Despite sudden loss of a major federal grant, nonprofit HourCar’s Evie Spot Network of electric vehicles/charging stations is expanding to low-income apartments, and pitching itself to more destinations, like hospitals and U of M parking meters. You game? www.twincities.com/2025/12/28/e...

Excellent recs 🧵:

Private prison company GEO Group allegedly made immigration detainees work for no pay. Now it's at the Supreme Court trying to prevent the detainees from suing. bit.ly/4pfafj2

our country is run by 12 year old boys so no girlz allowed

either there's a vanguard Dem caucus secretly war-gaming scenarios for forcibly arresting & removing Trump under "national emergency" contingencies OR everything's completely cooked

…the fact is that the vast majority of Middle Easterners have had zero choice in the conflicts which have destroyed so much around them & created so much misery. Third, this framing leaves out the terrible roles played by western powers & Russia in causing, directly & indirectly, conflicts in the ME

"The processors in data centers run hot and need to be cooled, so big tech companies are pulling from municipal water supplies to make that happen—and aren’t always disclosing how much water they’re using. Local wells are running dry or seem unsafe to drink from."

As urbanisation accelerates, cities are grappling with unprecedented pressures—from chronic housing shortages to streets overwhelmed by cars. In response, a small but growing group of leaders is matching the scale of the challenge—steering toward a more prosperous, resilient and sustainable future.🧵

What HAS happened in the last six months is many privileged (white) Americans who had been protected from the worst of the Republican Party’s abuses suddenly began to be affected personally and could no longer ignore or pretend not to notice what has been happening for a long time.

Damn right she is. Also here's the piece I co-authored with @cnygren.bsky.social that's linked in that thread. Which shadow-boxer clearly didn't bother to read. www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

No one says to legit business owners, "hey I see there's an underground market selling toxic knock-offs of your product: how will you incorporate the toxic product AND protect your customers against its harms?" But apparently it's fine to make this suggestion to educators with respect to AI.

If someone says to you, "what are you doing about students' use of AI?" ask them, "do you think that this should be my problem? How good do you think my response can be? Should it not be up to legislators & administrators to defend against a commercial industry's attack on your child's education?"

a short one about stephen miller’s nonsense youtu.be/6lWODssDCiU?...

Being loud isn’t the same as being sure. Most of the time it’s the opposite.

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

163 years ago in Mankato, 38 Dakota men were hung in the largest mass execution in our nation’s history. I’m grateful to the riders who continue to remind us the importance of fighting for accountability and healing for the Dakota people. www.mprnews.org/story/2025/1...

You can do a lot locally with a dedicated group of 15 to 40 people. Regular people should be thinking at that scale rather than at the scale of thousands.

Martha Stewart went to prison for shit that men do every day. It was because she was Martha Stewart.

By treating constituent problems as urgent and solvable, Zohran Mamdani is answering a strangely radical question: What if everyday government services actually worked? “It’s really important to us that there are fewer barriers for New Yorkers to get what they need from the government."

‘Running through the heart of Netanyahu’s philosophy is the question of power.’ Jacqueline Rose on her encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Paying attention is an act of care. In a loud world, listening is still a choice. Thanks for choosing it.

merry Christmas one and all abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

"Joy is an infectious emotion, and it has to be carried delicately while in a place that holds misery. Joy has to be spared from this negative environment in order to keep a person sane." What Christmas is like in prison, from @vera.org:

I never again want to hear about how the Republican Party is the party of national security. You don’t incinerate our diplomatic capacity & violate all of our treaty commitments if you care about national security.

On this day in 1868, President Andrew Johnson granted unconditional pardons to “every person who directly or indirectly” supported the Confederacy in the Civil War. Asked for a comment today, the ghost of President Jackson said, "Yeah, my bad. What was I thinking? Sorry."

