Engineers have done amazing things to turn this plentiful, shiny rock into the century’s most impactful piece of technology.

18% of samples exceeded relevant health guidelines or regulatory limits. Metal foodware (51%), ceramics (45%), paint (41%), toys (13%), and cosmetics (12%) were the most common culprits.

While the developed world has (mostly!) eliminated lead from consumer goods, lower-income countries are still producing contaminated items.

This podcast episode is a gripping summary of the true story told in David Grann’s book, Killers of the Flower Moon which was later adapted into an award-winning film of the same name.

Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. […] new institutions can make new kinds of thinking possible.

Thoughtful state intervention is critical for both the invention of new technologies and for scaling them up to solve pressing, societal issues. This idea forms the core of the authors’ proposed “supply-side progressivism”: “a liberalism that builds.”

Farming uses 50 percent of [Earth’s habitable land] and what you find is that around 75 percent of our agricultural land is grazing land. […] We are using a huge portion of usable human land to raise cows.

A realistic picture of what building a “green economy” would require.

… by eating their son’s flesh they would cross the rest of the desert.

It is in such a way, bhikkhus, that I say nutriment should be seen.

The Buddha defines the four kinds of “food” or “nutriment”, which include edible food, contact, intention, and consciousness. He illustrates them with a series of powerful and horrifying similes.

These prices are fake. And in being fake, they are warping our whole system: our relationship to the environment, to animals, and to ourselves.

… although objects manufactured in factories for profit are not made or handled according to Buddhist tradition, the “aura” can be produced in different ways and at different points of an object’s life

You can read the introduction to his book online here.

This YouTube Video is in Vietnamese but has English language captions which you can turn on via the “CC” button.

… there will be resistance to giving the thing rights until it can be seen and valued for itself; yet, it is hard to see it and value it for itself until we can bring ourselves to give it rights — which is almost inevitably going to sound inconceivable

On the history, and future, of how we define property and rights.