Daniel Aldrich

Excited to be speaking in Paris at the OECD

In a preview of political fights to come over artificial intelligence, the data center industry is starting to spend money on elections for the first time. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/u...

"Your members are now on notice that taking part in any effort to help President Putin hawk Russian diesel in the U.S. is a clear and dangerous violation of federal law" thehill.com/homenews/hou...

Russia's defense cooperation with China extends far beyond imports of dual-use goods, with evidence pointing to sharing drone design technology, providing testing services, and joint research kyivindependent.com/new-report-t...

Please join me for a conversation about my new book Beyond Common Ground on Monday November 2nd at 7:00 pm at @LehrhausTavern TL;DR: Libraries, parks, and restaurants can build resilience to shocks like extreme weather, crime, and terrorism events.humanitix.com/beyond-commo...

As a resilience professional, your city looks to you to prepare for the next emergency. Design wetlands plans to safeguard cities from tides. Develop communication strategies to combat radicalization. Apply for our MS Resilience Studies @Northeastern cssh.northeastern.edu/polisci/prog...

New #article from Ilham Syam et al: Conditional social acceptance of peri-urban housing development: Socioeconomic benefits, flood risk, and environmental governance TL;DR: Environmental legitimacy requires drainage capacity, waste and traffic controls journal-iasssf.com/index.php/EV...

New #article from Gareth McCorkill: The Community That Isn't There What Sustains Community, and an Eighth Benchmark of Societal Resilience TL;DR: benchmark should measure what institutions have made possible, as well as what residents contribute www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Social capital for the win: one way to foster a fitness mind set is to surround yourself with other people like you who are physically active. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/w...

The first new steel mill to be be built in Australia in more than 35 years will also be the first to contract its electricity supply entirely from renewables reneweconomy.com.au/first-new-st...

Texas has suspended the construction permits of 17 data center projects and disabled a web portal that automated filing for new permits after it was discovered that they were still being issued a month after calls for the process to be paused. www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

New #article from Ilham Syam et al: Conditional social acceptance of peri-urban housing development: benefits, flood risk, and governance TL;DR: legitimacy needs drainage, waste and traffic controls, benefit sharing, grievance handling, and monitoring journal-iasssf.com/index.php/EV...

New #article from Bo Li et al: Evac‑cast: an interpretable machine‑learning framework for evacuation prediction across hurricanes and wildfires☆ TL;DR: hazard intensity is the dominant driver of evacuation rates, followed by community vulnerability www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New #article from Inseok Seo et al: Social Capital as a Configurational System: A Rank-Based Mapping of Network–Norm–Trust Structures in Korean Local Governments TL;DR: 3 dimensions: network, civic norm environment, and institutional trust environment www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/14...

New #article from Lardier et al: Refugee social network growth post-resettlement: Impact of a learning, advocacy, and social support intervention TL;DR: university-community partnerships like RWP can temporarily boost social networks among refugees onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epub/10....

New #article from Tetsushi Omori and Michiko Iwai: The recovery paradox: integrating symptom, restoration, and lifeworld evidence for long-term recovery management TL;DR: avoid treating symptom improvement or visible reconstruction as sufficient evidence of recovery www.emerald.com/dpm/article/...

During shocks and disasters we overestimate the importance of individual behaviors (prepping, insurance) and government activities (mitigation structures, early warnings). We overlook the power of our #socialnetworks to help us survive and thrive www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4oY...

Important read from Nicole Lambrou: A count that allocates no value to social infrastructure is dangerously incomplete: Wildfire recovery tends to overlook damage that can’t be measured. placesjournal.org/article/what...

Thanks to the Boston Food Forest Coalition for a great conversation about the spaces and places that build trust and connections, like food forests, community gardens, libraries, and parks www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyHf...

Counter balance: With China flexing its naval power across the Pacific and bilateral tensions running high, Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi is weighing a move long viewed as taboo – nuclear-powered submarines for the Maritime Self-Defence Force fleet. amp.scmp.com/news/china/m...

Fool me once: Haemanthus has reportedly raised as much as $20 million and holds at least one granted patent. What it doesn’t have, at least publicly, is a product customers can buy, or published data showing its technology works. It has also lost its CTO fortune.com/2026/10/25/e...

Google was really trying to hide its water use figures, to the degree that it got the council to try to keep its water use figures secret. The community finally got the actual numbers and found out Google was using 29 percent of the water in the community. www.wired.com/story/what-t...

