I’m just glad Neil Postman didn’t live long enough to see TikTok
Environmental Reporter for The Highlands Current: An award-winning, non-profit, independent newspaper in New York's Hudson Valley. (https://highlandscurrent.org/author/bcronin/) Also teaching journalism at Marist University. He/Him.
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I’m just glad Neil Postman didn’t live long enough to see TikTok
One of the greats. We just re-watched the Northern Exposure where his character, who is a shaman, attempts to figure out what white people’s culture is so that he can heal them but he can’t find any.
You really have to wonder what these folks would have been like when the whole country was sacrificing to win the First or Second World Wars. The world is so fortunate that there was a better generation of Americans around when we needed them.
SCOOP: Revolution Wind employed 80 fishermen over the past 2 years, paying out $9.5 million to captains, deckhands, and fishing boat owners. Trump's pause means he just put Trump-voting fishermen out of work. When Trump paused Empire Wind, the fishermen stayed quiet. This time, they spoke to me.👇
Love the combo of Google no longer letting me update my Chromebook because it’s “too old” (2019) and the giant blue banner that now appears everytime I open a tab that says THIS BROWSER IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED YOU MUST UPDATE YOUR BROWSER motherfucker I would love to
“Bluesky is dying,” brother social media is dead. Bluesky is whale fall
like i was saying, i think maha is a very, very vulnerable coalition right now
Between this, Bernie’s op-ed, and the largest nurse’s union in the county all saying he needs to go, it definitely feels like the momentum is building…
As a journalist, I am not going to wildly and irresponsibly theorize what happened with Giuliani. I am going to wait for it to be reported out because the truth is probably 1000% crazier than anything I could come up with.
this should become a thing, putting up signs like this for every arrest & disappearance in public spaces. it would likely break into lower info, less politically engaged demos and local social media groups
cc: @thelouvreof.bsky.social
Ed O'Keefe barely fact checked Noem on her "LA would have burned" claim & let her lies about the LA immigration arrests stand. Here are the facts from the @latimes.com: "About 68% of those had no criminal convictions and 57% had never been charged with a crime. " www.latimes.com/california/s...
“Black women lost 319,000 jobs between February and July of this year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during this five-month period… Ms. Roy said that with the exception of the pandemic, Black women have never seen such staggering losses in employment”
People really need to grok that fascism and anti-science woo-y bullshit are intimately linked, given fascism’s foundations in aesthetic and affect They’re both about vibes to the exception of almost anything else and indeed are hostile to anything that undercuts the supremacy of vibes
Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings re-make, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:
trump can issue as many executive orders as he wants, perhaps coverage should reflect the fact that a lot of these have the legal force of a child's wishlist for santa
They’re doing all this to prevent people from MEMORIALIZING A MASS SHOOTING
Settling in for the most sacred of Labor Day Weekend traditions (flipping through the new humongous LL Bean catalog and thinking about sweaters.)
LET'S GOOOOOOOO
ICE forcing firefighters to stop battling a wildfire and make them all show their papers, then arresting some active firefighters and pulling them off the line shows there's no bottom. As @aselrod.bsky.social pointedly argues, it's nothing less than an "active assault on virtue wherever it exists."
Just saw a video of Bill Maher calling Mamdani a “straight up communist” and I continue to be struck by the depiction of policies associated with the New Deal Order as far-left extremism, which goes along with a refusal to depict Trump’s unprecedented authoritarian actions as far-right extremism.
Bluesky right now ...
Bernie Sanders writes today: “Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people”
Oh my god imagine if it happened on the 20th anniversary of Katrina
Anyway the light in Hudson was very good tonight.
Every time your electricity bill goes up for the next 10 years, it can be traced back to this Administration’s actions. They are making solar and wind power illegal to build in the United States. They are artificially restricting supply while demand is going up.
New Hampshire still the cranky uncle of the Northeast I see
Maybe people wrote all those op-eds telling us that BlueSky was bad and that we shouldn't use it because they knew that if everyone on the timeline tried to manifest [REDACTED] into actually happening it would actually happen
New study by @brendannyhan.bsky.social, @jasonreifler.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrates that prebunking election fraud rumors — by warning about anticipated false claims & filling conceptual gaps that those claims exploit — helps to reduce belief in falsehoods: www.science.org/content/arti...
The average American simply has no idea how quickly the infrastructure that keeps us safe and healthy is collapsing. These systems run in the background thanks to government employees who quietly do critical work. Those employees are being purged and systems are being destroyed.
One reason I like teaching college students is that it’s wild to see what Things I Remember Happening fall by the wayside and which things become HISTORY. For example, they all know about the Vince Carter “It’s Over” dunk in 2000 even though none of them were alive at the time.
They’re doing everything they can to signal and people are doing everything they can to ignore it.
spending 20 minutes trying to work out a post about “Hobby Lobby” and “habibi labubu” but having to start over every time I get push alerts that say stuff like “rfk announces ‘smallpox 2’” and “why rfk believes ribbed condoms cause webbed toes”
The only reason there hasn't had to be a dozen stories titled NATIONAL PARKS: SUMMER OF DEATH is thanks to thousands of overworked, overstressed, and understaffed NPS employees and volunteers doing everything they can to keep the parks from collapsing into *total* shitshows and I am very grateful
"Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota is down four out of seven law enforcement rangers and had to reduce emergency services this summer to four days a week instead of seven."
In response, Stephen Vitiello and Taylor Deupree are making the album they recorded there as part of their residency pay-what-you-will and if you are like me and are a sucker for gorgeous ambient albums laced with field recordings then this is for you. 12kmusic.bandcamp.com/album/captiva
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is selling Rauschenberg's property on Captiva, off of Florida's gulf coast and home to its residency program, because of "increasingly challenging environmental conditions, including recurring storm damage, broader climate risks, and rising maintenance costs."
How much in design and consulting fees do you think Meta spent to literally reinvent the wheel
After six months of turmoil, the loss of the new director and a round of high-profile resignations marks a new low at the CDC (Gift article) www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/h...
Due to the horrors, all I’m writing about today is Elizabeth Gilbert and tennis. www.todayintabs.com/p/read-play-...
CDC employees standing up and walking out in light of the mass shootings, firings, and *waves hands in the air* everything else. #USAnotRFK Lets gooooo
With the AJC dropping its print edition, I feel compelled to share one of the greatest moments in print design history
Ironically, he used this description as part of his complaint about the media outing a DOGE dude.
DOGE put my goddamned social security number in the cloud without asking me. Equifax leaked my personal information and I never even used their service. Every accusation is a confession.
More than 397,000 children have experienced gun violence at school since the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/u...
CDC WRAPUP: A White House spokesman emailed me at 9:30 p.m. to say that Susan Monarez, the CDC director, has been fired. This came after days of back-and-forth in which RFK Jr. tried to force her out and she refused. 4 other top CDC officials have quit. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/h...
🚨Border Patrol arrested two firefighters who were actively fighting a wildfire at the time. When the other members of the crew asked for a chance to say goodbye, a Border Patrol agent told the crew member “you need to get the f*ck out of here. I’m going to make you leave.”
This is not going to end well www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/c...
Reposted with alt text, and also, remember when Google’s motto was literally “Don’t be evil?”
According to federal data, 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of those cities are Chicago. 8 of the top 10 states in homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states are Illinois. And yet Trump is sending troops here.
BREAKING: www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08... The director of the CDC, Susan Monarez, is refusing to leave her post, despite demands from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that she quit or be fired, per her lawyers. via @sherylnyt.bsky.social + @apoorvanyt.bsky.social
In a functional government, this would be a five alarm fire where Congress calls in Kennedy and asks him what the fuck is going on
It is honestly still stunning to think that these folks are just out here saying the quiet part right out loud: we can’t do this unless we steal from you.
“Can a technology really be overhyped if it’s powerful enough to kill somebody?” is the kind of thought you have right before you take a six-month sabbatical to a cabin where you have no phone and no internet, just whittling, foraging and playing the recorder for a small group of woodland creatures.
Here's a guide to what the new restrictions on Covid vaccines mean for you, and how you may be able to get a shot if you don't meet the new criteria (age 65+ or a high-risk condition).
Interesting to take a cursory glance at the cross tabs and see that the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t think crime is a major problem in their OWN community but it is a major problem somewhere else. Hmmmm…..wonder why that could be……
ME: i’ll have a foot long turkey sub SANDWICH ARTIST: for here or to throw
In what comes as a surprise to no one, the 2 new Spoon songs absolutely rip
Sandwich thrower gets muffaletta off the hook
🚨WERNER HERZOG IS NOW ON INSTAGRAM🚨 www.instagram.com/wernerherzog...
“Today, New Orleans is smaller, poorer and more unequal than before the storm. It hasn’t rebuilt a durable middle class, and lacks basic services and a major economic engine outside of its storied tourism industry.”
If the Harris campaign had photoshopped this image up a year ago as a warning as to what a second Trump administration would be like all the Very Serious Pundits would have said they were overreacting
There’s plenty of disinformation trying to blame the nascent offshore wind industry for whale deaths without evidence. Not only is that misleading, it also takes the focus away from solutions that might actually address the leading causes of death — vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear.
