Reading archive 2025-07-01

Single-use plastic is a scourge of takeout. Here’s how I tried to escape it.: Most food deliveries come wrapped in petrochemicals. But there are ways to reduce the disposable plastic delivered to your door.

Senate passes Trump’s tax bill, sending it to House for final passage: The bill extends tax cuts from Trump’s first term and slashes roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid and other health-care programs. - "Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) repeatedly vowed the bill would not pass without deeper spending cuts. Instead, the Senate Finance Committee wrote a bill hundreds of billions of dollars more expensive than the House’s, and simultaneously more punitive toward Medicaid."

New McMillan site townhouses in D.C. mark next step in redevelopment plan: The near-completion of townhouses on the site, which city literature and the developer refer to as the Reservoir District, is the next step in the project.

Philadelphia Transit System Votes to Cut Service by 45%, Hike Fares

Private jet carbon emissions are soaring. Here’s who pollutes the most.: A new study found that the United States was responsible for 55 percent of the pollution emitted by private jets globally. - "'If you look at individual airports that are polluted from private jets, Van Nuys Airport [in Los Angeles] popped out,' Rutherford said.'“This is getting a lot of visibility because it’s where the celebrities and influencers are all parking their planes.'"

JD Vance’s prior vision for populism is largely absent from GOP tax bill: While a senator, Vance proposed a sharp break in the party’s economic orthodoxy that some experts say is not reflected in the legislation.

We are eating the Earth. The result will be catastrophic.: “We Are Eating the Earth,” argues for producing more food on less land to avert climate crisis. - "If it comes, disaster might be due to a lack of humility among eco-posers. Grunwald bravely challenges the dippy, but influential, cult of 'organic' farming and Luddite opposition to genetically modified foods. Nothing is more urgent for the climate’s future, he argues, than producing more food for a growing world on fewer square miles of land. We know how to do it, he shows, and we’re getting better all the time.

"Humans who love the planet should cheer scientific advances in agriculture; farms need more genetically engineered products, not fewer. Yet the fad is back-to-yesteryear. While “factory” farms feed millions with increasing care and efficiency, wasteful little Edens offshore the world’s hunger. The forests and peatlands destroyed are out of sight of Hollywood and the Hamptons."

Justice is coming for Vladimir Putin: A new tribunal targets the act that made all subsequent Russian war crimes in Ukraine possible.

The GOP’s big, fat warning sign to the bond market: This is not how budgeting should work. - "As I’ve explained before, this is not how budgets work. It’s like saying renewing your Netflix subscription should count as free, because you got used to having the streaming service already. Or each time you buy another Starbucks coffee, it doesn’t cost you anything, because you’ve enjoyed Frappuccinos before. Or if your current car lease expires, getting a new one is now complimentary, because you already got used to the convenience of having a car."

Musk-Trump battle erupts anew over GOP spending bill Elon Musk threatened to launch a new political party as the president mused over fresh scrutiny of the former DOGE chief’s federal subsidies.

A town tried to heal racial divides. It energized Confederate supporters instead.: What started as an effort to promote racial unity in Edenton by reconsidering its most prominent downtown symbol has done the opposite.

The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse: Humanity is set to start shrinking several decades ahead of schedule.

The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California: Housing prices are rising fast in red and purple states known for being easy places to build. How can that be? - "The Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them. Cities in the South and Southwest have portrayed themselves as business-friendly, pro-growth metros. In reality, their land-use laws aren't so different from those in blue-state cities. According to a 2018 research paper, co-authored by Gyourko, that surveyed 44 major U.S. metro areas, land-use regulations in Miami and Phoenix both ranked in the top 10 most restrictive (just behind Washington, D.C., and L.A. and ahead of Boston), and Dallas and Nashville were in the top 25. Because the survey is based on responses from local governments, it might understate just how bad zoning in the Sun Belt is. 'When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee,' Alex Armlovich, a senior housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, told me. 'It's almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.'"

Trump Insults America—Again: The president of the United States seems to have no interest in appealing to a national sense of pride or honor. - "In my many travels to university campuses over the years, I have often heard that America is only one of many horrendous regimes in the world. Usually these pronouncements came from students trying out new intellectual clothes in the safety of an American classroom, or from radicals on the faculty for whom anti-Americanism was a central part of their academic credo. And I know, especially from studying the Cold War, that presidents in my lifetime did a lot of shady, immoral, and illegal things. But I have never heard a president of the United States sound like a graduate student who's woozy from imbibing too much Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn."