Ben Bartosik

Blue whales are going eerily silent—and scientists say it’s a warning sign A six-year study off California’s coast shows how marine heat waves and noise pollution are silencing the ocean’s largest singers. Does saving the ocean start with hearing it?

Blue whales are falling silent from hunger. The krill are gone. The sea is too warm. Their songs fade away.
This is no anomaly. Humanity is deaf to a symphony of grief and warnings.

Blue whales are going eerily silent—& scientists say it’s a warning sign
www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

That's how you can tell human authors from AI.

AI will put in some em dashes, then apologise and take them out when told off.

Human authors will climb the filing cabinet, hissing, and defend their right to em dashes with a loaded stapler.

Cities should be aggressively identifying excess asphalt in urban spaces and converting it into green space. It cuts the heat island effect and removes maintenance costs from the books.

It’s fiscally responsible and climate action all in one.

Floods Are Becoming Deadlier. We Aren’t Worried Enough About It. Flooding is getting more frequent, extreme, and hard to predict—and most of us are dangerously unaware of its risks.

Feed: "Slate Magazine"
By: Henry Grabar on Thursday, July 24, 2025

No cheating, post your Lock Screen

BREAKING: President Trump signed an executive order directing states to criminalize and institutionalize people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and mental health disabilities.

Montreal Adds Nine More Car-Free Streets after ‘Mind Blowing’ Success Four years after Montreal decided to make a 2.5-kilometre stretch of a busy downtown artery car-free every summer, the transformation continues to receive rave reviews from users and local businesses.

“To use a technical term, it blew my mind,” said Vancouver’s former chief planner Brent Toderian…”They weren’t lazy about it—they didn’t just throw up barriers and ban cars. It might be the best bargain I’ve ever heard,” Toderian said. #Montreal

It’s not just what you take away. It’s what you add.

Jokes on them, I went (further) left at an evangelical seminary.

Everything is connected. I really enjoyed this. It's the sort of storytelling we need more of to show people how their lifestyles and interests are deeply dependant on migrant labour, supply chains, and environmental stability.

Working 72 hour workweeks to knowingly build and train the systems they want to replace you with is wild.

Thousands of workers tried a 4-day week—the impact on their health was clea Employees whose working weeks were cut by eight hours or more—while retaining the same salary—saw the most changes.

Thousands of workers tried a 4-day week, and their mental and physical health improved.

A study tracked 2,896 workers across 141 organizations for six months.

Reducing the work week by 8 hours led to better physical and mental health, with no loss of productivity.

www.newsweek.com/four-day-wor...

50 Bixi trailers are now available in Montreal for bike share customers As of this summer, 50 purpose-built BIXI trailers—designed and assembled entirely in Montreal, are available as part of the city's bike share

Great move by Montreal bike share BIXI Montréal to add trailers to the mobility mix for customers.
momentummag.com/bixi-trailer...

Forever my favourite Disney movie

image of a child wearing backpack walking a painted bike lane between live traffic lanes. Text: IF youth walked to school in our bike lanes, would cities still consider paint a good enough barrier

Barriers.

Creative done with NOYS.org. This campaign was calling out those who design, approve & implement inequitable transportation systems that disproportionately affect youth + BIPOC communities.

Protected one way bike lane on a low density small town street

Fergus, Ontario (pop. 20K) can make safe room for bikes. Your town can too

Colbert will be all right, maybe even better off. The world's his oyster and I'm sure MSNBC and Netflix will come calling. He could stand up the biggest late night YouTube channel in days. But they are just torching the Late Show, an institution, solely to appease a dictator. And that fucking sucks.

Opinion: The bitter truth is that cheaper housing means a retirement crisis for homeowners Gregor Robertson, Minister of Housing, has to make a hard choice as he faces two evils

Can we just stop treating housing as an investment?

www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...

Two kids standing in front of fountains on the street

Spent some time in Quebec City last week. My kids were enthralled by the various elements of joy that we just stumbled upon.

Considering how many ppl can’t even figure out the mute/unmute, this level of multitasking terrifies me

This is how insane people sound when you tell them why A.I. is bad

Waiting for the truth social post where he tries to tariff our wildfire smoke

Republicans complain to Canada over wildfire smoke despite supporting planet-heating bill Lawmakers send letter railing against ‘suffocating’ smoke days after voting for Trump plan likely to boost pollution

Climate change can't be solved by borders www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Zuck thread of posts (on Thread) bragging about building "several multi-gigawatt" data center clusters in the pursuit of "superintelligence"

Zuck's talking about diverting entire major cities' worth of power generation - something that will be serviced by more fossil fuels - to his and his friends' pet project while our energy grids are already experiencing rate hikes and rolling blackouts and climate disasters are escalating

I ordered the vegetarian meal at a Polish restaurant once and was served an entire fish (including the eye)

I really enjoyed Divine Intervention

Of all the ways to describe Rue St Catherine in downtown Montreal, ‘closed’ sure isn’t one of them!

Mine was when I was involved in asking that an incredibly modest % of the money the church was asking to raise for its own building programs go towards supporting poor folks in the community and was told that the leadership didn't think it was a good use of money.

I really have been enjoying it. Thank you so much for creating it. It’s been a nice blast of hope in otherwise bleak times

In typical Doug Ford govt fashion, there's big changes being proposed on the Friday before a long weekend. Once again, these changes implicate conservation authorities. And once again, there are few details in this press release about what these changes actually are

news.ontario.ca/en/release/1...

“Sidewalks are a promise. A promise of connection. If there’s a sidewalk, there’s gonna be things that sidewalk connects to… A sidewalk implies that we, the city, welcome you to walk through our city, and go to the places connected by that sidewalk, and that in those places you will meet other ppl.”