An update: in February 2026, *every single one* of the 1,507 refugees admitted in the United States were white South Africans: In FY 2026, the U.S. has admitted a total of 3,155 white South Africans, three Afghans, and nobody else. www.rpc.state.gov/documents/Re...

can't stop thinking about the american pope beefing with the american government

On press today www.etsy.com/listing/9524...

I tend to get dogpiled every time I say this but: as someone *who likes bluesky and benefits from being here* we have a problem. The network is shrinking, not growing. It's shrinking a lot: only about 1.1m people a day even like a post. This time last year it was 1.6m.

If you think the first paragraph is cursed then you should read the second one.

Congrats to AO3! www.theverge.com/tech/906346/...

Is Polymarket paying influencers to hype up fake insider trading? www.theverge.com/business/905...

eventually someone in journalism will use AI in their work in a way that is legitimately impressive but by then the word will be so embarrassing that people are gonna have a whole set of euphemisms to avoid the connotation that they used AI to do the writing

the venn diagram of people obsessed with immigrating "the right way" and people who put up sheds in their backyard without a building permit and then blow their tops off when their nosy neighbor reports them is a circle

She spoke out about Gaza. Now she can't use a credit card. The UN investigator for Palestinian territories is facing U.S. sanctions and accused of antisemitism by the State Department.

my level of stress has crossed a threshold where i think it would be funny if trump attended the birthright citizenship oral argument and scotus incoherently ruled in his favor 6-3. cortisol levels so high that i can't stop lolling about all my family members in danger. wouldn't it be funny tho

FUCK i can't believe Art Lien is retired now

my patience has increased but I will say, it is ok to have trouble reading, it is not ok to scream at people for things you imagined they said because you can't read what they actually said

i wish more english speakers would watch that korean reality tv competition with the shamans and fortune-tellers, but then again, maybe i don't really have it in me to gossip with a white person about the korean shaman tv show

Reflexive hatred of journalists and journalism as a whole is one of those right wing behaviors that doesn't get treated as such because the institution of journalism is in really bad shape, for reasons not actually journalist's fault. I am not a journalist so you cant get mad at me for saying this

People shouldn't do this, not because Stern is a particularly valuable resource for legal news but because it's psychotic behavior that you shouldn't do to anyone, least of all all the third parties who you have just lied to about what someone else said.

The commentariat is fixated on how No Kings will affect the November election. Obviously I'm hyperfocused on how it's overtly or implicitly affecting court decisions, but also, I'm kind of obsessed with how much No Kings is shifting American culture itself www.theverge.com/policy/90440...

Made the call a while ago that I won’t be writing much about the series itself, but it was important to spell things out now that Warner Bros. is cranking the hype machine up

as a computer-enjoyer it's very strange to me that people are arguing about the inevitability of AI. a lot of powerful tech was torpedoed or gutted or just didn't quite pan out. like they never went away but also a fuckton of investors lost money betting on them. most obvious example is napster

I mean it was right there www.theverge.com/report/90181...

i really hate wearing my gas mask because it feels like shit and i only do it if there's a chance of imminent gassing but wow it really does make a difference during allergy season doesn't it

going back reading some of the stated uses for this tech is such a trip

For people who are concerned about having their devices seized at US airports starting Monday when ICE "assists" the TSA, EFF has this guide: www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

nothing will induce me to go back on x but i'll note that breaking news events in the middle east don't happen here because the community for it isn't here. also? iran protests + war has been a fucking slop propaganda shitshow of x-poisoned insanity

this is completely insane: since when is it acceptable for a tech company to rewrite news outlets' headlines without their consent? especially at a time when audiences are sensitive to how stories are framed in headlines? (ie Israel/Palestine, the Trump admin, ICE) www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

This is absolutely bonkers and infuriating. Must-read reporting by ProPublica.

