Deb Chachra

I got to introduce someone to the greatest website of all time yesterday:

McMaster-Carr

[If you’ve never had occasion to use it: just go to that link, pick something, repeat. Or look around where you live or work for something that’s broken and needs replacing and look for that part. Or think about something you might want to make.]

Tomorrow is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. I wrote about the precipitating event, and its role in my own life, on its 25th anniversary and republished it today:

thirty-six years later

Engineering Cairn, UBC (December 3, 2025) I wrote and first shared this piece in December 2014. It’s been lightly edited and updated, including n...

I wrote this piece during a US federal government shutdown in 2013 and everything I said then is just as true today, except I’m even more furious at the people who don’t understand the value of collective systems and universal provision.

the Guardian

If we want a civilised society, charities can

Debbie Chachra: I gave to a local food bank because women with infants are going hungry thanks to the shutdown. But it fills me with fury

I’ve been repeatedly pointing people at this over the past few weeks, so putting it here:

How Complex Systems Fail

I made a quilted winter cover for the AC in my living room (in lieu of taking it out), and also a very silly joke.

I had reason to revisit Cory Doctorow’s (@Cory Doctorow ) long, thoughtful review of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS yesterday and it’s so great — it means so much that he really, truly gets what I was trying to get across. “This is a bold engineering vision, one that fuses Chachra's material science background, her work as an engineering educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist and feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking.”

Pluralistic: Deb Chachra’s “How Infrastructure Works” (17 Oct 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

TIL: if you were a guest at the Parker House Hotel in 1912 or 1913 and ordered the dessert that originated there and which the hotel remains famous for, your Boston Cream Pie may have been made by… Ho Chi Minh. [He apparently worked as a pastry chef in the hotel kitchen while studying in Boston. The surviving evidence is scanty, as you might imagine, but not in dispute.] [photo mine, taken this afternoon since I was coincidentally in the immediate neighbourhood]

FREAKING FINALLY "Buttons are back, baby!! This piece has been 15 years in the making, more or less." @Christopher Mims in the WSJ on the resurgance of physical buttons for interfaces. "Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them." Materiality and embodiment ftw. [gift link, courtesy of the author] https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/touch-screens-are-over-even-apple-is-bringing-back-buttons-86fb9ea8?st=XPWkwV&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Newcomen's steam engine (1712) used some of the coal coming out of a mine to power a water pump so that much more coal could be mined. I think of it as the start of the exponential growth that fossil fuels made possible. So it definitely feels like a landmark that the UK's last coal-powered electricity plant shuts down today:

the Guardian

End of an era as Britain’s last coal-fired power plant shuts down

UK’s 142-year history of coal-fired electricity ends as turbines at Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant in Nottinghamshire stop for good

I’ve been friends with @Clive Thompson for a couple of decades now, and a fan of his writing (and thinking!) even before that. If you follow me and my work, I suspect that you’ll also get a lot out of this long, chewy interview with him about technology, thinking, mobility, infrastructure, the coming energy transition, writing, AI, and so much more:

Clive Thompson: Tales of Technology

On writing about the climate, theories of change, the anthropology of technologists, and where AI might be going.