Journalist, author (Tasty, on science of flavor; Path of Destruction, on Katrina); currently PhD candidate at UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism studying media coverage/public debates over AI risk.
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New York Post editorial board, not exactly a bunch of lefty progs, says RFK Jr. "came off as a paranoid kook connecting red strings on a whiteboard," whose "warped worldview" includes "pathetically simplistic one-villain-for-all-ills conspiracy-theorizing" about why medical authorities oppose him.
The struggle is real – but not hopeless. I worked on this statewide survey of local journalism in Maryland last year. It shows a lot of problems, but there was a surprising amount of breadth in available local news, and reasons for optimism as well www.poynter.org/local-news/2...
A review that captures the struggle between local journalism (in bad shape but not defeated yet in this show or reality) and rapacious late capitalism and all its petty frustrations
In other words, by all means blame Schumer/Jeffries for being blind to both the risks they/we face and to the (small) power they do wield. But it's also helpful to appreciate that they have made themselves prisoners of a set of rules that got them where they are, even if it is destroying them now
There's also an academic debate about what triggers large-scale changes in institutions (internal forces, external shocks, etc.). Democratic congressional leadership is definitely facing an external shock (Trump) but so far this has only forced a kind of doubling down on existing/weak tea D politics
There's a whole theory in sociology called new institutionalism that says that successful institutions tend to grow and, in the process, well, institutionalize rules of behavior and ways of thinking, creating inertia that is resistant to change en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_ins...
There's a book waiting to be written in how congressional Democrats' clinging to an outmoded institutionalism paved the way for American fascism talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/there...
Corollary to this in "savvy" conventional wisdom: Democrats can maybe sometimes win when they move right on those issues
The folk wisdom among political press that "Democrats cannot win on crime, immigration, and culture war issues because they don't represent the real America" goes back more than 40 years and not even the rise of fascism can shake it
"At The Level, we offer two sides to any news story or discussion." For the people who subscribe to my BlueSky account — and for many others paying attention — the problems here will seem all too obvious. www.readthelevel.ca/page/mission
Relevant questions: how is this site funded, and what is its business model? Not seeing that info on the site.
"At its core" this story is not about "brash" figures dueling on the international stage – but the U.S. abandoning any pretense of foreign policy or strategic action and acting entirely on the vanity and pettiness of its leader www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/u...
IDK, isn't the whole BlueSky discourse (which I mostly agree with) that many elected Ds are channeling centrism-promoting consultants and shy away from attacking Trump? If they were actively attacking/undermining him, even with limited power, would make a difference (in real terms/media perception)
Thanks Lizzie – back then the problem was various forms of negligence, systemic breakdowns, etc. Today the government is actively and gleefully dismantling itself even as climate change and a host of other problems get worse, somehow certain that those responsible will never face any consequences
On this 20th anniversary, it’s important to remember that the effects of a storm like Katrina were not only predictable, they were predicted. Three years earlier by @mschleifstein.bsky.social and @johnmcquaid.bsky.social msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essay...
A huge amount of money and effort spent carrying out a plan built entirely on alliteration
A great joke that slipped right past me when watching
If your health policy must be based on fantasy, it might as well be Madeleine L'Engle
Thanks to @brianstelter.bsky.social for featuring my thoughts on ways to counter “doomscrolling” at @CNN.com: view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/175... Great advice from @jenmercieca.bsky.social: focus on solutions journalism weekly, if not more.
Wish this piece had grappled at all with what it means when a violent, hateful, extremist movement enters "the mainstream" and is this legitimized (in part by the NYT itself, which imposes a normalizing frame in Trump's radicalism) www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/u...
But Starfleet has not responded to my FOIA request for all documents relating to Sisko's role in Romulus's entry into the Dominion War
Good to know that #FOIA survived the Trump administration, the eugenics wars, and the transition from national to interplanetary governance
It will also dumb down the profession, eroding critical thinking. Analogous to the situation with writing/thinking. At the same time, interesting that something that essentially opens/democratizes coding may also have serious risks
Important takeaway from this @laurengoode.bsky.social Wired piece on vibe coding www.wired.com/story/why-di... Implication is, there will be more and more coders in the "don't even know the language" group, which will create glitches/broadly impact code quality/create problems in systems/apps
![Vibe coding didn’t ignite this longing in me. Instead, I saw more clearly that we’re entering a dizzying age of duality in AI. Is AI going to kill our jobs or create more jobs? Yes. Did I technically build a feature in an app that has since been pushed to a hundred million users, or did I cheat my way through an assignment by leaning heavily on AI and other humans? Yes. [remainder highlighted] Do I need deep foundational knowledge of software programming to be a successful coder, or can I skate by without even knowing the name of the programming language I’m using? Also yes.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:l5ljrwl53opypctfzfa5mq4c/bafkreibhxvfn4plsec5ehrjdyuzjfoqa4ibh6twsynb24rj4xk6tte3pyy@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Seems like in Bolton's case there would be few or no options for countries to flee to/go into exile in
Did an AI write this? (Either in the sense that the author is literally an AI generating stereotypical claptrap, or if human, that he made liberal use of one because he could only budget 5 minutes to write this)
Good advice! But how did cesium-137 enter the food chain, presumably via shrimp aquaculture in Indonesia, where the exporting company is located? – Runoff of contaminated wastewater from a nuclear reactor seems like a possible culprit: www.nature.com/articles/sre...
A variation of the Peggy Noonan "Romney yard signs" fallacy: if I'm personally seeing/hearing it and it supports my position, my experience must be generalizable peggynoonan.com/monday-morni...
The entire edifice of political news coverage is based on "important people doing and saying important things" - the idea that those important things might be bad faith actions blows up that edifice, or at minimum causes paralyzing contradictions that news orgs are unable to deal with
If/when inflation does start definitively rising, of course, only a matter of time before those statistics get shut off.
Once again kind of hard to tell what's going on with inflation from reading the NYT and Washington Post
Not saying it's the right course, but seems like a really tough decision, given the power imbalance (in absolute terms and vs. other mayors/governors) and that getting personally targeted by Trump could make things worse for DC residents.
Midihitlerians off the scale
pierogi is speech, can't be compelled
In the 1950s, as atmospheric science was expanding in concert with nuclear testing, Congress appointed an Advisory Committee on Weather Control (mainly cloud-seeding), and while controversial, many people wanted to make it a reality. (Image: 1956 Washington Star story)
Sorry Nancy, the 33 1⁄3 LP format will not be introduced until 1948
So their very inauthenticity represents some deeper primal authentic America ... it's nonsense but it exerts a powerful hold on the political press
And of course the other source of legitimacy for bad actors in the eyes of news orgs is that they represent something authentic about the public that the media itself lacks/does not understand.
The entire model of mainstream political coverage depends on ascribing good faith to bad actors. Partly because it's "unbalanced" to call them out and partly because they have power – and in the US system the media operate on the assumption that power is legitimate, or just legitimating enough
I think people are missing something big. Trump's manipulation of the bureaucracy to manufacture pretexts for DOJ to prosecute his enemies is happening right now. It's actively underway. It's not theoretical. It's upon us.
Ironic that what's driving this right now isn't (primarily) vengeance but the need to create a distraction, FWIW a sign of political weakness.
The political press were eager to pronounce this story over and shift "the narrative" back to ... what? Precisely the opposite of the many "Biden in trouble" stories in which huge journalistic resources were expended to maintain that narrative
Curious why the political press (NYT, Politico et al) were so eager to pronounce this story over and shift "the narrative" back to ... what? The opposite of many "Biden in trouble" stories in which huge journalistic resources were expended to maintain "the narrative"
NYT uncritically publishes a bunch of clearly false attacks on the WSJ scoop. Strictly speaking, the NYT has no obligation to defend a competitor's reporting; but in a story on deranged MAGA-Epstein politics it could note that journalism is based on facts/verification www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/u...
Hi, yes, g'morning. This is awkward. But targeting a reporter - hi! - with surreptitiously obtained photos and details of her tooling around town is an attack on the public's right to know. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...
So the right D nominee might fix the rift, but then lose, and then we start over ...
Seems like practically speaking, "fixing the rift" and "winning" are two things that have to happen simultaneously through the D primaries (which will air out the issue) and then with a D nominee/president to begin to impose some order via politics/policy. But if that nominee loses, keeps festering
The larger problem is, the Trump administration's lack of transparency/legibility is corrosive to accountability (on top of literally destroying the govt's accountability capacity) and public discourse in general. It breeds cynicism and learned helplessness. And a huge challenge for journalism. /end
In a "normal" administration, if somebody got fired, the govt. would issue a statement (maybe true or "spend more time with family" etc.) and journalists could report on what really happened. With Trump, explaining "what really happened" even in small-potatoes decisions might be near impossible.
