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As I write these words, a heat wave is sweeping through Europe. Last month, a heat wave swept through the East Coast. Next month, a heat wave might sweep through the Middle East, or South Asia, or North Africa. As temperatures continue to reach record highsand climate change increases the likelihood of heat wavesthe sun has become foe, and shade has become king. Shade can lower the ambient temperature of the air by as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It can cool surfaces by as much as 45 degrees. But where is it? Ten thousand years ago, more than half of the land on Earth was shaded by tree canopies. Today, after millennia of deforestation, agriculture, and urbanization, that number has dropped to just 30%. The problem is particularly dire in cities: A recent map by UCLA and the nonprofit American Forests revealed staggering shade deserts in almost every major urban region in the U.S. According to journalist and author Sam Bloch, this dearth of shade is by design. In his new book, simply titled Shade, Bloch argues that the absence of shade from our lives is not an accident. “Shade has been deliberately designed out of our environments,” he tells me on a recent phone call. “Those decisions may have made sense in the past, but we are rapidly moving into a new world where sun protection is going to be as important as sun access.” Shade as old as time Humans have sought shade for as long as we have lived under the sun. “Forget palm trees and ponds,” Bloch writes. “In ancient Mesopotamia, cities were the real oases.” Four thousand years ago, in places where temperatures could soar up to 130 degrees, Sumerians used city walls for shade. They built deep, narrow streets and packed houses close together. Unlike modern cities, which are laid out along the cardinal directions, Sumerians also oriented their cities diagonally, which offered equal amounts of sun and shade on both sides of the street. In his book, Bloch mentions the work of Mary Shepperson, a U.K. archaeologist who specializes in urban archaeology of the Middle East. After modeling the suns daily and seasonal paths over Mesopotamian cities, Shepperson found that the orientation of streets, their narrowness, and small protrusions like vertical rooftop parapets and horizontal eaves likely made for pleasant, shaded cities. The “wisdom of shade,” as Bloch calls it, was known to the Syrians, Phoenicians, and Persians. Later, it was embraced by the Greeks and Romans, and eventually exported by the Islamic caliphate to modern-day Spain and Portugal. But that is the extent it traveled. Europeans had their own beliefs about what makes a healthy city, and they exported those beliefs to the New World. “In temperate climates, the sun was their friend, not their enemy,” Bloch writes. “They had little use for shade.” How we designed shade out of our cities If shade is as old as time, so are our preconceptions against it. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunted growth. As Bloch points out, our prejudice against shade even shines through in the language we use: When something is dubious, its shady. When we feel offended, we take umbrage. Americans, perhaps more so than others, take particular umbrage at shade. “We think shade is yucky. Its for damp corners and fetid ponds,” Bloch writes. This goes back to the early colonizing days. When Europeans arrived in modern-day America, they brought with them a “deep and abiding fear of forests,” which were considered pagan and unholy. In 1771, an English patrician proclaimed a garden in a street is not less absurd than a street in a garden. Or as the author puts it: “A city dweller who planted trees in their front yard was just another country bumpkin.” Many factors further contributed to the downfall of shade, but perhaps the most significant of them is our ancestors’ fear of tuberculosis. Early research from the 1900s showed that bacteria could be killed with sunlight. This understanding birthed a fixation for sunlight that translated to some of the most famous modernist buildings of the time, including Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium in Finland. In the U.S., urban planners introduced zoning that called for “setbacks.” They wrote “solar codes” into urban plans. They widened roads (which also helped cars thrive) and carved out paths for sunlight to reach deep into the streets. “This fear of tuberculosis has driven so much of our urban design,” Bloch tells me. The approach trickled down to buildings, as architects clad office buildings and homes with large expanses of glass. Le Corbusier declared glass the foundational material of modernism. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said, Its up to the engineers to find some way to stop the heat from coming in or going out, about his Farnsworth House. Glass, we know now, is notorious for trapping heat. But it has survived as a material of choice, thanks to another notorious invention: AC. Modern air-conditioning was invented in 1902 by American engineer Willis Carrier, who designed a system to control humidity at a printing plant in Brooklyn, New York. Suddenly, external shading systems like brise-soleils, awnings, sun sailssystems that have been used in European cities for centurieswere dismissed as costly add-ons that could never match the level of comfort provided by cool air being fanned through your house. Case in point: After the Truman administration renovated the White House in the 1950sinstalling mechanical cooling in the processit foolishly took down the stripy summer awnings that once kept it cool. Air-conditioning revolutionized cooling around the world, but as Bloch writes, “it came at a cost.” It distanced us from nature and trapped us inside climate-controlled boxes. It lowered our comfort level and our defenses. Even worse: It exacerbated the heat problem it’s supposed to solve by sucking the hot air from our