Weekend Linkages: AI, That Damn Metaverse, Living Pantries and Compressed Air

...Image from the deep internets. The stupidity of AI Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. No, Cities Aren’t Doomed Because of Remote Work Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon ‘A living pantry’: how an urban food forest in Arizona became a model for climate action History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy...

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I Made an Enzo Mari Table and So Can You

...s fantasy plays out in the furniture I’ve build for the inside of the house. Such is the fate of attempts at revolutionary design within our post-modern age. Everything gets subsumed within a vast parade of styles and one can easily imagine this table on sale at Urban Outfitters at your local mall. Mari, who we lost to COVID in 2020, had the genius and grace to acknowledge the contradictions in his own work while not letting this discourse get in...

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Nithya Raman for LA Council District 4!

...ouncil more democratic and ways to escape gridlocked traffic. Raman has an urban planning degree from M.I.T., helped start the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, served as executive director of Time’s Up Entertainment and worked for the city on homeless policy. Frankly, she’s one of those people who have already accomplished what would take me ten lifetimes to get around to. She is much more qualified than the incumbent David Ryu, who has a th...

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Go Plant a Million Trees

...trees, a bunch of ponds, enriched soil and wild stories.” In our own small urban yard, we’re beginning to see the fruits, literally, of our own small-scale arboreal efforts that we began over ten years ago. This month we had a abundant crop of Mission figs, avocados, olives and pomegranates. And that pathetic vegetable garden I blogged about? My heretical thinking is to give up annual vegetables entirely and use the space to plant two small citrus...

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