As a result, the Trump administration is a bunch of random seemingly inexplicable shit happening all the time, a govt. that is completely opaque, not so much by design but because nobody cares
The Trump administration is not at all legible – not to the public, not to journalists, and not even to itself. Many important decisions are never explained (e.g., why defund/dismantle NIH). But many or most decisions are arbitrary, based on some lizard brain impulse and opportunity (USAID).
Captures something important. The Trump administration is obviously not transparent. But a key part of democracy is something more like *legibility*: govt. decisions/processes can be seen and explained. By govt. agencies themselves, or IGs, journalists, NGOs etc talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/polit...
(Chris Rose and I started at the TP within a week of each other. This is an excellent and compassionate account by TP/Advocate writer Keith Spera.)
Talented writer and former Times-Picayune journalist Chris Rose most famously documented Katrina stories in "One Dead in Attic" and walked a troubled path of addiction and other problems before arriving at something close to peace living in a Maryland state park www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/...
Sorry to hear! Looking forward to hearing what comes next.
For those interested in what the conversation about the Epstein files looked like on X over the last few days, I collected some data and put it into an interactive visualization: faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Spot...
A Supreme Court Justice who tries to communicate directly with the public is a novel idea and just what the institution needs – political communication to expose an institution masking its own corrupt politics with institutional trappings and lingering perceptions of integrity
“We are not witnessing a reimagining of federal disaster response — we are watching its demolition. With each policy rollback and staffing cut, the federal disaster management function is being hollowed out, leaving states and survivors to face storms, fires and floods with less.”
This was a noteworthy character beat in the film. Gordon presses Batman on the ferries blowing up, and Batman responds, "that won't happen." The Joker talks about the "fireworks" of the imminent explosion and Batman says "there won't be any fireworks!"
And this is only the beginning, Texas was terrible but we will likely see much worse ...
And yeah, federal agencies failed terribly in the immediate Katrina response because FEMA had been hollowed out under George W. Bush.
(I was involved in the Times-Picayune's Katrina coverage and co-authored a book on that disaster. One lesson was, only the federal government can coordinate the response to large-scale disasters and fund recovery. Basic matters of scale.)
It's at least a modestly positive development that the negative news coverage of the Texas disaster focused on weakened NOAA and FEMA capacities has spooked the White House about about plans to continue degrading/dismantling those agencies
The need for FEMA has been obvious for decades, and only grown as the scale of disasters has increased, overwhelming state/local capacity to respond ... yet somehow the Trump administration assumed dismantling it would have no negative consequences (for itself) www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
“If they run, we go” -ICE ICE has shown no signs of slowing down its raids, which, according to our analysis, appear targeted. From car washes to Home Depots, to a display of force and intimidation, these masked agents have stretched across LA, rounding up people with brown skin.
"The newsroom is constantly under pressure from its leaders to prove that it is not taking sides in politics — or democracy, for that matter." — Dan Froomkin on the New York Times. presswatchers.org/2025/07/the-... I think this is an under-appreciated factor.
It is baked in that the Times is "not conservative." But they really go out of their way – to the point of compromising their own standards – chasing the "not liberal" branding, and it seems to satisfy that internal mandate but ... what audience is this supposed to be for, exactly?
This (rather dense) article by Philip Agre (from 1997) has a lot of insights on how AI researchers/developers systematically avoid scientific rigor/accountability pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre...
A basic problem is, "AI" has always been a chimerical amalgamation of different fields of computer/information science and engineering, and psychology/behavioral science, biology, neuroscience, et al, and focused more on results than scientific rigor
True, but even then they tended to significantly oversimplify psychology and neuroscience in order to make the problems manageable, and because they were not experts in those areas
A very odd thing about Artificial Intelligence as a discipline in computer science is that it historically shifted from “understanding the human brain better” to “we give up on understanding the brain and will just replace humans despite having no fucking clue”
Lea.Thompson, quite wisely: “If you made Back to the Future in 2025 and they went back 30 years, it would be 1995 and nothing would look that different. The phones would be different but it wouldn’t be like the strange difference between the 80s and the 50s and how different the world was."
