Writer. Professor. Golden retriever papa. Bylines in Guardian, Slate, TNR, many other places. Supervises VQR. Wrote a pile of books you might like.
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if you are a 40 year old man complaining about being “bullied” on a social media platform, I have great news for you: you are allowed to log off
Terrific read. Frumpy cheats at everything
Some new street art spotted in DC 🤣
Risk terrain modeling “is a mathematical way of justifying a type of policing in certain people and neighborhoods that police have already wanted to surveil,” EFF’s @mguariglia.bsky.social told @kansas.com. www.kansas.com/news/local/...
“Now Bart, we could go back and forth about who forgot to pick up whom …”
Citizen Kane
Nah. It’s not that. It’s that they can’t undo or escape their professional ideological indoctrination.
“Artificial intelligence” is 70 years old.
Remembering when the NYT went on a weeks-long bender covering a decades-old real estate deal the Clintons were involved in, in which they *lost money*.
It is wild that the Washington Post -- which claims "Democracy Dies in Darkness" -- has remained completely silent for more than a day about Trump's latest attack on free and fair elections. Support pro-democracy independent media. Subscribe to Democracy Docket today. hubs.ly/Q03jcjqP0
If you're 60, 69.1% of all job growth since your birth occurred under Democratic administrations. If you're 45, that number is 74.7%. If you're under 28, the number is 100%. Happy Labor Day.
Big opening for, say, Brad Lander www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/n...
The blame for this falls solely on leadership and Belichick for this Joe Biden debate-ass performance.
youtube.com/watch?v=VwP-...
Funny how I’ve seen 1000 articles bemoaning the horror of young men’s prospects since I was young, yet never once have I seen a piece on how young women view the job market/economy Even when they’re the ones going to uni, holding down dom labor + traditional jobs You’d think one might like to know
Please talk to some Black people before dismissing the psychological impact of having Feds running around the neighborhood hemming people up en masse.
It is time we cracked down on both cisgender men and US-born citizens. They are groups that disproportionately commit violent crimes. A nation of trans immigrants would be safe, peaceful, and much more fun.
Just sent C-ville's City Council a letter opposing the police chief's appalling proposal to target our unhoused fellow citizens & criminalize being homelessness. Read about the chief's proposal: c-ville.com/cpd-chief-wa... Write to Council: www.charlottesville.gov/677/City-Cou...
Sorry i was late to the bbq i was rendering aid to a victim of domestic violence* *i fell down 2 (?) spiral staircases into a big hotel fish tank when a sex worker made fun of my penis for having 4 distinct skin tones & a toenail on the end of it. 9/11 as well
A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment. Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.
happy labor day
NYT about to call Trump a “democracy skeptic”
If anyone believes Newsom has the chops to lead this country they should try reading his book.
Not gonna belabor this too much, but it’s important to understand that Newsom’s public messaging sucks for *two* reasons: it serves as an advertisement for Trump by aping his tone and content, and it also reminds us that Newsom has no principles other than seeking power & attention. This is failure.
I had a popular, award-winning podcast called Democracy in Danger that ran from 2020 through 2024. Then UVA canceled it because I guess democracy was no longer in danger.
It's not "creeping" fascism when it gives up all pretense of stealth.
Hey @mollyjongfast.bsky.social thank you for pushing back on misogynistic bullshit other guests on MSNBC The Weekend were spewing about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein being somehow UNFIT to testify in court because they were PAID for SEX. They were all WRONG, and you were the only one to call it out
"Chicago is experiencing a significant decline in gun violence, with year-to-date statistics in August 2025 showing a -32.3% decrease in homicides and a -37.4% drop in overall shooting incidents compared to the same period the previous year." www.chicago.govcity/en/depts/may...
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
ICE Continues to Detain Award-Winning Journalist Who Filmed Immigration Raids Truthout truthout.org/articles/ice...
This is NYTimes-speak for calling Rudy’s account total BS: “The narrative of how the accident unfolded, based on accounts from [Rudy mouthpiece] Mr. Ragusa and the New Hampshire State Police, is a little unclear.”
Why is our government deporting children? They are *children*. Are we going to say these are hardened criminals who threaten national security, ffs?
Jesus fucking christ. The Trump administration tried to send a bunch of children to Guatemala at 3 am and justified it by saying that the kids just wanted to return to their parents in Guatemala, but the kids actually told the court that they are afraid of being sent back to Guatemala.
