This is completely fucked but good news: The writer of the column put his email at the bottom.

I live in the sparsely populated upper valley of VT & NH. Hanover, NH, w/ 10 k & Dartmouth College, is as close as we get to a city. But there's a little cold regions research hub across from our middle school. Recently, they discovered 26 new species of life... www.miamiherald.com/living/artic...

“We plan to hire an AI rewrite specialist to ingest the reporting by Hannah and others and use AI to convert it into stories.” The editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer said it will use AI to ‘write’ its articles. www.cleveland.com/news/2025/10...

Hey, journalist friends: The Maine Monitor is hiring an environment reporter! The position can be remote, but you must be based in Maine.

“.. The youngest was 27 years old; the oldest was 90 and had dementia. Some were homeless. Some died with drugs or alcohol in their system. All found themselves at the bitter mercy of the cold.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

North Carolina lawmakers have voted to remove all college campus voting sites. Specifically at the largest HBCU in the US NC A&T. They now have to walk 30 minutes to their nearest polling place. Students are protesting this - pls share and support. www.tiktok.com/t/ZThx29BJ9/

Shock around Rubio speech seems a variation of same delusion that led legacy media to inaccurately declare it a softer touch, as if Rubio, a Latino man who once disputed Trumpism, is an alternative voice. He’s not. He joined fascism; now he’s a fascist; he gave a fascist speech, because fascism.

Good morning!

Our story @chicagotribune.com: Chicago teen Ofelia Torres, whose father was detained by ICE while she fought cancer, dies. www.chicagotribune.com/2026/02/14/c...

Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans - facial recognition through the glasses' camera. You look at someone, AI tells you who they are. In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good because civil society groups are busy with politics and won't cause problems.

Universities buying into this shit under the guise of "equity" makes me SO angry Equity for my students would be access to the databases and journals we've dropped subscriptions for. It'd be having a paid human to caption videos and make PDFs screen-reader compatible. Not this shit.

My Trump-supporting cousin-in-law just texted my husband to say he encountered this Mother Jones on social media, read it, realized I wrote it, and told him to tell me I’m doing good work and to keep going. Things are changing, y’all. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

"An evening stroll with friends. I would so enjoy that." Ray MacKinnon's portrayal of Reverend Smith in season 1 of Deadwood moves me so fully. (I'm rewatching as a form of rest from the news, a slant rhyme for the present horrors that permits a perspective.)

And the young profs just getting started need to know that the comfort of administrators to reach down and set our assignments is a new thing and they better start pushing back now.

Today, I learned: Open AI fired its head of safety for objecting to porn -- no, wait, excuse me, for "discriminating against men"; Anthropic's head of safety quit to study the poetry his company hoovered up from the world's library; and Trump said to every stinking factory, smoke em if you got em.

Anthropic head of AI safety quits, warning of "world in peril" & announces plan to study creative writing, as my college charges ahead in deal with Anthropic, which trained its tech on at least 25 books taken without permission from our Creative Writing faculty. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Greetings from UW - Madison, where the two biggest initiatives of our university in the last four years have been <checks notes> an initiative to hire 50 faculty “innovators” in AI & the creation of <checks notes> a College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence 🤔

Glad to see a Columbia administrator speaking the plain sense about AI so many college leaders refuse to contend with. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...

It's not an exaggeration to say this will result in genocidal-scale death. And I don't mean in the distant, speculative future. Just the tens of thousands of pollution deaths in the relative near-term (Free link.) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/c...

My apologies, Charles Darwin. I wasn’t familiar with your Hater Game

Direct parallel to denialism around fascism. Too many tell themselves “we’re winning”—as if acknowledging scale of fascism’s assault means submitting to it, or as if democracy is a pep rally. It’s a struggle, we’re not winning, but we can, so let’s fight harder—against the anti-human in govt & tech.