It's interesting because the NYT is already effectively branded as "not conservative" but it has to go out of its way / compromise its own standards / stick its thumb in the eye of its own audience to get that coveted "not liberal" positioning
Also given the scale of spending, seems likely we will have post-Iraq war levels of taxpayer funds lost to corruption. Also a feature not a bug
We are on a collision course between a huge army of random masked thugs (seems like they will have to hire any thug that applies no questions asked to spend all that $$) and a society with a 250-year tradition of not having random masked thugs on every corner and at every polling place
In both cases the effort directed against D candidates is partly aimed at positioning the NYT as objective and/or "not liberal" – these things are more or less the same in the current NYT approach
www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/u...
The incident is reminiscent of the NYT's story on the Parkinson's expert visiting the WH eight times: a non story intimating a cover-up, but run anyway to fuel the "Biden is old" feeding frenzy
Meanwhile institutionally the Democratic Party is the opposite, completely risk-averse, and we see how that's going
This YOLO approach (aligned with the Trump governing fantasy that there can be no negative political consequences for anything) puts them in the minority more often than they otherwise would have been, but it's working
Major, unappreciated feature of today's Republican Party: it has shown itself collectively willing to act against its own short-term political self-interest and take major losses – even control of Congress/the presidency – in order to advance its agenda www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
Not a new MO for the Times. In 2015 the NYT ran a number of stories trying to gin up a scandal on the Clinton Foundation, based on the right-wing attack book "Clinton Cash" ... though the Mamdani story is about 300% trashier
The R justices really hate it too, added bonus
We can only hope that reality has or will finally overcome decades of establishmentarian torpor in the Democratic Party over attacking SCOTUS ... Like so many other things it seems like it *should be* great opportunity for D candidates
To be clear, overall this is a good story! It contains a lot of info debunking RFKJr's efforts. It's just constructed like the opposite of a "truth sandwich" - a "lie sandwich"
There is an age-old formula for news stories about govt. decisions: 1. Report the decision 2. Report what the decision-makers say they are trying to accomplish 3. Quote them 4. Report what 'critics say' That *really* doesn't work here with RFKJr. and vaccines www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/h...
Douthat: I think you’d prefer the human race to endure, right? Thiel: Uh — Douthat: You’re hesitating. Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would — Douthat: This is a long hesitation! Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this. Douthat: Should the human race survive? Thiel: Uh — Yes.
There is a lot of leaking, but this and a lot of terrible/important activities across the Trump administration remain opaque to journalists/journalism so far ... we don't know how/why things happen and often they don't even have an official explanation/justification (e.g., destroying NIH)
New from me: the Constitution limits Trump's power to push states around, and sooner or later California or another state is going to teach him that in court. /1
These arrests are outrageous, but the stunned handwringing they provoke among Democrats seems to miss the point that these are high-profile/unpopular forms of overreach that are hurting Trump. Ds should keep asking ICE for accountability at every opportunity www.thecity.nyc/2025/06/17/b...
Incredible that the country is at one of its lowest ebbs, Trump is unpopular and getting more so, large swaths of the public are angry – and Democrats are mired in rounds of off-topic recriminations and have in some sense given up on their ability to communicate www.offmessage.net/p/why-democr...
NYT' current positioning – "sorry liberal readers, we are definitely not liberal" – and the more general media framing of Trump opposition as feckless/disorganized/ideologically questionable, creating a large blind spot
Plus young Richard Kind!
Takoma Park MD #NoKings rally is exuberant and drivers are honking in affirmation
Got distracted today & did a little experiment on ChatGPT 4o. I told it I had a question about AI & asked it to suggest six experts to contact. In one condition, I put "tough-minded and rigorous" before "experts". In the other condition, I put "friendly and kind" before "experts". ⬇️
Raises the issue of when Rupert passes on and what happens then. Will liberal kids see it as their historical moment to use their power to end the madness, etc. (Not getting my hopes up but within the realm of possibility)
So much of the tech hubris about "revolutionizing" government is an assumption that, just because these orgs work so differently from their own, they must be doing something "wrong". It's an insulting level of under-appreciation for very good & stable systems that just.. aren't a tech company.
www.tvinsider.com/1185399/jeop...
Jeopardy! is among the last broadly-accepted arbiters of fact in American society. Not sure what that means exactly for us all going forward, but @kenjennings.bsky.social is right to note it's significant www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/o...
Thanks for posting this! Life @parismarx.com and @bcmerchant.bsky.social ‘s work. New version of this article with oral history interviews with Navajo workers coming out in my new book The Inattention Economy this fall!