Come for the cool photos, but stay for the stories embedded in the alt-text 👍

It's just so fucking depressing all the time

@nytimes.com or @nytpitchbot.bsky.social, you decide

You can't "earn" a billion dollars and none of their examples did. Michael Jordan earned $93m playing basketball. He's worth $3.5b today because of our meticulously-engineered legal, economic, and tax structures that prioritize accumulated capital and property over everything else.

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Meet Merlin Van Lawick, grandson of conservation icon Jane Goodall, in Paris. He was interviewed by Mongabay during the ChangeNOW 2026 environmental forum. No pay wall.

Researchers have developed three new antibiotics from scorpion venom and habanero peppers to combat tuberculosis and other drug-resistant pathogens. Free link: www.wired.com/story/mexica...

A climate monster is growing in the Pacific Ocean. The building El Niño will crest around the end of next year—arriving on top of global heating. And it appears stupendously intense—almost certainly stronger than the “Super” El Niño of 2015-16. Must read! Gift link. link: tinyurl.com/mtr9663c

1/ The billions in profits Big Oil is reaping due to the Iran war may stymie the energy transition, experts & advocates fear, incentivizing oil & gas expansion and boosting the sector’s funds for political lobbying. No pay wall.

Every suspected hantavirus case took a commercial flight to get home. They were in crowded airports and on airplanes. They weren’t isolated. They weren’t instructed to mask. No precautions were taken. The lack of precautionary principle is maddening. If you’re traveling, wear an N95.

“Huck shows great disrespect for the Court’s precedent in Dred Scott when aiding the fugitive Jim, presumably due to liberal indoctrination by the Widow Douglas.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/exc...

The publishing industry views Bluesky as some tiny unimportant island out somewhere in a far-off ocean. It's not worthy of their attention like Amazon Algoland or The Republic Of Instagram Influencer Collaborativepost is. What they don't realise is just how much the island's inhabitants love books.

🎵"The wheels on the truck they may fall off, ..." 🎶 #Cybertruck

It’s telling that Alabama took 14 years to implement Brown (you MUST desegregate) and < 14 days to implement Callais (you CAN eliminate Black districts if you call them Democratic, but you don’t HAVE to).

Tennessee: a picture says a 1,000 words. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

I've dropped the paywall for a couple of days on this extraordinarily silly piece I wrote earlier this week, in the hope it might nudge a few more people into subscribing to my newsletters. My advice would be take out a free sub first then see how it goes. www.tom-cox.com/american-gol...

I'd like to thank all the Gerrymandering Confederates who've stopped pretending they're not racist. The next step is to stop pretending you're Christian. BC y'all hate the Gospels as deeply as you hate the VRA.

There is not enough discussion of the EEOC's lawsuit against @nytimes.com for discriminating against a white man. Here's a gift link. Let's get into it.🧵 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/b...

Trump threatened to nuke Iran during the same press event where he called a woman reporter "baby" and a "bitch" and we'll all just supposed to continue on tomorrow as though any of this insanity is normal or acceptable

Attorney Kurt Olsen once worked to try to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in court and was later sanctioned by judges for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections. He is now Trump’s director of election security and integrity.

You wouldn’t marry someone who lied to you like this. You wouldn’t be friends with someone who lied to you like this. You wouldn’t do business with someone who lied to you like this. You wouldn’t work for someone who lied to u like this. You’d want nothing to do with someone who lied to u like this.

NEW: ProPublica identified at least 79 children who’ve been left screaming, unable to breathe, or otherwise hurt by tear gas and pepper spray during Trump’s historic immigration crackdown.

Boarding? I hate referees in professional sports, going both ways. When this gets out of hand ... #Flyers

🧵 On hypocrisy

Pope Leo XIV gifted Marco Rubio a plant of peace. In return, Marco Rubio gave the pope a crystal football. The pope’s response? “Wow. Okay.”

When Tom Homan asked construction workers if they were legal, they should’ve asked him what he did with the $50,000 he took in an FBI sting, and why that’s legal.

TIL the president of a university gets a fourth stripe on their academic robe -- at my daughter's graduation today #TempleU

Pretty much an ad for every Democrat across the country.

Someone is insider trading on crude oil shorts using Iran War announcements from the White House…and making a LOT of money. You better bet we’ll be investigating ⬇️

It is interesting how Trump quietly accepted the Gulf states denying U.S. military access to their airspace for Iran operations after blasting NATO countries for doing the same thing. www.nbcnews.com/politics/whi...

Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available. We decided to illustrate it.

I've been scooped (in a good way). I was working on a piece along these lines. This is better. substack.com/home/post/p-...

EXCLUSIVE: My latest story for @theatlantic.com : www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

“It may be that the first step in truly reining in the court is to remember that the republic — and the Constitution that brought it to life — is meant for us. It is ours to interpret and ours to transform.”

Here’s how the AI Boom, such as it is, has impacted my life: it has been used as an excuse to lay off my friends for bot equivalents that never came. It has made mass culture and art immeasurably worse. I have a stalker with AI psychosis. So, no, I don’t more data centers. I want less of all that.

Looks like foreigners don't want to risk being imprisoned by ICE just for a chance to see a soccer game.

"Democrats have become unnervingly unrestrained in expressing their higher-end hopes." Read Mark Leibovich: "Democrats Could Use a Cold Shower Before the Midterms" www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

In all, at least 75 career federal officials who’d played important roles in elections have left, been fired or been reassigned. In their place are roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections.

I have not previously seen the Justice Department cite the attorney general's TV ratings in a filing in federal court. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Renewables growth cut Spain’s electricity bills by 24.2% over the past two years www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/30/r...

JOHN FOGERTY: I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain JAMES TAYLOR: okay, you’re not gonna fucking believe this

open.substack.com/pub/pauloffi... Vaccine package inserts can be misleading.

DCCC Adds Bob Harvie’s Campaign to Unseat PA-01 Republican Brian Fitzpatrick to Its ‘Red to Blue’ Program | The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will now provide the Bucks County Democrat’s campaign with organizational and fundraising support.

Pretty cool watching California's first solar-over-canal project succeed. Looking forward to more scale on the next go-round — currently two installations totaling less than one-third of a mile. www.fresnobee.com/news/califor...

Excellent context of the GOP's war on Black voting and representation—the sort you don't imagine you'd find on cable news, like Democracy Now!, but with bigger production budgets—that's exemplary of what you find regularly on MSNOW.

Courts had deemed Republican gerrymanders illegal in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio several months before the 2022 elections. The Supreme Court and other courts let the GOP use those maps anyway, and it handed them the House. Now SCOTUS is doing the opposite thing for the same goal

JUST IN: ProPublica and @ctmirror.org's “On the Hook” series, which exposed how Connecticut laws had come to favor towing companies at the expense of low-income residents, has won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. It’s ProPublica’s ninth Pulitzer Prize.

Breaking: Supreme Court Over the Dissent of At Least Justice Jackson, Breaks Its Usual Procedural Rules to Allow Louisiana to Minimize Black Voting Rights in the Middle of an Ongoing Election electionlawblog.org?p=155898

The perfect car doesn’t exi—-