Adelaide is the driest capital city in the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and it has known this about itself for long enough to have developed some genuinely instructive responses. Its investment in recycled water infrastructure, its early and serious engagement with urban heat as a public health emergency, and its stewardship of one of the great metropolitan parkland systems in the Southern Hemisphere all represent hard-won lessons rather than inherited advantages. Whether those lessons are being applied at the speed and scale that a warming Mediterranean climate demands is a more complicated question — and one the city is still in the process of honestly answering
Buddhism treats kindness as something you practise rather than something that visits you. On mettā as a trainable skill, Buddhaghosa's near enemies, and what happens when the most developed doctrine of loving-kindness in the world is set beside its own record
The satellites have named the mountain — the same massif that destroyed Langtang village in 2015. K.J. Parker sorts a month of evidence into fact, inference, contested and speculation, states the Langtang hypothesis, and sets out how it could actually be tested
Melbourne's liveability rankings measure the compact, tram-served inner city. They do not measure Tarneit on a 45-degree day. On 27 January 2026 the western suburbs ran three degrees hotter than the centre — and that gap, not the weather, is the story of a world-class urban forest, a sprawling metropolis, falling reservoirs and two cities under one name.
Audio discussion about this essay.
I. Introduction: The Grinder of Glass and Gods
In the damp, salt-laden air of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, a revolution was...
Christianity is at an ecological turning point. It must rediscover creation-centered wisdom or adjust its anthropocentric doctrines to tackle the global crisis.