Followed by the next speaker calmly explaining the need to repeal the 14th amendment. It’s not just Yarvin, & this isn’t just “wotta jerk”; needs to be emphasized that these really are some of the influential intellectuals of the regime. This isn’t fringe. It’s fascism in power.
This is incredibly embarrassing for the Trump administration and I legit worry that they will counter by deporting the sandwich guy to Uganda
Ever hear of this place called Waffle House? It's like Cracker Barrel, but instead of rocking chairs and Necco wafers it has food with flavors
ok now this is a good logo, I would eat here
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Katrina by punishing the FEMA employees who care enough about their job to warn the American people that we're not prepared for another Katrina is, I fear, very on-brand.
Bill admits that this is back-of-the-envelope math and doesn't include labor, transmission, etc, but the cost of enough solar panels to power the world is....around $2.5 trillion. We spend $7 trillion a year on fossil fuel subsidies. This is a solvable problem.
"If you are one of approximately 16 million Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ (a number rising fast), you are nearly twice as likely to be displaced after a storm as someone who’s straight."
I stand corrected!
CRACKER BARREL: When You're Here, You're Angry©
What's really sad/hilarious is that the new Cracker Barrel logo was part of an incredibly expensive total rebrand and overhaul because . . . .nobody was eating there anymore. Now their only chance of survival is to cave in and hope they get known as The Place You Eat To Own The Libs©
Looking forward to not thinking about Cracker Barrel again until the news stories six months from now about how they've been bought by a venture capital firm and another 8-12 months after that when we read that they're filing for bankruptcy.
For @nytimes.com Magazine, I visited the Palisades burn scar to write about fire and resilience www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/m...
Trump's insane beef with clean energy is going to wreck both planet and economy www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
It's important to understand that he singles out Black women because there are few negative consequences for him when he does. It's his most frictionless lane for bullying. The broader public has shown him few, if any, will step up to defend us, and it's only ramped up since his first term.
I keep getting asked for my salty thoughts about the Salt Path as my position on nature cure narratives is v clear! A mere fraction of those thoughts published here @literaryhub.bsky.social, with thanks to @bookwormvaught.bsky.social and @nicwilson.bsky.social for their earlier pieces linked below.
thankfully school is starting, which means we can get some Elite College Campus controversies instead of Cracker Barrel
Methane-hunting satellites are driving attn to super-emitters as a climate problem. But those plumes also contain hazardous air pollutants. An impressive new mapping project uses the satellite data to illuminate the public health risks from super-emitters. Story here: heatmap.news/climate-tech...
“I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.” Lisa Cook, in response to Donald Trump. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...
The first time Trump was in office it took three years to get to the "Good thing I just got a box of dried beans delivered and a ten pound bag of brown rice" moment and this time around it only took eight months
Did you know that we offer free updates by email? There's a weekly update on Friday with links to all the stories we've posted, a weekly update on Thursday for the arts, daily updates for Philipstown or Beacon and a daily calendar. No spam. Sign up at buff.ly/AGg8KWr
"Sedaris has complained, “Checking is like being fucked in the ass by a hot thermos.” Bua mentioned this to the checker on Sedaris’s next piece, Yinuo Shi. Shi considered the analogy and said, “If a thermos works, the outside wouldn’t be hot.” Pure gold, every line.
This, a history of the New Yorker's "vaunted" fact-checking department, is an instant classic and I will be quoting it for the rest of my life.
Not the first to make this point, but it really is wild to see the administration declare an energy national emergency while simultaneously blocking so many projects that would provide local, abundant energy
we're about to find out something pretty important!
The transformation of the Washington Post editorial page appears to be complete.
We just covered it but we’re a small local newspaper. Crazy that it’s not a massive everyday/everywhere story like inflation was!
Every Dem harping about kitchen table issues could be walking through a grocery store with reporters, pointing at the prices, and saying “Damn, look what Trump did.” Easy layup! AND YET.
Pretty good metaphor for our environmental policy
Lotta people on here seem pretty eager to pick fights as opposed to introducing discussions
My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
This man is being subjected to a real-life version of Kafka’s “The Trial” as punishment for being the embarrassing object of the regime’s own malicious and chaotic incompetence. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...
UPDATE: Kilmar’s lawyer announces he has been taken into ICE custody.
Yes *because* it disproportionately affects Black and brown communities. It's like covid - white people took steps until they learned it was poc was were disproportionately dying. Then they let covid rip. They are fine with dying from pollution as long as more of us are dying. I'm not guessing
The account that made this viral post uses a AI-generated stock photo as their profile picture, and the main claim that Big Balls "was harassing and trying to pick up the 15-year-old girl" is not in the article. We are not immune from disinformation.
This has an ungodly number of shares for something that apparently to be entirely made up. The police report has been covered and doesn't say anything like this. www.wired.com/story/edward...