houses and expelling it in our cities. According to computer simulations from Paris and Phoeni, the waste heat from AC units makes the surrounding air about 2 to 3 degrees warmer. “All this happened when we turned our backs on shade,” Bloch writes. [Photo: Library of Congress] How we can design shade back into our cities So, how do we learn to love shade again? The good news is that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. In his book, Bloch highlights examples from cities all over the world. In Bologna and Singapore alike, people can walk under miles of covered sidewalks that are carved out of the ground floors of buildings. Italians call them portici (porticoes). In Singapore, they’re known as five-foot ways.” In Sevillewhere seats at the bullring cost two to three times more when they’re in the shadepractically all windows are shaded by roller blinds, or persianas de esparto, which are threaded grass curtains that Sevillanos drape over their balconies. Every spring, the Spanish city also installs toldos over streets and plazas. These “sun sails” have been used for so long (over 500 years) that they have become a proud tool in the city’s shade vernacular. Naturally, every citys “shade tool kit” will vary based on its climate policy, geographic and socioeconomic conditions, and affinity for design-led solutions. Barcelona has set up climate shelters,” while Dallas has been planting thousands of trees. And Los Angeles has been coating its streets and roofs with solar reflective paint. Since the early 2000s, architects have been pushing for more passive houses. But as Bloch writes, the incentives largely benefit the future occupants, whose energy bills are lowered, not the developers, whose bottom lines remain the same whether or not a building is climate-resilient. This “split incentive” problem has notably hampered construction and can only be solved if cities implement stronger building codes and grant developers stronger financial incentives. (Building a passive house typically costs around 10% more.) Perhaps it would help shift our perception of shade if cities classified heat as an environmental hazard, like water or air pollution. The Clean Water Act limited what industries and farms could dump into waterways. The Clean Air Act required power plants and factories to monitor, control, and report their emissions. A similar requirement for heat might help us take more actionable steps toward heat mitigation. “If we ever agree that heat is a threat to our freedom and happiness, then we might also decide that shade, our defense against it, is an inalienable right,” Bloch writes. (Even if studies have shown the cooling benefits of shade, Bloch says there is no single, widely accepted index to measure shade’s thermal impact.) For Bloch, the problem with shade access isn’t necessarily technological but psychological. Some of the experts he interviewed for the book are even calling for a life “after comfort”where architecture is made more porous, and where we can learn to live with heat. Studies have found that people who are forced to deal with heat can tolerate it more than those who can escape it. In the U.S., the ideal indoor temperature ranges between 73 and 78 degrees. In Ouagadougou, Burkina Fasowhere AC is virtually nonexistentstudies say that the Burkinabe people’s ideal temperature is closer to 86. Similar studies have shown that people in Marrakech, Morocco, are more likely to feel comfortable than people in Phoenix, Arizona, despite a similar climate. Bloch knows that the cooling effect provided by shade is never going to replace the icy blast of AC. “Even on a thermodynamic level, it’s not doing the same thing,” he tells me. “But if we can adjust our expectations as to what comfort really is, we might be able to be more tolerant of shade as a viable solution.”
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E-Commerce
When Mark Zuckerberg recently announced his grand plans to build enormous data centers in Ohio and Louisiana, two things stood out. First was the scale of the centers set to power Metas AI ambitions. Zuckerberg said that just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan. While both will cost hundreds of billions. The other was their names: Prometheus will soon pop up in New Albany, Ohio, and will be joined by Hyperion in Louisiana in 2030. Where do these weird names come from? Typically, the process is generally for most naming projects to go through a companys brand team, though that doesnt always happen, says Dalton Runberg, a naming expert who has previously worked for big tech companies. It could depend on the size of the companyat some smaller places, it might just be a function of other marketing people, but any big company is going to have a dedicated brand team, and may even have a dedicated naming person or team. Or they could work with a naming agency, especially for very high-profile brands. One of those agencies that big tech companies bring in to advise on this is Lexicon Branding, whose president and founder, David Placek, says: These are relatively nerdy names, or geek names that geeksand I dont mean that in a derogatory wayare very comfortable with. The question is whether they are for non-geeks. Theyre going to be, for the general public, hard to spell, and the awareness of them will be very, very low. Some nameslike Grok, the AI model developed by Elon Musks xAItap into sci-fi. (The reference is to Robert A. Heinleins 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, where its used to describe deeply knowing something). Others, like Prometheus, rely on mythology. (Prometheus is the Greek god of fire, known for stealing the resource from the gods and giving it to humans.) I think Prometheus was a very deliberate decision on their part, says Placek. The metaphor of bringing the fire of AI to the world and to people, I think, was appropriate. The more inscrutable names are also chosen because they can feel a bit insider-y, says Runberg. Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as separate toand smarter thanthe average person, and so the names technology companies choose often reflect that perspective. If you know the deeper meaning of the word, or which Greek god was the god of whichever thing your product is related to, or whatever other fun fact might end up in a Jeopardy! clue someday, it can feel like it has an added layer of, If you know, you know exclusivity and inspeak, explains Runberg. They feel familiar yet a bit mysterious. But the danger is that those types of names can feel smart, though theyre not always as clever as they think they are. For instance, data centers wont want to catch on fire, particularly when they cost billions of dollars. Still, fire and storms are in vogue among tech. Just look at Anduril, Palmer Luckeys defense companyand also the name of the sword wielded by Lord of the Rings character Aragornor Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded tech firm that takes its name from surveillance orbs popular in the same Tolkien lore. The naming starts to get meta when you look at Palantirs product names, like Gotham, its intelligence product designed for the Department of Defense, U.S. intelligence agencies and other allied military forces, which also happens to be the name of the city Batman inhabits. But the reason that those mythological figures appear more often is because they offer the products linked to them a credibility that theyd otherwise not get. Classical, mythological, or historical names tend to sound and feel powerfuloften being associated with mighty empires or omnipotent gods, says Runberg. Also importantly for a young, disruptive industry like tech, theyre old, adds Runberg. They have a feeling of legacy, which can give your brand a sense of authority or reliability, as if it has been around for a long time. Its sort of borrowing the credibility from a word or name that has existed for hundreds or thousands of years. However, just because theyre old doesnt mean theyre good for tech today. Theyre not great names, admits Placek. Good names help process fluency for the reader, the branding expert says, or has things in it that are familiar to you. One of Placeks best-known non-tech names is Febreze, a new coinage that evokes a little bit of fabric and the breeziness of hanging your laundry out to dry within it. Yet Placek also dabbles with tech names. One of his most recent jobs was to help come up with a new name for an AI product previously called Codeium. His solution? Windsurf, the firm initially due to be bought by OpenAI, whose CEO was then acquired by Google when that deal fell through, with the rest of the company heading to competitors Cognition.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump’s modus operandi is to keep the news cycle moving, fast. For even avid consumers of news, that can make it hard to keep up. But one public art project is doing its best to slow things down by retelling stories in new ways, the latest shining light on the people behind the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Phil Buehlers Wall of Shame, 2025, is currently on view in Brooklyn. [Photo: courtesy of the artist] Wall of Shame is artist Phil Buehler’s 50-foot-long, 10-foot-tall mural put up in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn in partnership with Radio Free Brooklyn; it takes a data viz approach to very recent history. Subtitled Visualizing the J6 Insurrection, it’s made up of more than 1,500 color-coded waterproof vinyl panels that display a headshot, name, age, and hometown of rioters who invaded the Capitol on January 6, along with details of their actions on that day, including their charges and sentencingall information that is publicly available. Phil Buehler, Wall of Shame, 2025 [Photo: courtesy of the artist] The U.S. flag-inspired colors used for the mural are designed to turn right-wing positioning of rioters as patriots on its head. Red panels indicate violent rioters, while blue panels indicate those who damaged property. The rest are white, according to Radio Free Brooklyn, a local New York station. “A red hat, white skin, and blue jeans dont make you a patriot. But storming the Capitol makes you a traitor,” Buehler told the station. Phil Buehler, Wall of Shame, 2025 [Photo: courtesy of the artist] Buehler’s approach makes the attack more personal. This isn’t another photo or footage of the faceless mob of flag-waving rioters storming the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election; it’s a look at individual people from the crowd. The artist fact-checked everything written on the panels with reporting from NPR. Phil Buehler collaborated with Radio Free Brooklyn on Wall of Lies back in 2020. It showed 20,000 false statements Donald Trump made during his first term as president. [Photo: courtesy of the artist] The artist has made two previous murals with Radio Free Brooklyn. Wall of Lies in 2020 was made up of 20,000 false statements Trump made during his first term as president. Wall of Liars and Deniers in 2022 showed Republican candidates running for office that year who denied the results of the 2020 election. Wall of Shame was unveiled on Independence Day. Phil Buehler, Wall of Shame, 2025 [Photo: courtesy of the artist] A February Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that 83% of Americans opposed Trump offering clemency for violent criminal offenders connected to the attack, and 55% opposed him offering clemency for nonviolent crimes. But in today’s fast-paced political news cycle, January 2021 can feel like ancient history. By turning the backstories of those who attaced the Capitol into public art, Buehler and Radio Free Brooklyn found a new way to visualize the story, and from hundreds of different points of view.
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E-Commerce
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