They're thinking anout building a data center in my lovely town of North Brunswick, NJ, right next to the high school and a half a mile from my home. Check out datacenternb.com for details and come to the town council meeting on Monday, June 26 to tell them why we don't want this in our community!

In bad news, with disability education oversight being moved to the Department of Health and Human Services from the Department of Education, that means Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have power over disability policy positions. New from me at @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Where fiber history meets Pride. This is a large piece (10x28') of one of the two original 30x60' pride flags, the only known surviving section of either. They were designed, hand dyed and sewn by a community of queer artists. The colors are slightly different from most rainbow flags today.

From @whoevenreads.bsky.social: Indie bookstores have often served as hubs of political action and community care. Read more about their masking policies and COVID-19 consciousness in 2026. bit.ly/4unyhKE

There are currently more bills attacking trans youth’s right to play sports across the U.S. than there are trans youth in school sports.

This reveal and the news yesterday— about Meta having shipped the code for facial recognition in their glasses—should be understood as very deeply intertwined.

Happy Pride! Reminder: LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be disabled & to lack access to healthcare. Especially trans people. Queer liberation is disabled liberation. You can support both by rejecting eugenics in your daily life: wear an n95 in public spaces. Give/get mask mutual aid:

People have been asking me if I know of a resource like StandWithMinnesota for New Jersey, and I haven't found something comprehensive. So, for the moment, I have put together all the links to NJ orgs, crowdfunding links, events, and stuck them on a page of SWM. standwithminnesota.org/jersey

If students in my classes learn only one thing, I hope it is the understanding that learning new things is hard and often makes you feel bad. I say: "If you are learning, you will probably feel bad, but in this class you don't have to feel bad alone. We will get through those bad feelings together."

It's a huge mistake to "adjust to" or "adapt" to generative AI. There's rarely been a more clearcut situation to reject vehemently for so many reasons. One reason beyond those that apply now is the future capacity for proactive manipulation and distortion. We need less outside interference not more.

More people should study library and information science and there need to be many many many more jobs for people with, particularly, the perspective it enculturates.

A patient with type 1 diabetes has begun producing his own insulin after receiving a transplant of pancreatic cells. For the first time, islet cells have been edited so they wouldn't be rejected by the patient, removing the need for immunosuppressant drugs. www.sciencealert.com/first-of-its...

never fucking forgive them for what they've done to the computer

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

Friction is also a necessary part of information seeking. Uncertainty, doubt, confusion - these are all expected, essential parts of interacting with information. Without friction, we cannot learn.

US-based trans people with long COVID - The Sick Times wants to hear from you. More info here: www.instagram.com/p/DYU6FvmkTK4/

With its new AI-based "search," Google is literally killing the infrastructure that its entire business is built on. Instead of linking people to the web, it will lock users into an "interactive" mode that slorps up data what is rapidly becoming the now-neglected and unvisited web. (1/3)

Are any of the "AI" CEOs even attempting to reckon with the harms and risks of dumping this much completely false information into *the place people go for information*? Like is that even remotely on the radar or are we all just getting offered a seat on the rocketship that we can't decline

All forms of oppression—transphobia, racism, sexism, worker exploitation, etc—ultimately result in disability or death. Oppressors disable targeted group or redefine them as disabled, then wait for ableist society to abandon them. You must be actively anti-ableist to be effectively pro-liberation.

Funny how two+ years in and we're not hearing about all the massive success stories AI must be responsible for by now

For all the pandemic deniers out there: "COVID-19 pandemic inflicted a setback of historic proportions. An estimated 22.1 million excess deaths occurred between 2020 and 2023, with nearly a decade of gains in life expectancy & healthy life expectancy wiped out by 2021" iris.who.int/server/api/c...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

It's frustrating to see media treat the same minimizers who built their reputations downplaying Covid now as the default experts on hantavirus too We actually have a much broader range of voices & expertise available now! Maybe interview them

If you are having Covid trauma resurface, I’m so sorry that’s happening! Have you considered modifying the approach of pretending Covid is dead and over and you never have to think about illness again? It might help.

