Tried to catch the rainbow and lightning photobombed my iPhone shot. #WXsky #ILwx

The table of contents of "The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-Wandering, Creativity, and Dreaming" make for a refreshing reminder of how much we're still figuring out about intelligence academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

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

We won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting @chicagotribune.com! Our entire newsroom covered Midway Blitz with everything we had. I’ve never been prouder of the Tribune or its commitment to the truth. It’s an honor to be part of this team.

Isn’t it mad how in the age of memes, newspapers have laid off almost all of the editorial cartoonists? The Columbia Missourian (below) not included:

Presenters say that Weber State University’s legal team adopted a narrow construction of a state law designed to withhold funding from public institutions suspected of practicing DEI.

I really liked this conversation about radical unlearning with @mskellymhayes.bsky.social and @lewispants.bsky.social truthout.org/audio/the-sc... (Yes it was released in March but I just got to it)

Cool soundsystem at the Land School for a screening of "Happy Today", a concert film of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet

The Yale Law School Federalist Society just gave this guy a profile in courage award this weekend.

Know someone who’d be a good fit? We’re looking for someone with fundraising experience and a passion for accountability journalism to be our next executive director. www.injusticewatch.org/about/jobs/e...

If a Biden appointee posted that "we are longing for lefitwingers" to fill jobs, it would be a week long Fox story about how the Deep State sustains itself.

It is sort of crazy that a defining feature of contemporary Republican politics is the claim that there is a cabal of pedophiles who are protected by the powerful, and then they do stuff like this. Paxton is trying to win a Senate seat this year!

Maybe the neighborhood coyote dropped by this afternoon because we have a "wildlife habitat" sign in the front yard?

This is one of the most quietly revolutionary things any city can do to improve kids' lives & outcomes. If you genuinely care about kids having access to education or safe after school spaces & activities, then fund your libraries, staff your libraries, & make every public school ID a library card.

a key to understanding the reactionary right, for me, is the realization that there are pleasures in cruelty "and no you are not immune." there's something in the human soul that delights in having someone to look down on--or at least, the capacity for this exists in us

Tidied up my ancient Flickr group for photos of the Chicago Municipal Device, a Y-shaped symbol that's hiding in plain sight all over our fair city. www.flickr.com/groups/chica...

clear goal of republicans in these states is to, in the words of carter glass, “eliminate every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”

My biggest conspiracy theory is that telling working class people that engagement in the arts is a middle / upper class thing and to do so makes you a class traitor is a psyop to make them disengaged with themselves and the world and the beauty of being human, so that they accept worse treatment.

I think it could be cool if atproto labels had an optional "action" which could provide more context or a path to deeper engagement. AppViews could provide a CTA button in the label details when it's defined

new @onthemedia.bsky.social podcast about the history of FEMA (and conspiracy thinking abt FEMA) is off to a good start www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm... Mount Weather was interesting to hear about as a fan of the tv show Paradise And great audio like the "Duck and cover" song and "FEMA blues"

Alright nerds listen up. In the last ~24 hours this little stand has sold about 40 plants. FORTY. There was a huge spike in traffic after I posted to our neighborhood's cantankerous facebook group. Want people to plant native plants? Make it easy for 'em. Hot damn.

Just checking in on week three of Heath Freeman's decision to fire our print production team...

Ok there's a lot of incorrect information going around on this, so I want to be clear that the problem with the Big 3 and EV's isn't that the Big 3 didn't want to make EV's. The problem, as with so many things, is Trump. I'm gonna do a little thread on this because people don't seem to be aware. 1/x

Michael Pollan is blowing my mind with these xenobots (describing the work of Michael Levin)

Posting this every time this idea comes up: coralproject.net/blog/the-rea...

The Illinois Accountability Commission has released its final report on Operation Midway Blitz. The report looked at evidence suggesting a federal effort to suppress dissent, finding "DHS used paramilitary tactics to occupy and impose control in Chicagoland." Full report here:

‘“I always knew the path I chose would not be easy. I distinctly remember making these decisions to invest in my music community, in my own music,” he says. “I do things for money, sure, but, if I’m going to do it, I look at myself as an artist, trying to make art…’

Been sitting with how many Black Civil rights leaders bled and died to ge the voting rights act only for it to be struck down by this white supremacist supreme court. This is from bloody Sunday which catalyzed passage of the VRA. It's hard not to shed tears at what we've lost.

i was told by john roberts and sam alito that racism is over so i won't worry about white republicans in the south jumping over themselves to end black political representation wherever they can

I don't know how widely understood it is that the US is now conditioning lifesaving, utterly essential health aid to African countries on access to minerals and other ~sweet deals. I probably only know about it bc of the @unbreaking.org team that tracks it. healthpolicy-watch.news/ghana-rebuff...

People building in the public interest - whether it's founding newsrooms, creating #atproto services, or building entirely new platforms and infrastructure - deserve to pay their bills and buy food. They're struggling. Some thoughts on closing the funding gap: werd.io/building-wit...

The chair of an accountability panel reviewing the aftermath of Operation Midway Blitz called on Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke to prosecute federal immigration agents for misconduct.

It's kind of funny that just 3 days after every journalist in DC threw Trump a little party to "celebrate the first amendment" while giving him a tongue bath, Trump is once again using the full weight of the federal government to try to ban a comedian from TV for insulting him.

I am so underwater with work-wrangling and thought-wrestling so this is just bubbles rising from the deep, but: what I am excited about right now in the networks zone is that we have a real shot at a do-over on the social internet, which means we have a chance to make new and better mistakes.

Some pretty crazy stuff that somehow didn’t make it on the air.

The story here is that Congress rejected Trump’s proposal to slash funding for the National Science Foundation, but Trump is gutting the agency anyway. The by-now classic Russ Vought play of treating Congress as an irrelevancy. www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Hold on. We the taxpayers are going to pay companies $900 million, which is more than 6x what we spend on wind power R&D, to NOT build wind power at a time when electricity prices are spiking and we need more clean power?

Woodlawn on a Thursday evening (5/14) is really hard for me but I hope that at least some of you will go to this @invisible.institute event for me if only to take joy in the concept of an event promoting Freudenfreude! invisible.ourpowerbase.net/civicrm/mail...

I've had "All You Fascists (Bound to Lose)" in my song rotation for a little while. In honor of the Bette Midler cover (here it is), I thought I'd post a mini-thread of some other great versions. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBj5...

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

“They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.”

If you think AI surveillance cameras aimed at drivers’ faces is a good idea (no matter how well intentioned the justification), you are a naive fool. This data will be harvested, sold to fascists, and used to imprison activists. Oh, and car companies will 100% use it for ads you can’t turn off.

A truly under-examined aspect of the past 18 months is how much events have been driven by people treating one of the narrowest elections of my lifetime as though it was 1984.

"These indie info providers left their employers seeking independence, but then quickly rebuilt a new dependence on tech companies that might not be aligned with their values." A new piece by me for @cnti.bsky.social: cnti.org/guest-essay/...

The only path to redemption I can see for journalists attending the White House Correspondents Dinner is if he falls asleep and they draw on his face with sharpies

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

Interesting NLP/AI job at ACLU: www.aclu.org/careers/appl...

I took the wrong day offline yesterday, this is the thing I am *most* psyched about on the whole ecosystem, YES, YES

ICE has violated almost 100 court orders. Let me say that another way. 100 times ICE was caught brazenly ignoring the law. 100 times a court told them to immediately stop. And 100 times they ignored the order. That's an out-of-control agency that shouldn't get another dime.