There is a smart and fair and nuanced conversation to be had over discrimination (whether real or perceived) against white men and lol we as a society of course won’t have it

"Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion…not censoring just for the sake of it” www.npr.org/2025/12/04/n... by @shannonbond.bsky.social

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

now i need to bleach my brain

HEADS UP: CDC website now officially asserts that vaccines may cause autism.“Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.” Also says the “vaccines do not cause autism” header remains b/c of an agreement with Cassidy.

it should also now be illegal for journalists to use metaphors

Functionally, the wandering self-indulgence of the bamboo section does a good job of lulling the reader into not being ready for the relentlessly focused intensity of the finale

what a time to be alive and in multiple media group chats

"It was tough to beat Apple, but the Swiss did it." said one administration official. How the Swiss convinced Trump to drop tariffs with gifts of a Rolex desk clock and a 1 kg gold bar. www.axios.com/2025/11/14/t...

Every single Wikipedia "alternative" I've ever come across works like this. IIRC even the NSA's internal Intellipedia cribs extensively from Wikipedia. The amount of work it would take it actually replace Wikipedia is just too massive (unless you wanted dubious machine-generated entries)

other examples: apple, Genesis (band), tarot

Fans of the indie rock band Here We Go Magic were surprised to see they dropped a new single today, the first release since 2015. Actually nope, it's just AI. "It's so predatory, and so terrible," the band's singer Luke Temple told me. www.npr.org/2025/10/27/n...

At least 3 times in the past 2 weeks, an official Post editorial has taken on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In each case, the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests. www.npr.org/2025/10/28/n...

Mario Guevara, an Emmy-award winning reporter, was deported to El Salvador — a nation he fled more than two decades ago. He was arrested while covering a protest of the Trump administration in a case that has alarmed free speech groups.

NEW—US Department of Education sent out standard Out of Office language to employees on Wednesday in light of shutdown. Later yesterday, workers tell me they found someone had updated their auto-responses without consent to a new one blaming Democrats. Version of original on left, updated on right:

UPDATE: At the Small Business Administration, employees were given "suggested" language for OOO email replies: blaming Senate Democrats for the shutdown and praising the "record-breaking services we are providing under the leadership of the Trump administration": www.npr.org/2025/09/30/n...

The Justice Department website now has a banner that blames Democrats for the government shutdown. More on the partisan messaging strategy pushed by the Trump administration: www.npr.org/2025/09/30/n...

Despite DOGE's promise that canceling contracts and terminating leases would help reverse the trend of the government spending more money than it brings in, the most recent Treasury data shows an *increase* in expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars more than the year before.

Agencies ordered to drastically slash their workforces over the last eight months are now hiring back hundreds of workers, as they struggle to perform basic operations or carry out some of President Trump's top policy priorities. Read more with @shannonbond.bsky.social @jennamclaughlin.bsky.social

NEW @npr.org: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency effort has failed to deliver on its outsized promises to cut costs and increase efficiency, NPR's latest analysis of federal data finds.

tfw you watched Mountainhead and learned nothing.

New: ICE has bought a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones globally, updates every single day. Usually harvested from apps and advertising www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

Scoop: CBS News' corporate-installed, MAGA-loving ombudsman visited the network on Monday, visiting with senior leadership. Meanwhile, the Bari Weiss appointment is imminent. More in @status.news: link.status.news/4nrFwyD

A baby in Mississippi has died of whooping cough for the first time since 2012. The infant was less than two months old and was not old enough to receive the pertussis vaccine. buff.ly/8epl2QS

SCOOP — The White House instructed all federal agency leadership on Tuesday to send out a mandatory message to workers blaming the impending potential government shutdown on House Democrats, The Handbasket was first to learn. Absolutely no modifications to the email were permitted. My story:

The White House is pinning the shutdown on Democrats, in a message blasted to agencies that's raising ethical questions. HUD & VA blame the "Radical Left"/"radical liberals." "It basically read like a campaign email," one federal worker told me. w/ @jennamclaughlin.bsky.social & @stphnfwlr.com

NEW from @shannonbond.bsky.social, @stphnfwlr.com and myself: Staffers at over 10 federal agencies (and counting) received political internal messages blaming "Congressional Democrats" for the impending shutdown. Several say it originally came from OMB. www.npr.org/2025/09/30/n...

@npr.org EXCLUSIVE: Trump administration uses taxpayer dollars to blame Democrats for government shutdown Experts say the messages may violate ethics laws meant to keep partisan politics out of day-to-day governing. @jennamclaughlin.bsky.social @shannonbond.bsky.social

NEW: The Trump admin asking TikTok investors for a multibillion-dollar payment to US is the latest extractive “fee for service” from WH. "These are shakedown schemes…I'd even call it extortion…Privately, CEOs are horrified." www.npr.org/2025/09/26/g... w/ @davidfolkenflik.bsky.social

remember when the Twitter files were supposed to be a big scandal showing the US govt illegally pressuring a social media platform to censor content?

I looked into the group and the guy pushing the FBI to create a new designation of “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism”—itself a political project, meant to conflate the fact of trans people’s existence with extremism.

in addition to alarming detail on what DOGE is doing with Social Security data, the Senate Dems report also gives a hilarious peek inside DOGE's workspace at GSA www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/u...

the AI summary literally links to articles about Redford’s death but still can’t get the facts right

In addition to this statement Trump is now giving vaccine advice. “I’m just making these statements from me I’m not making them from these doctors… they talk about different results, different studies. I talk about a lot of common sense.”

I experienced this last week & refused, saying I had never before been asked to provide the names of any analysts I was planning to quote to get a comment. Spox replied that maybe they were D donors. (In that case, it was 3 retired top military JAG officers.) I guess that was not a weird oneoff.

“The proposed changes to the vaccine schedule also run counter to the hours of data presented by the CDC's own scientists throughout the meeting on the rationale for these recommendations.” www.npr.org/2025/09/18/n...

word of the week: “Jawboning” www.npr.org/2025/09/18/n...

I was interviewed by one of the largest newspapers in the country this summer. The reported specifically asked me about my political donation history, noting that the White House was doing this.

“When was Joe Biden president?” remains the most difficult question in politics

we wrote about this WH tactic recently. they’re asking journalists for expert source names and then using them to look up political donations in FEC records to try to discredit those sources as biased. www.npr.org/2025/08/18/n...

GSA has created an "ICE surge" team in recent weeks, referring to an effort to lease private offices to allow ICE officers to establish long-term work space in the cities where they are operating. www.npr.org/2025/09/18/g...

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Story on what's going on for reference: www.mississippifreepress.org/supreme-cour...

BREAKING: BlueSky is blocking access to Mississippi. This is the No. 1 platform for @mississippifreepress.org. We ditched X for BlueSky early this year. And now, at 3 pm on a Friday, poof. I don't know what we'll do next. Keep up with us using our newsletter at mfp.ms/subscribe.

fascinating thread

Yesterday a lot of folks were gobsmacked that Winnie Greco had insisted on handing @katiehonan.bsky.social a red envelope of cash in a potato chip bag at an Adams campaign event. Here's a new story from some of my colleagues that seems to connect some dots.