- It’s hot, so people are (temporarily) thinking about climate chaos: Read about heat waves and the accuracy of climate models. Also read about the problem with air conditioning (as opposed to being poor and/or building for the local climate).
- Listen: What So Many People Get Wrong About The Energy Transition
- Listen: This podcast on Putin (there are many many people working on “understanding Putin,” so he’s getting the same treatment of his hero, Stalin) offers a sad but insightful analysis of his personality: A lonely guy who was recruited by the mafia before he started working for the KGB. A man who never personally experienced Soviet failures (Chernobyl, Afghanistan, the economy), and thus incorrectly blames for Soviet collapse on outsiders, when it collapsed from within. A man who’s death cannot come soon enough. Listen to it.
- Read: Amsterdam’s mayor on the “right” kind of tourists
- Read: How Tokyo allows small innovations in a sprawling metropolis
- Read: When the Dutch ran into an American billionaire
- Read: Taking back roads from cars
- Longread: How to confront the growing threat to American democracy. Related: How US gun sellers turned male angst about their masculinity into sales (and mass murders) and how social media DOES undermine democracy (“people are more willing to commit violence when they are immersed in a community they perceive to be morally homogeneous”)
- Read: Why houses are so expensive (interesting that 20 years inflation in the US is 72% but 22% in NL)
- Listen: Good discussion of the origin and dynamics of conspiracy theories
H/Ts to CD, DL, ED and PB