and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two, and fill your boots:

billmckibben.substack.com/p/free-elect...

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“Like Putin, Trump has begun using religious messaging”

“Putin appears to have evolved from uncomplicated Machiavellian grifter into sincere extremist. Again like many terrorists, he built his beliefs partly on half-digested bits of religion”

Young leaves on an oak tree in Oxford. 22 April

Anthropic’s New A.I. Model Sets Off Global Alarms

“Major A.I. breakthroughs are beginning to function less like product launches and more like weapons tests”
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/t...

In honor of Earth Day: a thread of environmental wins

CATL claims 6-minute charge and 1,500km range for new electric vehicle batteries Chinese group also slashes charging time in race against BYD for electric vehicle battery supremacy

If you work in energy policy, you will know that - to quote Naomi Klein - this changes everything www.ft.com/content/1773...

👀

Burning wood for power worse for climate than gas equivalent, report finds Research casts doubt on plans by UK government to offer subsidies for carbon capture attached to the power source

The biomass — mostly Drax — continues to be a heavily subsidised scandal www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Prof Lord Nicholas Stern, Chair of Grantham Research Institute: "I welcome the clear and strong commitment from Ed Miliband to accelerate the pace of electrification and the transition to clean power."

The core response to climate change "must be a rapid reduction in world demand for fossil fuels."

Searching for Satyrus - Official Trailer UK 2026 YouTube video by Underground Slate

This is a beautiful, wise and very moving film youtu.be/ygBvYhbNffs

A Genocide Scholar Asks “What Went Wrong” in Israel Podcast Episode · The New Yorker Radio Hour · 17 April · 39min

“Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is. But the state of Israel has to be reinvented.” podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...

You make a good point

Rabbi who boasts of bulldozing Palestinian homes will light torch for Israel’s national day Human rights campaigners say honour for Avraham Zarbiv endorses ethnic cleansing and war crimes

“Zarbiv indeed deserves to light an independence day torch: not because he is worthy of the honour, but because Israel has lost its way, its moral compass and its conscience.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

Wildlife and humans thriving in Unesco-protected sites While wildlife populations crash globally, research finds designated areas enable recovery of threatened species

“While wildlife populations have crashed globally by nearly three-quarters since 1970, those within Unesco-protected areas have remained largely stable.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

40 years on from the disaster, why there are foxes, bears and bison again around Chernobyl Endangered species are making their home in a massive wild zone around the derelict Chernobyl nuclear plant.

"The zone has undoubtedly been shaped by radiation but also, crucially, by abandonment and time. As a consequence, the usual ecological rules no longer apply and this has meant Chernobyl now has some remarkable wildlife." theconversation.com/40-years-on-...

Alas, said the mouse…

This doesn’t quite get to what I’m trying to say, but it’s something along the lines that two big questions — why is there something rather than nothing, and what is the nature of consciousness? — may usefully be thought of as koans: questions that don’t make sense or cannot be answered

What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels? | Quanta Magazine The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life.

“It’s hard to fathom the level of engineering achievable by a billion years of bacterial evolution.” www.quantamagazine.org/what-physica...

Red and yellow

“No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."

“a reduction in the key elements of systemic resilience: diversity, redundancy, modularity, backup, asynchronicity and circuit breakers. A loss of any one of these properties should be a flashing red light. But the whole dashboard is now lit up”

“Chinese firms account for at least 70 per cent of global manufacturing capacity for major green technologies”

‘The Moon and The Zoo’: Simon Armitage poem celebrates 200 years of ZSL Zoological Society of London commissions poet laureate for animation to mark its 200th anniversary

Goodnight gorilla www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

"When I started writing about the climate crisis in the 1980s...I didn’t fully comprehend that there could be a force on this planet so steeped in greed and power that it would sacrifice the earth and its inhabitants for its own narrow interests. But there is, and it’s Big Oil"

Can we make robots that eat other robots? For one group of dogged roboticists, artificial life that can reproduce itself is the future. The fact it doesn’t yet work only adds to the excitement

“How did this all begin? How did this life start? And what would be the equivalent of the origin of life for robots? You could call us, you know, part of the driving force of that.” This reads like a parody of overblown hype. www.ft.com/content/9193...

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

“Chief Justice Roberts has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court…he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

Opinion | A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality

"The defendants in these situations are multinational corporations with effectively unlimited resources to throw at a lawsuit. On the other side, we have victim communities and their nonprofit lawyers urging public prosecutors...to bring charges" www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/o...

He goes the way that providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker