Reading in progress
Monday 28 September 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Stop on the pavement next time you hear geese overhead and watch the skein until it is out of sight. They are only just back from the north, and you have them until spring.
271 of 365Naoki Matsuda sculpted a human skull from grains of rice in 2013, as a way of thinking about rice farming. Then it went into storage, and there it stayed for years. When he retrieved it for an exhibition in Tokyo this autumn, insects had eaten their way through half of it. He put it on display exactly as he found it, sealed in a transparent case, chewed grains and all. What he had made as a reflection had become, without any help from him, a demonstration.
The show is NAFAS, staged at BUoY, a raw concrete art centre in Tokyo, from 4 to 26 September. It is the travelling offspring of the Invisible Dog, a Brooklyn art centre that lost its building over a year ago and has worked itinerantly ever since. Its founder Lucien Zayan, curator and sometime chef, started NAFAS in New York in 2022 around the meeting of art and food. "Nafas, in Arabic, means breath," he says, and also the gift some cooks have of making dishes exceptional rather than merely good.
Most of the work was made for the occasion by young Japanese artists, and much of it circles the same question: where does material go. Moéko compressed waste, mostly plastic, picked up on a journey east from Tokyo to Ibaraki into a single dense sculpture. Shogo Chazono stitched gargantuan pizzas from recycled fabric and found objects. Nanami Hayashi dotted 298 gilded wooden blocks with tiny painted ramen bowls, one per remembered meal.
Two workshops took the waste cycle further. California-based Tara de la Garza showed participants how to fuse the city's abundant plastic bags and packaging into a pliable sheet material, which they folded, origami-style, into lanterns. Kao Okada pushed the loop hardest of all, leading a workshop in which participants baked biscuits bound with ash, in uneasy homage to an Okinawan war survivor's account of starvation.
BUoY's café stayed busy through it all, with visitors eating cake in front of the ramen paintings and a poet swallowing a strip of his own rice-paper manuscript at the close of his reading. But the skull kept its own counsel in its case. Everything else in the building staged the cycle of making, consuming and returning; the skull simply underwent it, without an artist statement, without a workshop fee.
Fused-bag sheet: layer clean carrier bags between baking paper and press with a medium iron for a few seconds until they bond into a workable 'pleather', then cut and fold. The material is free, the kit is already in the kitchen, and a lantern takes an evening.
Makery · Read the source
Nothing in today's harvest touches machine learning directly, so this column does what it is meant to do on an empty day: it accounts for itself. The reading above this piece, about a rice skull that came out of storage half-eaten, was drafted by a model. A person chose the source, a model produced a first version, and a person cut what was wrong with it. That is the whole pipeline. There is no mystery in it, and no shame either, provided the costs are counted honestly.
The costs are worth stating plainly. Drafting one short piece of this length uses a fraction of a kilowatt-hour — less than boiling a kettle once, though the data centres that house these systems draw water for cooling that rarely appears in the invoice. The model itself was trained on writing taken from the web without most of its writers' consent, cleaned and filtered by contractors paid poorly to read the worst of it. Those debts do not disappear because the output is about heritage rice and grain pests.
What the machine did competently: it summarised. What it did badly, before a person corrected it: it invented a detail about storage humidity that was in no source, and it wrote that the skull was 'a testament to resilience', which is the sort of sentence a person only writes when they have stopped paying attention. Both errors are typical. The model produces fluent output and fluency is not the same as accuracy, and the gap between the two is where the human editor earns their keep.
The honest position for a publication like this is the repairer's one: use the tool where it saves labour that matters, keep a hand on it, and say when it slips. Today it slipped twice in three hundred words, which is about average. If that failure rate is acceptable to you as a reader, the arrangement holds. If it is not, the answer is fewer drafted readings and more human hours — and human hours are the one thing this publication has never had enough of.
The publication's own drafting process for the day's readings
For the first squash of the year, while sage is still standing in the garden.
Set the oven to 200°C (400°F), halve the squash and scrape out the seeds into a sieve rather than the bin, then cut it into thick wedges - the skin goes soft enough to eat, so leave it on. Toss the wedges with half the oil and good salt, spread them on a tray with room to breathe, and roast for about 35 minutes until the edges catch and a knife slides through without argument. Meanwhile simmer the lentils with one of the onions halved, the garlic, and the bay leaf for 20 minutes or so; you want them tender but still holding themselves, and keep a cup of the cooking water when you drain them. Slice the second onion and cook it slowly in the rest of the oil until it slumps, then push it aside and fry the sage leaves for a minute until they go crisp and dark at the edges. Tip the lentils into the pan with the vinegar and a ladle of their water, stir through the onions, and season. Rinse the seeds, dry them, and give them the last ten minutes in the oven with a little oil and salt, then scatter them over everything at the table.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation