This literature review synthesises the negative consequences of automobility, or car harm, which we have grouped into four categories: violence, ill health, social injustice, and environmental damage.

Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility’s violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with policies that reduce it. To that end, the paper briefly summarises interventions that are ready for implementation.

For a video walking through this paper and its conclusions, see Not Just Bikes

You can only use a gallon of gasoline once.

This fundamental difference between renewable and nonrenewable energy sources is why you should be excited for the energy revolution that’s already under way.

In this video, Alec explains the benefits of using technology that you don’t need to burn and addresses the land-use and minerals concerns head-on in this must-watch video for anyone who uses electricity.

Because of the war, the mission of the Shōjuin bell swung drastically…

During the Asia-Pacific War, as metals grew scarce, temple bells became a material resource for munition production. Why were temples and shrines convinced to give up their bells that embodied the hopes and vows of past donors? What was the process of transformation from a religious instrument used to comfort the dead into an object that would destroy life?

Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and online research, I examine two interconnected issues. First, how temple food practices—offering alms to monks and operating newly invented temple food courts—sustain temples spiritually and financially. Second, how temple food, which is consistently integrated into various events and rituals, enables Thai Americans and a diverse assortment of other participants to connect and work together.

Why not
tend to your own horse

A poem in response to Auden’s poem about Bruegel’s painting about the fall of Icarus asking what it is that we owe one another and what is the correct response to the tragedy of craft.

Because sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, producing this text has required bringing together over twenty experts from a variety of fields….

By covering a wide range of topics with a uniformity of style, and by including glossaries, review questions, case studies, and links to further resources, the text has sufficient range to perform as the core resource for a semester course. Students who cover the material in the book will be conversant in the language and concepts of sustainability, and will be equipped for further study in sustainable planning, policy, economics, climate, ecology, infrastructure, and more.

Technologies are only obvious in hindsight.

the burning of organic carbon warms the Earth about 100,000 times more from climate effects than it does through the release of chemical energy in combustion.

it’s damaging the planet, it’s poisoning our bodies and, worst of all, we kind of have to participate in it because not participating in it is even worse.

a multicriteria assessment of 24 meat and milk alternatives that integrates nutritional, health, environmental, and cost analyses with a focus on high-income countries.

Our findings suggest that a range of food products exist that when replacing meat and dairy in current diets would have multiple benefits, including reductions in nutritional imbalances, dietary risks and mortality, environmental resource use and pollution, and when choosing unprocessed foods over processed ones also diet costs.

This episode is about what it takes for a poor kid to get a college degree. Strange as it may sound, campus food at a place like Bowdoin College is a big part of the problem.

For part one of this miniseries, see Carlos Doesn’t Remember.

48.5 percent of children in the countries surveyed have blood lead levels above 5 µg/dL.

High lead exposure reduces measured intelligence substantially.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat…

the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it

a man must do more than sell roses
where the bums go and beg—
he must keep something holy.

Under pressure, it’s a liquid at room temperature. If I open the valve, it’ll shoot out of this pipe and evaporate very rapidly back to a gas. The cooling effect is quite dramatic.

A brief history and explanation of refrigeration.

You needed rails and these huge engines. You needed timetables and organization. That encompassed everything that industrialization was about.

Bruges in the 15th century was the hub of international trade, and people came from all over the world wanting to get rich, including the Arnolfinis

How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process?

An exploration of the history of paper as a container for both goods and advertising.

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Transporting Images conference in 2023 and can watched on YouTube here.

If you are a viewer in Canada you are very likely to own a type of screwdriver that viewers outside of Canada are very likely to have never seen or even heard of in their life.

The history of the Robertson screw.

Meet the people, the hoarders, not as bearers of mental illness but as differently-abled bodies that might have special sensory access to the call of things.

Vatika bottle sits in the bathroom,
contents solidified by London’s night.

All the rage.

the sanitation department is the most important workforce in the city of New York

83% of Earth’s farmable land is used for livestock; for example as pastures or to farm fodder crops like corn and soy. That’s 26% of Earth’s total land area.

The trouble is that the same carbon-fluorine bonds that make PFAS so stable and useful in consumer products also make them incredibly persistent in the environment. Which is why you might also know PFAS under a different name: ‘forever chemicals.’ They have been found everywhere from bustling cities to untouched areas of wilderness. Every continent, including Antarctica, has PFAS all over it. Almost every living creature, from polar bears to birds to fish to humans, this stuff is now everywhere.

These dull-edged blades-to-be are called ‘blanks.’

Slowly rotating scraper blades continuously remove the combined sludge and sand layer from the bottom of the tank while clarified water flows upwards into collection troughs.

electrical current, in nearly all cases, doesn’t flow into the earth; it flows through the earth. The ground is really just another wire. Although not a great one. Let me show you an example…

This is why you need a weird obsessive nerd somewhere on your staff!

How door closers work and how to mount and adjust them.

old altars are increasingly encountered as surplus goods by those who lack the space, ritual expertise, or inclination to care for them. Like other forms of sacred waste (like human corpses), disposal is complicated for practical and moral reasons, and often requires the performance of special rites (供養 kuyō).

‘The wheel and axle’ revolutionized human technological history by transforming linear to rotary motion and causing parts of devices to move. While its ancient origins are commonly associated with the appearance of carts during the Bronze Age, we focus on much earlier wheel-shaped find: an exceptional assemblage of over a hundred perforated pebbles from the 12,000-year-old Natufian village of Nahal Ein-Gev II, Israel. We analyze the assemblage using 3D methodologies, incorporating novel study applications to both the pebbles and their perforations and explore the functional implications. We conclude that these items could have served as spindle whorls to spin fibres. In a cumulative evolutionary trend, they manifest early phases of the development of rotational technologies by laying the mechanical principle of the wheel and axle.

Air conditioning relieves us of having to think about the air, so that we can think about other things.

How climate control created and sustains the dualistic thinking underlying climate change and its inequities.

But the real innovation was coming up with a preserved protein. Ancient Egyptians went to war carrying dried fish…

How military needs drive culinary innovation.

Decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality reveals the fragility of Buddhist care structures and highlights growing concerns about how religious activity generates waste. The management of religious materiality in the world’s fastest ageing society has extensive spiritual, moral, and practical implications.

This article examines how inherited Buddhist objects in rural Japan, such as altars and tombs, become burdensome due to depopulation and fragmented kinship. It highlights how temples like Fudōin in Hiroshima Prefecture serve as custodians for these spiritually charged items, navigating the moral and practical challenges of preserving cultural heritage amidst demographic decline.​

A passive prosthesis, also called a cosmetic prosthesis, is a device that closely resembles a “natural” limb. It doesn’t crush any cans or get you any attention… In fact, it serves the opposite purpose: to help you blend in.

To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This reflects the way in which, when that hammer comes into that circuit of mind, body, and world, it transforms how the world appears to us or what it makes us see the world as.

We’ve structured modern life in such a way that it’s easy to say ‘this isn’t my fault,’ that the machine made me do it…

This is the story of the deadliest infectious disease of all time…

The author moves through the premises, inferences, and conclusions of the conservative conception of objects and also the eliminative and permissive views, problimatizing each one. The analysis ends with a brief discussion about which objects may exist fundamentally.

What if short swords, enchanted tree trunks, and hefted boulders were allowed a voice? Shouldn’t an Althing include all things? Isn’t a republic a res publica, a public thing? At a parliament, what gets to speak?

Here I am, holding one more
mirror. This time smoke…

What people enjoy about smoking is the mindfulness: taking a moment out of the day to step outside and breath.

And even the alertness of nicotine itself is mostly caused by turning off the Default Mode Network: the same as in meditation.

Swaddled and sleeved in water,
I dive to the rocky bottom and rise

… in this state of not knowing, curiosity and engagement with the world arises. And that engagement, that curiosity is intimate and very, very alive.

A defense of taking seriously the life in things and expanding the range of “normal” ways of being with the world.

I think if we had more of that kind of sensibility operating in our world today we might not be in the pickle we’re in now

On cultivating a sensitivity to our relationships with objects and the material world.

Museum of Nonhumanity calls for the deconstruction of the categories of animality and humanity in order to enter a new, more inclusive era.

The fact that some intersections are still using incandescent bulbs is a little odd.

Musings on the nature of technological progress in a democracy.

That’s tunnels, not shafts.

An acclaimed meditation on our material existence, some of the photos from this book can be previewed on The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), Menzel’s Website or on Google Drive.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

A foundational classic in the field of product design, you will never look at any thing the same way again.

And if you loved this book, which I know you will, I also highly recommend its sequel: Emotional Design published by Basic in 2003.