Here are a few stories, posts, and resources I’ve read and enjoyed over the past month.
Hope you enjoy them, too!
What I Found Interesting
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Looking to add native plants to your garden? Author Lorraine Johnson offers helpful tips to shop for native plants on one of my favorite sites, Rewilding.
One key point: native plants vary by region. What is native to a location 100 miles (or kilometers) away may not be native to your area.
Nice shoutout to Canada’s Pollinator Partnership native plant finder and Wild Ones free downloadable native garden designs for multiple ecoregions in the United States.
This year I joined our local Wild Ones chapter and met a group of helpful gardeners who love to share tips and resources. I’m lucky to have a local native plant nursery nearby.
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Have you heard of Belle da Costa Greene?
I only learned about her important library work at New York City’s Morgan Library from the Smithsonian magazine November 2024 edition.
To mark the 2024 centenary of its life as a public institution, the Morgan Library & Museum will present a major exhibition devoted to the life and career of its inaugural director, Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950).
Widely recognized as an authority on illuminated manuscripts and deeply respected as a cultural heritage executive, Greene was one of the most prominent librarians in American history.
The Morgan Library has a number of events planned for the Greene exhibition, including an October 25, 2024 symposium which can be attended online.
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If you have a computer running Windows 11, it’s possible it’s running the built-in artificial intelligence Recall tool.
Recall creates screenshots of almost everything you do on your computer and stores it in a database on your computer.
Which caused controversy when Recall was initially released earlier this year and turned on by default.
Security researchers discovered the database wasn’t encrypted and pointed out additional issues, including domestic violence issues if you shared your computer with others.
Microsoft updated Recall and now users opt-in to use it, but you can disable Recall or remove it completely.
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According to the Open Repair Alliance, people around the world only want to fix their stuff.
In their October 2024 The Rise of Community Repair, data from over 200,000 repairs across 31 countries over 12 years highlights the rapid growth and public enthusiasm for repairing things.
And folks are passionate about helping others learn to fix their stuff, too.
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Good news to read about bike lanes easing traffic congestion and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
One item from the story stood out for me: 30% of trips in Paris, France are now made by bicycle.
After Paris added bike lanes:
The city saw a 54 per cent increase in bike use from 2018 to 2019.
And for the first time, car use decreased by five per cent between 2010 and 2018.
Sadly, we have no bike lanes in our community. Here’s hoping our community leaders invest time to learn about the positive impact of bike lanes on the community and businesses.
