Links for March 4th, 2025
So, tariffs. Shameless plug: here’s something we whipped together at TVO about it a few weeks ago.
I’ll have you know I had to eat January peaches to film this.
What Will Democratic Resistance Look Like? [New Yorker]
Something similar is awakening within the liberal electorate. We in the media will constantly underestimate it. But picture the most intense, bleeding-heart liberal you know, the type who has five signs in their front yard, rage-watches the news, and has spent the past ten years worried that Donald Trump will march us straight into fascism. Now imagine all that discontent freed from the burden of uninspiring Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Where does that energy go?
Age of Invention: The Coal Conquest
Wherever coal could go, Britain’s Fangorns gave way to the neat fields and hedgerows of The Shire. As one writer put it in the 1690s, “where wood fuel is … supplanted by that of coals, men are easily tempted to quit the preservation of their woods and convert their ground to tillage in hopes to find more advantage”.42 Wherever coal appeared, land that previously had to be devoted to fuel — mostly wood, but also peat-filled marshland and gorse-covered heath — was rapidly converted to agriculture instead.
[An inversion of the old theory that England industrialized first because of deforestation: in fact, the author argues the deforestation was possible because England had coal first. -JMM]
The construction of this infrastructure appeared to influence a tangible increase in bicycle usage among women. These results underscore the importance of investing in a segregated cycling infrastructure to promote active transportation and mitigate gender disparities in bicycle usage.
Is there no such thing as Italian cuisine? [BBC]
Grandi's book explains that when industry-driven growth started to lose steam in the 1970s, Italy's economy pivoted to small companies, niche products and local excellence. Thousands of protected labels and regional products emerged and Italians doubled down on gastro-nationalism.
"Cuisine is no longer part of our identity," says Grandi, "it is our identity." He argues that after decades of industry decline and economic stagnation, Italians have no faith in the future – that's why they "invent the past"…
"I always say that every time anyone in the world adds cream to carbonara, somebody in Rome dies," says Grandi. "Italians used to get upset when they were defined as 'pizza, pasta, mandolin, mafia'," he adds. "Now it looks like it's us Italians feeding those stereotypes."
Trump assault on USAID leaves plant that makes peanut butter for malnourished kids scrambling [CNN]
MANA Nutrition makes a special kind of peanut butter paste that many humanitarian aid workers are familiar with. It is fortified with milk and essential vitamins, packed with calories and sent to severely malnourished children around the world, including some countries in Africa.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mark Moore, the CEO and co-founder of the Fitzgerald, Georgia-based plant, got word from the US Agency for International Development: MANA’s contracts with the agency were being canceled.
Democracy Watch v. Ontario (Integrity Commissioner)
Democracy Watch’s attempt to seek judicial review of Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner’s decision not to pursue investigations into specific lobbyist infractions was dismissed by Ontario’s highest court. -JMM
How the British Broke Their Own Economy [The Atlantic]
Broken housing policies have a ripple effect. In London, Bowman said, the most common options are subsidized flats for the low-income and luxury units for the rich, creating a dearth of middle-class housing. As a result, the city is bifurcated between the über-wealthy and the subsidized poor. “I think housing policy is a major driver of a lot of anti-foreigner, white-supremacist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim attitudes among young people who are frustrated that so-called these people get free houses while they have to live in a bedsit or move somewhere an hour outside the city and commute in,” Bowman said.
Power Cut [Where’s Your Ed At]
I want to make it clear that Microsoft is effectively cutting its data center expansion by over a gigawatt of capacity, if not more, and it’s impossible to reconcile these cuts with the expectation that generative AI will be a massive, transformative technological phenomenon.
I believe the reason Microsoft is cutting back is that it does not have the appetite to provide further data center expansion for OpenAI, and it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole.
Pressure is mounting on U.S. building codes from all sides. Advocates for flagging downtowns would like to change the rules to make it easier to convert office buildings into apartments. California is grappling with how stringent codes might be impeding the recovery from the Los Angeles wildfires (and how lax rules might have caused the disaster in the first place). Conservatives are furious over energy-efficiency updates, and some red states have sued the federal government over their enforcement. Modular construction companies are grappling with the country’s fragmented code landscape, in which rules can vary between states and cities.
Everywhere, the crisis of housing affordability has built momentum to relax long-standing quality-of-life rules to permit cheaper apartments (think: windowless bedrooms, microunits). Rather than rising to the occasion, the solutions just keep getting weirder and worse. Into this contentious discussion steps Smith, with a different idea: What if we could change our ways and build things better, without any sacrifice at all?
Related: Small Single-Stairway Apartment Buildings Have Strong Safety Record
A first-ever analysis of fire death rates in modern four-to-six-story buildings with only one stairway shows that allowing these buildings to have only one staircase does not put residents at greater risk: Single-stairway buildings as tall as six stories are at least as safe as other types of housing. And allowing the construction of such buildings could provide much-needed housing, including homes for people with modest incomes.
[Note “first-ever analysis”: a staggering number of the rules dictating what can be built, where, and how are not rigorously evidence-based to say the least. -JMM]
The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes
This is the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill.
Really enjoyed this book, though I listened to so many of his interviews when he did the grand tour of podcasts promoting it I will say that there wasn’t a ton I hadn’t already heard. I particularly enjoyed his interview with David Roberts, here.