Please help my friend get a kidney if you are able. Amanda is a wonderful person who deserves good things. Please share.

you can always decide to wear a face mask!

The daily heartbreak of living during a pandemic that most people are ignoring is just so exhausting.

Robert Kennedy Jr is a cruel and bloodthirsty man. He is trying to kill you. And if not you, somebody in your family.

Looks like this is public now: the NNLM Reading Club has sunset. The discussion guides that we made over the years will remain available (for now, anyway), but there won't be new additions. #medlibs 📚 news.nnlm.gov/region_6/202...

New study 📝 We audited 5 AI chatbots to assess how they respond to health questions in misinformation-prone contexts. 49.6% of responses were rated problematic (e.g., suggesting alternative cancer clinics), with limited guardrails and many poor/fabricated citations. bmjopen.bmj.com/content/16/4...

MAHA's leaders claim they want to end sickness, but they intend to do it by ending chronically ill and disabled people's access to the care that keeps us alive. The MAHA plan for ending chronic illness is simply ending chronically ill people.🧵 www.patreon.com/posts/156210...

It's normal in libraries to see a small number of book challenges by parents & patrons who have concerns about content. Today, however, 92% come from organized groups, including officials and dark money groups like Citizens for a New LA. It's time we reclaim our libraries for the people they serve.

nearly all of these MAHA influencers are being compensated by tobacco companies, and very few disclose it. in many cases, they are marketing to children. nicotine pouches harm child brain development.

Here's what your country CAN do for you. It can give you universal healthcare. It can make sure you have a safe place to live, a stocked pantry, and a great school to send your kids to. It can make sure that your job pays a living wage and your work isn't exploited by billionaires.

damn aaron swartz tried to warn everybody about sam altman

The @washingtonpost.com describes the deaths of an estimated 750,000 people to date as "messy"

kindly begging you to wear respiratory protection—for your own and others benefit—if you’re going to be out a No Kings rally tomorrow. we want things to be better than they are now, something that cannot be achieved by making each other less well. that’s doing the fascists work for them.

It's probably a good idea to listen to the people who were saying "abolish ICE" ten years ago and pay attention to what dangers they're pointing out now and maybe get on board with that stuff too

reshare for alt text, republicans and rich people who want to privatize mail have been lying about the USPS and trying to push this narrative longer than I've been alive, and imposing massive financial burdens on it to make it "insolvent"

Every single individual involved in books or publishing, from authors to editors to to marketers to CEOs to readers, should be sounding a five-alarm fire about this and calling in their support for #libraries 📚 #PubLibs

"The ruling dealt a significant setback for the reduced childhood vaccination schedule championed by Kennedy..." a W folks, enjoy it.

the crazy part of this is that like 30% of federal research spending was cancer research. It's hard to exaggerate how much money the US government used to spend on cancer research.

Remember that you are more likely to become disabled than not. You can be disabled by illness, injury, climate disasters, war, police brutality, unmitigated pandemics, lack of access to healthcare, etc. Disability justice is for us all, and it’s foundational to all other forms of justice.

we are losing so much talent, progress, and hope for no good reason www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I know this is impossible for us discuss in this current moment but... People want to do interesting, thoughtful, creative, day to day work. They want to care for each other, and feel like they are contributing to something bigger. It should be where we start when we think about our communities.

It was on this day six years ago that the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. So it is on this day six years later that all of us officially enter the seventh year of this pandemic.

“While this new paper suggests the OPTN policy had its intended effect, it does not solve racial disparities in kidney transplantation. Other research has suggested that the adjustment largely helped patients who had regular access to care, and were already on the waitlist”

“Several years ago, nephrologists attempted a first-of-its-kind effort: remove race from a key clinical algorithm, and attempt to undo the harms… A new study found the change had big results, impacting 27% of Black patients and resulting in 5.3 more transplants per 1000 Black candidates.”