“It is a revenue structure designed by donors and corporate strategists who invested heavily in Trump’s political apparatus because they know how rapidly [profit] margins expand once guardrails fall.”

“Marxism is generally considered anti-religious. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, on the other hand, sees overlaps: Christianity and Marxism have repeatedly awakened in humanity a radical sense of hope for a more just world.”

As an anthropologist, I believe art can only be understood in context. This music belongs on the list of best Christmas music. This performance, in this particular time and place…all the feels. bsky.app/profile/pete...

There’s enough space in cities, it’s just poorly distributed.

“This is the declaration of the reinstated father, who promises to restore the rule of fathers everywhere; to undo the psychic castration suffered by straight white men at the hands of invading immigrants, feminist women, ‘woke’ mobs, DEI initiatives and the democratic presumption of equality.”

Instead, the Times offers this bizarre paragraph as the takeaway. Pace this framing, Trump’s extortionate actions here are entirely predictable, and not very different from how he has rolled out, say, tariffs. And the passive voice (“were defined by”) listing of problems misses the point entirely.

All right people so literally I downloaded one of the government documents to Books on my iPad. I highlighted some text that was not redacted and it included some that was redacted and I copied it over to notes and I pasted it and you can see everything unredacted. www.justice.gov/multimedia/C...

The only way to responsibly teach students how to use AI is to teach them to read and think and understand for themselves. We don’t need an app for that. We never did.

"Speculation has been hollowing art out for decades, and we might simply have passed a threshold where price is the only measure of worth. But I’m alert enough to know that the era of unbridled conspicuous consumption might be ending." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2025/12/two-...

‘9/11 was the moment that the US Treasury began to treat financial flows as strategic targets, banks as intelligence partners, and the dollar system itself as an instrument of awesome state power.' Daniel Soar on the latest episode of Aftershock. Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...

"Behavioural scientists are increasingly calling for context as a key to addressing pressing problems caused by human behaviour. However, despite its powerful ability to generate contextual hypotheses on the basis of relatively simple rules, ecological thinking is rarely applied to human behaviour"

“Monster” conjures a threat distinct from “foreign,” “different,” “other” or even “alien.” Here it implies that the deportees are different from “normal” people (read “white, Anglo, native-born Americans”) in ways that go beyond merely committing a garden-variety crime’

Taps the sign: "Because one cannot prove legal residence or citizenship without due process, deporting people without legal proceedings is to deny rights that must be extended to all if they are to exist for anyone — " 1/2

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

WHAT DID I SAY. IT WAS THIS. bsky.app/profile/juda...

ICE has hired bounty hunters to locate migrants for abduction.

By the way, PBS SoCal lost all of its federal funding this year. There's TONS of really amazing programming and you can get unlimited streaming on the PBS app on any Roku/Apple/etc device for literally $5/month. I've been binge-watching Frontline over the holiday. pbssocal.org/give sign up here

Calling these fucking sickos 'weird' accomplishes something important, which is refusing to recognize the premises of their disgusting madness. Instead of starting with "OK, I can see where you're coming from," you begin with, "this is weird & gross, what kind of sick fuck would say such a thing"

Job Opportunity! Grinnell College - Assistant Professor of African Diaspora Studies Two-Year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (Start Fall 2026) networks.h-net.org/jobs/69658/g...

A hygiene center, for 700 people "the only place to take a shower, wash clothes, fix a bike, get a sweater, blanket, or hot meal…while enjoying a little bit of community", was closing so the land could be sold. Rick Steve's bought it and gave it to the nonprofit that runs it, RENT FREE. #GoodNews

#OtD 21 Dec 2011 workers at Yemen's national airline went on strike calling for the dismissal of the director, the son-in-law of the unpopular president. After two days, he was suspended. Two months later, a revolution forced the president from power stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7844...

This is a stunning piece of work by Global Witness laying out how Musk's chatbot software actively helps spread climate denial and disinformation. globalwitness.org/en/campaigns...