Against the bleak techno-authoritarian futures now being sold to us, a radical new vision for global progress in the 21st century feels urgently needed. The most credible vision is one in which the habitability of the planet is a precondition for human development and equality. Our new report examines the conditions required for the world to progress towards this ambition on an economically and ecologically compatible path, by the end of the century. Its conclusion? A global transformation that reconciles planetary habitability and high standards of wellbeing for all is possible – as long as three conditions are simultaneously met. Fast decarbonisation of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift away from overconsumption towards “sufficiency”. This would involve a sharp reduction in labour hours and the use of raw materials, along with big changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use and forest cover. Financing and politically sustaining decarbonisation and sufficiency will require a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, between countries and within them. This reduction of global inequality is compatible with deep decarbonisation; indeed, it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.

In 2026, the politics of AI has a new meta: “caring a lot about AI” is no longer correlated with “knowing a lot about AI.” AI is rising in salience faster than any other issue among US voters. Politicians gearing up for the 2026 midterms and 2028 primaries won’t lag far behind. That means AI policy is no longer the remit of a few wonky technocrats. From now until forever, most people regulating, protesting, and talking about AI will not be interested in AI per se, but rather how it impacts their preexisting belief systems and political agendas. These forces are stronger, more diffuse, and more volatile than we have seen in AI policy before. And the curve is just about to shoot straight up. —Jasmine Sun

Thoreau urged his audience…to reconsider the settled spaces they inhabited…. “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

[Flo Crivello, @Altimor] Americans severely underestimate how dirt poor most Europeans are. They go spend their American wages there and are amazed at the "quality of life," not realizing that they're taking the equivalent of a trip to Disneyland, and everyone around them is the staff.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome] Median size of a dwelling in every US state vs the same thing in Europe. [presumably a map or chart]

“As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This … is what we have in common. Oddly enough, many of our subjects seem to realize this more clearly than we anthropologists ourselves. In Java, for example, the people quite flatly say, “To be human is to be Javanese.”

Don't necessarily disagree with this framing (would say it differently), but I believe a large percentage of Europeans would swap their tiny apartment three miles from downtown Brussels, or Marseille, their tiny car, for a ranch house in Jacksonville beach with three cars & a yard for the kids to play in. Not sure many Americans would take up the opposite offer, other than grad students wanting a quaint experience Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my sense.

Phoenix is a large grid, of mile-long four-lane sides, with shopping plazas at the corners, and an inside of twisting single-lane roads and simple ranch homes on half-acre plots. Those residential insides are the nice parts, and showing that they’re nice is partly why I’d come to Phoenix: to highlight a version of the American Dream, which, while I might not love and isn’t necessarily “walkable,” is still very appealing to lots of people. It’s what I wrote about last week, when I cautioned that walkability doesn’t necessarily translate into livibility. [https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/so-what-makes-a-city-more-walkable ]