Two killer Verge podcast jobs: 1. I need an ambitious SUPERVISING PRODUCER for Decoder, which is a big fun job job-boards.greenhouse.io/voxmedia/job... 2. We need another PRODUCER on The Vergecast, which is set to expand in fun ways this year job-boards.greenhouse.io/voxmedia/job...

There is so much evidence of bad faith behavior it feels like the really egregious acts get lost in the noise, but see: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

someone i know found out about the mo chara terror charges AFTER watching the kneecap movie on netflix and it's got me thinking there must exist at least one person who found out about the case after enjoying the kneecap song on the dungeons & dragons movie soundtrack

OFFS. When Iran tried to interefere in 2020, researchers caught them and called them out. Then the Benz-Weiss-Taibbi-Musk-Jordan-Trump axis labeled those researchers "censors" ... and set about defunding them and dismantling their organizations.

the congressional authorization thing is bad but honestly for me the whole "the crime of aggression is the supreme international crime" thing is what keeps me up at night

what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"

posting, once again, the well-established definition of the crime of aggression in the rome statute for the ICC

so we went from war on anthropic to war on iran in a matter of hours

what the fuck friday night

just had the thought that it should absolutely be knowable why the epstein plea deal happened at all, like, acosta didn't die, did he? and then i looked up where he is these days and holy moly i want to d*e

if you are a voter in one of these states I think an actually substantive thing you can do is be plaintively vocal about paying legislators more money. Go full Karen about it. It's a Karen-worthy issue and no one will expect a Karen reaction about it

if i ever get fuck-off rich my hobby is going to be running for state legislatures that pay legislators $30,000 a year. top agenda item will be raising pay for legislators so normal people can afford to serve. as soon as i achieve that i will resign to live with my model wives on a yacht

NPR and PBS would have to be much more robustly funded by the government than it was before. the problem is that the money + hands off the content approach has been largely a matter of norms. no norms will remain after trump. propublica is vital, but here's the thing about them —

i was knocked out in bed with a cold for days and when i woke up the government was at war with anthropic and emil michael was back in the news and in a completely differently shitty way. the nyquil hadn't completely worn off yet and boy it's been a rough catch-up

i've now seen 50 different kinds of "well it makes sense if you think about it" britposts about something called gordon and denton, which leads me to suspect something unusual has happened that defies sense, actually

i have an adversarial and self-loathing relationship with instagram reels where i regularly watch foreign brainrot and/or propaganda, and today i hit rock bottom when my brother who actually lives in korea told me that i was "on that korean garbage algo" because the shit i see has gotten so stupid

i actually think this is the wrong way to think about the direction this is going. fox news is the default channel in many public spaces — most troublingly, us military bases, has been for decades. this was not a matter of policy afaik, it just slid into place. it's not hard to lock it in as policy.

i do not believe for one moment anyone on bluesky can do this. you are all over 35. it's not even the alcohol or the running, you simply do not have the digestive tract for this anymore. beer gives you a headache. if you eat onions you get bloated. you have acid reflux twice a week

I worked at AP for a long time, and even it has lost a lot of capacity—but it’s filled in for a lot of local media as local newspapers have been eliminated. Those losses are a big reason all politics is national and heavily BS-based now.

mergers & antitrust not my strong suit. is oversight on the state level not federally preempted in this instance? deadline.com/2026/02/para...

i'm a big fan of magazines, investigative reporting, and longform, all of which requires staff and institutions, but the really really dire thing that indie media can't replace? the fucking wire services

small brain: free markets produce free press normal brain: consolidation of media into monopolies makes the press unfree large brain: despite media consolidation, media consumption is more diverse than ever galaxy brain: media fucked because of phone

second paragraph is one of the funniest paragraphs ever in a statement of interest, concerning a person who is not actually listed among amicii. is the pope ordering SCOTUS to strike down the eo..... well, he's not NOT ordering SCOTUS to strike down the eo

the ufo thing is obviously an attempt to distract from the epstein files but the way things have been going, in four weeks we're going to receive incontrovertible proof that that donald trump was elected as an extraterrestrial op