Excellent @washingtonpost.com piece on the signs that global warming is accelerating by @shannonosaka.bsky.social and @johnmuyskens.bsky.social, featuring @hausfath.bsky.social @rarohde.bsky.social @cjsmith.eu www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Especially bad news for Atlantans, but also bad news for all of us and democracy. As more and more cities become increasingly unreported, ordinary corruption has an ever more open field into which to cohere into local authoritarianisms, rippling out and up.

Couple of years ago I bought a book by the Tennessee photographer Baldwin Lee. Marveled at a few pages, put it on shelf to linger w/ later, only now remembered it. And... these are photos of the Black American South, yes. & they are photographs of EVERYTHING. A few here: www.baldwinlee.com/work/vol1

1. Internal documents reveal that Freedom 250, which purports to celebrate the nation's 250th anniversary, is a vehicle to promote Trump and "America First" propaganda, including election conspiracies Major corporations like Mastercard and Deloitte and spending million to bankroll this effort

Keep track of the escalations. The 21-yr-old who's been posting openly white-supremacist, antisemitic graphics for Dept. of Labor just got a giant promotion to run social media for DHS's 222,000 employees. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/u...

#WhatWASjournalism?

"This is what the bear probably looked like--except real." If I was choosing videos for a space probe to other galaxies, I'd include this & the St. Louis February news. I think that might be it. In a million yrs, aliens wld look at earth, by then a lifeless cinder, & mourn our genius.

Communication from my university today: "given that AI is here and poised to stay..." Maybe! In my classroom, we try not lean on "givens," especially those of no more than a couple years vintage. One doesn't need to be critical of AI to recognize this as an abdication of inquiry.

What WAS journalism? Friends, it was this, the greatest truth telling I’ve ever witnessed.

seen in my neighborhood in south Minneapolis

A dvd? How do they play it?

Saying Trumpism hasn't accomplished much is likeBoston fans saying Yankees suck. It might feel good, but more often than not it's not true. That's just a game; this is countless lives damaged, ruined, ended. It's not doomerism to count the costs; it's remembering what, & who, you're fighting for.

This guts me

"There are still plenty of places to read about literature.…But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares....The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits." www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

This drives me nuts: people saying we don't need to worry about Trump seizing ballots because it won't be close enough to matter. What timeline do these folks live in? Not just the last ten years, but the many times elections have turned out closer than expected? But yes, *the last 10 years.*

ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...

This is 18-mo-old Amalia waving to me when she was detained. She was hospitalized with a respiratory infection while at ICE’s Dilley facility for immigrant families. She’s one of dozens of detainees who I spoke to via video and phone calls, letters and an in-person visit. 🧵1/

Something I'm learning from Epstein files is how often rich & powerful people who don't really know each other as much beyond status markers tell each other "I miss you."

I'm re-reading The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths, by Brad Fox, to teach tomorrow. It belongs in a tiny canon of the brilliantly odd literary nonfiction of things found and assembled, w/ Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl and Lauren Redniss' Radioactive.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

The best bit in 1984 about the novel-writing machines: Julia (who works in the Fiction Department) "could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad."

Republicans have weaponized the non-sequitur.

Often forgotten is the detail in 1984 of a song writing machine that cranked out slop for the proles. Cranking out romance novels seems to be in the same vein.

Buried in this piece is a throwaway line about how actually her real hustle is selling online courses to aspiring AI hacks, marking an extraordinary symbiosis of my two most hated internet poisons

Good point. I forgot the 47th amendment, "one in, one out"--if you let in ONE five-year-old, you'd have to kick another out. I mean, how many five-year-olds can fit in this thing? (America, that is.)

This is Tom Homan's actual goal and why he is focused on law enforcement cooperation.

It's a war on creativity, which can be made formulaic, commodified, deployed for propaganda, used for evil ends, but ultimately contains within it an unpredictability, a core of unriggability, that fascism hates and capitalism seeks to subdue.