Polluting for AI: Venture Global, the company that exports Liquified Natural Gas from massive terminals on the Louisiana coast, is planning to expand its ability to generate electricity at its facilities to help bring new AI data centers to the state. www.nola.com/news/busines...

Japan’s unpopular revisions to the Imperial House Law that reinforce the male-only succession rules took effect Saturday. The new rules are expected to bring historic changes to Japan’s 1,500-year-old monarchy. apnews.com/article/japa...

A count that allocates no value to social infrastructure is dangerously incomplete. placesjournal.org/article/what...

New #article from Haque et al: Perceived climate change vulnerabilities and adaptation among wetland communities: evidence from Hakaluki Haor, Bangladesh TL;DR: interplay of exposure to hazards, pronounced socio-economic sensitivity, and limited capacity. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New #article from Jonas Bergmann et al: Unequal Displacement Risk and Multidimensional Well-Being Losses after the 2017 Coastal El Niño in Peru: A Mixed-Methods Analysis TL;DR: Intact social relations were a key source of resilience for displaced people www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New #article from Xu et al: Revealing Disparities in Human Tolerance to Infrastructure Disruptions: Empirical Evidence from Typhoon Yagi in China TL;DR: households are most susceptible to water disruptions, followed by communication, power, +transportation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New #article from Zhu et al: From peaks to deltas: Mapping divergent flood adaptation pathways for households in the Lancang-Mekong River basin TL;DR: Structural conditions appear more often in Southwest China www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New #article from Das et al: Rapid assessment of post-disaster business visitation recovery and its evolving drivers using mobile phone location data TL;DR: Small and medium-sized businesses and essential sectors recovered more quickly www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

When thinking of disasters, we too often focus on the individual level (prepping, insurance) or the state (early warning systems, mitigation infrastructure). But we overlook the role of our social networks in helping us survive and thrive www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4oY...

Can foreigners save a depopulating, often antiforeigner Japan? In a misty mountain village in Japan, residents recently welcomed unlikely guests from a Peruvian district along the Amazon River, seeing a chance to revive aging community facing extinction www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/10...

Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breached federal law by sharing sensitive government data with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fortune.com/2026/10/22/f...

A raft of new books on elite impunity—like End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran, and Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg— signal a simmering anger about the law’s inequities and the dangers to democracy. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Loose cars sink ships? US armed forces have banned Chinese carmaker BYD's EVs from an air base in Japan due to security ‌concerns after Washington put the company on a list of enterprises it believes are aiding China's military. www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

Mount Fuji attracts thousands of foreign tourists each year, but many forget that Japan’s peak is an active volcano. With the risk of an eruption ever-present, a critical question looms: how could such visitors be evacuated in the event of a disaster? www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/10...

New #article from Dale et al: Transforming Canadian Federal Governance in a Polycrisis TL;DR: political process remains the primary constraint, shaped by short electoral cycles, policy reversals, limited public engagement, + entrenched financial power onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New #article from Claire Leppold et al: Adapting a large-scale disaster recovery program to different community contexts: An evaluation of the Australian Red Cross 2019-2020 Black Summer Program TL;DR: flexible, community-based approach as a key strength www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

High fuel prices and low Chinese pricing make solar panels the in thing for wedding gifts www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Utah released a report recommending the Legislature consider “streamlining” the process to fire tenured faculty under state law, and to further consider banning public colleges and universities from providing more tenure protections than that law does. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

From Gary King: We show that AI-generated article reviews are now better, by every measure we could construct, than reviews written by well-compensated human experts and judged to be of unusually high quality by journal editors and authors gking.harvard.edu/peerless/

It has taken nearly six decades of commercial reactors operating for a government to grant an operating licence for the world's first permanent repository for radioactive spent #nuclear fuel. uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/finland...

The New York Times profile that re-familiarized many of us with Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who duped some of the world’s most powerful shareholders into championing a rickety toaster filled with blood www.gq.com/story/elizab...

When we think about disasters and shocks, we too often focus on the individual (prepping, insurance) or the state (mitigation infrastructure, early warning systems). We lose sight of the power of social ties to help mitigate and then recover from disaster www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4oY...

Trains and rails as defense infrastructure? Japan is looking at broadening the range of expenditures that could be counted as security-related in an effort to inflate defense outlays www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...