Reading in progress
Friday 30 October 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.
Put the lid on the pan when you boil the potatoes tonight. It does the same job on a lower flame.
303 of 365In Pavia, Repair Day coincided with two birthdays. Repair Cafe Pavia turned ten this year and Repair Cafe Borgarello turned two. Both anniversaries were marked at the first Repair Day Festival, which Repair Cafe Pavia organised with the University of Pavia's Office of Sustainable Actions. Talks and workshops ran alongside a repair cafe.
Of the items brought in, 76 per cent were repaired. The reported saving is 793 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent, put alongside roughly thirteen young trees growing for ten years. The report does not say what the items were, who did the fixing or how many people came. The organisers hope the festival will become an annual event.
Pavia's festival was one of 3,497 events held in 53 countries on and around 17 October, with some groups running in the couple of weeks either side. In Kingsland, Auckland, a permanent repair co-lab was officially launched on Repair Day, which was also the fifth birthday of the national repair organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. The network released a Repair Manifesto the same day.
The Open Repair Alliance also released its dataset. It now covers more than 500,000 logged repair attempts from community groups, and for the first time it includes items that are not electrical or electronic. Across the records, the average comes to more than 400 attempts a day.
The Restart Project · Read the source
Kim Đoan Quốc is a visual artist whose installations, videos and performances keep returning to bodies, plants and the idea of a safe space. In 2025 Kim spent six months in Việt Nam doing research for a project called Foliating Memories, which deals with Agent Orange pollution and spans Việt Nam and France. The Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant paid for the trip. Kim is now writing about the project for Makery in three parts, of which this account draws on the first.
The history Kim is working with begins in the forest. Operation Ranch Hand put 80 million litres of Agent Orange on the forests of South Việt Nam, to find resistance fighters under the canopy. Kim's sharpest objection is that dioxin, the poison in the mixture, did nothing for the defoliation. It came from a production temperature the manufacturers chose not to control. A note warning of the danger reached the US government, and production carried on unchanged. When Vietnamese victims brought a case between 2004 and 2009, it was dismissed.
Trần Tố Nga is still pursuing the manufacturers. She is 84, a journalist and war veteran with French and Vietnamese nationality, and she was sprayed directly during the war. She lost her first child at 17 months and has since lived through several serious illnesses. Since 2014 she has had a case running in Paris against the companies that made Agent Orange. On 16 June 2026 the Court of Cassation referred it to its Plenary Assembly over its implications for international law. That hearing is expected early in 2027.
Through this work Kim met Marvin Freyne, an anthropologist and geographer, who was in Mã Đà forest in November 2025.
Makery · Read the source
Nothing in today's harvest concerned a model doing work in a field, a workshop or a record office. So this column looks at the tool the publication itself uses, and at what it was handed. Ten leads came in. Three from the Landworkers Alliance arrived with no summary at all, only a line saying the post had appeared first on their site. The Centre for Alternative Technology's item about its new strategy stopped mid-word, at "Rhian". The most solid item was from the Restart Project: 3,497 Repair Day events across 53 countries.
That is the raw material. A language model given a headline and nothing else will still produce a confident paragraph if it is asked for one. The output will read like reporting. It will have been built from a title and from the statistical habits of text that resembles it. This is the failure worth watching, more than the wrong fact caught later. The two readings above this piece, on Repair Cafe Pavia's tenth birthday and on an artist tracing Agent Orange in Việt Nam, were drafted by a machine working from inputs of this kind. Where the source was thin, the honest draft is a thin one.
Repair cafe volunteers have a rule that suits this. You open the case before you name the fault. For a drafting tool, that means a person reads the linked page, or the model is held to the text it was actually given and told to stop where that text stops. Neither happens automatically.
There is also a cost we cannot yet state. We do not have a per-piece figure for the electricity or water behind these drafts. A publication that asks readers to count their kilowatt-hours should either find that number or keep saying plainly that it has not.
The Restart Project: Fixing brought us together on Repair Day 2026 · Centre for Alternative Technology: CAT's vision for the future · Landworkers Alliance (harvest feed, summaries absent) · source
For the flesh you scoop out of tomorrow's lantern, which is watery and bland and does best cooked down slowly with rice.
Rinse the seeds of their strings, dry them on a tea towel, and toast them in a dry heavy pan with a lid until they puff and start to pop, then tip them out and salt them while they are hot. In the same pan, soften the onion in the oil over a low heat for a good fifteen minutes with the cumin, chilli, bay and parsley stalks, add the garlic for the last two, then add the pumpkin flesh and the stringy bits, which will dissolve. Cook it with the lid off until it has slumped and given up most of its water, which a carving pumpkin will do in quantity, then stir in the rice and add only enough water to come a finger's width above it, with a teaspoon of salt. Cover, turn the heat to its lowest and leave it for fifteen minutes, then look without stirring: it is done when the surface is pitted with small holes and there is no liquid at the bottom when you tilt the pan, and if you hear a faint crackle the base is catching, which you want. Rest it off the heat with the lid on for ten minutes, then turn it out with the crust uppermost, squeeze over the lemon and scatter the parsley leaves and the seeds.
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