Reading so much here about skilled, deeply experienced translators being reduced to much-lower-paying machine translation post-editing (MTPE) — fixing a first-round AI translation. Reminds me of the tremendous labor + frustration of *undoing* a bad copyedit (whether performed by human or machine)
Walked by a circle of six National Guard soldiers near Eastern Market in DC. They each were forcefully handling threats posed by cups of Baskin Robbins ice cream.
Every freaking day something disgusting comes out. Every day. All we do is point it out, complain about it in podcasts and social media posts and then wait until tomorrow. Rinse and repeat until we’re in full on fascism. We need to build a massive movement against cosplaying journalism. Now.
The police version of the crash, as relayed by a local Manchester reporter, is unsurprisingly quite different from what Giuliani's spokesman says. The whole thing is even more murky now, however. manchester.inklink.news/rudy-giulian...
“The people in this book are brave,” said Toad. “They fight dragons and giants, and they are never afraid.” “I wonder if we are brave,” said Frog.
not just that he has no constitutional authority, there isn't even any particular legal or institutional mechanism by which the president can make anyone treat this as anything other than a weird advisory opinion.
The Kant Car
RADDATZ: You talk about what can be done. After shootings in Buffalo & Uvalde, Congress passed a bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It provided hundreds of millions for schools to expand mental health services. You didn't vote for it. Why? TOM EMMER: I don't remember the reasons I didn't vote for it
In America we've set up a cool system where, when you get *super* rich, you actually pay *lower* taxes.
fun fact: if any politician in the United States so much as hints at wanting to separate housing from the profit motive, the New York Times will immediately start taking dictation from actual neo-Nazis in an attempt to scuttle their electoral chances
"The lunatics are running the asylum."
And spread widely via @theatlantic.com. Ultimately Clinton Democrats embraced it as well and it spread to Atlanta, Houston, and other Dem cities.
Texas AG Partizan Attack On Beto Ken Paxton threatens to arrest Beto O'Rourke for fighting the illegal gerrymander of five congressional seats. Speech is no longer Free in Texas! open.substack.com/pub/betoorou...
Pritzker: "We don't want troops on the streets of American cities. That's un-American and frankly the president ought to know better. This one doesn't seem to. He hasn't read any books. He doesn't seem to understand the Constitution or the laws."
Yeesh. What ever happened to good-old hazing?
Chicago launches resistance campaign as Trump threatens to send troops www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
Pritzker: "No one in the administration -- the president or anybody under him -- has called anyone in my administration or me. It's clear that in secret they're are planning this invasion with US troops."
For those asking, my American Revolution lecture course is free online here: oyc.yale.edu/history/hist...
Good night 🌙 and….
Reading about expanding threats to interlibrary loan (bc of Trump's IMLS cuts, tariffs, etc.) means I need to re-up this:
Islamophobia. Racism. False fears of being called antisemitic.
"The COVID-19 vaccine kept us healthier—both physically and financially" Same goes for wearing an #N95 mask & breathing cleaner shared air indoors. Think #SwissCheeseModel layers - Via @ocanannain.bsky.social www.mpo-mag.com/breaking-new...
NEW: A federal judge ordered an Arkansas school district to take down Ten Commandments displays in its classrooms following our lawsuit.
From the beginning, many of us were apprehensive about allowing LLMs to actually execute code. Asking it for answers is one thing. Allowing it to take actions in privileged environments is entirely another. pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/29/v...
I wanted to give benefit of the doubt to the authors because headlines are not always under their control, but the frame of the entire piece is fucked. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/u...
You spelled ENDANGERING wrong, @nytimes.com. “Pushing the boundaries” is a *positive* frame implying unconventional innovations. There are no innovations here. Just medieval anti-science populist attacks on some of best methods of truth seeking we have.
"3,000 CDC staffers have left since January, with thousands more gone from the FDA and NIH. The expertise drain also hits cyber defense, nuclear safety, weather forecasting and disaster response."😱 Enabled by a complicit GOP Congress that will live in infamy. www.axios.com/2025/08/30/t...
Nuns from a convent outside Waco have repeatedly visited the women on Texas’s death row—and even made them affiliates of their order. Lawrence Wright reports on a powerful spiritual alliance.
any body want to help me plan sneaking around and raising all the flags back up to full mast
melania constantly refreshing the tl
Meh. Why would he?
Thinking about that time Edith Wilson was secretly the President of the United States for awhile.
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.
You are not persuading the text pipeline! You are stumbling on to a mathematical vector in which you are causing the word delivery mechanism to replicate sequences other people typed up in which they are persuaded and that OpenAI likely stole without permission!
It’s wonderful that this video from Milwaukee’s Public Library system features a nod to a book on Prince, because he loved libraries. In 2001, he donated $12k to save the Louisville Free Public Library’s Western Branch — the first to serve Black patrons. www.courier-journal.com/story/news/l...
Nearly a million people marched against Brexit. Not front page news. 50 people gather outside a hotel. National news for weeks. "Fears of mass unrest", media says.
Question: Why did US put big tariffs on India despite major national interest in cultivating a strategic counterweight to China and trying to isolate Russia? Answer: Because the US president lied that he fixed India-Pakistan and India wouldn’t go along with the lie. (Seriously, that’s the answer)
The last person employed by the National Weather Service really needs to take one for the team and send out an announcement over the warning system when it finally happens. That way everyone knows all at the same glorious time.
Right now, your ability to get access to a COVID vaccine this fall is in jeopardy, whether or not you fit the new, restricted eligiblity criteria. Please send a letter to your member of Congress here. And spread the word. @defendpublichealth.bsky.social actionnetwork.org/letters/writ...
WIRED breaks down how ICE’s unprecedented expansion will actually affect every person in the US—citizen or otherwise. www.wired.com/video/watch/...
I vaguely remember tweeting something like the country that effectively captures this free energy source at scale will rule the 21st century. whelp.
Can't believe that in 2025 we have to be telling people that vaccines are safe and slavery was bad.
We want to apologize if it feels like we’ve been venting a lot lately. It’s just hard to ignore that nearly every move from this administration seems to be illegal, unlawful, or outright unconstitutional and yet nothing happens.
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”
Dear Americans, welcome to the thrilling game of ‘Did this dictator die or just disappear for a day?’ We’ve been playing it with Putin and Lukashenko for decades. Enjoy the suspense.
“…I am infuriated that the Air Force plans to grant military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt. She did not die defending the Constitution. She died trying to overturn it.” My latest in @thebulwark.com www.thebulwark.com/p/honoring-a...
Educ’n in 🇺🇸: Trump admin threatening to withhold over $150m from my local school district for failing to change its transgender policies - though issue at hand (access to bathrooms and lockers based on gender at birth or identity is not yet definitively settled in US law. wjla.com/news/local/f...
That’s a little too believable now
First item on my syllabus: Discussion sections do not start this week. Number of students writing to ask why no one else showed up to discussion sections this week: Six.
I would read an academic murder book in which the murder was solved by reading the syllabus
The first principle of the regime is that the leader is always right. The second is white supremacy. Political analysis fails if it doesn't start here.
You could have stopped him seven months ago. You are not helping.
North Carolina Republican county elections chair James Yokeley resigns after video shows him secretly tainting Dairy Queen Blizzards he bought for his 16 year old step-granddaughter and her 15 year old female friend Search his basement NOW www.wral.com/story/nc-cou...
Here's something I think a lot of folks don't yet understand, but 16 states' worth of CVSes refusing to give out Covid shots *is* actually preventing people from accessing them. They are the biggest pharmacy chain in the country and they own Aetna insurance, often forcing those clients to use CVS.
It’s not the NRA. The NRA is broke and weak. Those guys actually believe in arming people. It’s not corruption. It’s stupidity.
If you just watched the news and had no knowledge of US history, you'd assume that Congress was an elected group of TV pundits who had no actual power or governing responsibility.
Wrote about Comer/Mace attempting to doxx and intimidate Wikipedia editors in an effort to force their own viewpoint onto Wikipedia.
Reuters: MOST TRUMP TARIFFS ARE NOT LEGAL, U.S. APPEALS COURT RULES
There are few real heroes in the United States. Many of them work at the CDC.
To be clear: this is yet another reason why many of these laws are so problematic. If people want to run fediverse instances of any size, the fact that costly age verification requirements could put them in legal jeopardy, is very bad. Regulators make laws as if every website is Facebook.
Was rummaging through old articles and found this one of Demetre Daskalakis. Apparently, back in 2013, he went to New York City's gay sex clubs and bathhouses and administered meningitis vaccines and helped beat an outbreak.