Once again thinking about this @theonion.com article:

Every single day of this administration, I have thought of my late professor Joe Nye and his work on soft power. Every single day of this administration, Trump finds a new way to hemorrhage soft power from a country that once had more to spare than any in the world.

This is a good definition of what conservatism actually is: whining about merely being told that your selfishness is harmful to *yourself*

Lots of talk about Lindsey Graham this week but here’s an obit worthy of our attention. A life of service vs Lindsey’s life of self serving. chicago.suntimes.com/obituaries/2...

120 MINUTES was an absolute oasis in pre-internet pop culture. So many bands that you could ONLY find there (TV-wise) became ubiquitous online later (and relatively recently). A pioneer. consequence.net/2026/07/dave...

CDC stopped monitoring parasite now causing explosive diarrhea across the country

After a months-long occupation, Minnesota is still recovering from a retribution campaign waged by the federal government. Now, Minnesota stands with Houston in demanding accountability for the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. This bloodshed cannot be normalized.

Local Chapel Hill-Carrboro parents, community members and friends, please read and sign this request of our public school district on their use of edtech. Our children deserve better.

*sighs Jewishly*

when someone shows you their nazi tattoo, believe them

Thinking of Anita Hill & Christine Blasey Ford & every woman who tried to warn the world.

Incredible. They just asked everyone at the Boston Pops show to stand for a patriotic singalong and then started singing Neil Diamonds AMERICA, the most pro-immigrant anthem ever written. A+ no notes.

There's a perverse symbolism in the legacy of White racism sheltering under the bowers of all African Americans have done for this country while patiently waiting for the chance to go back to insisting we are a drain upon their society and that they never needed us at all.

This is absolutely bonkers: newly uncovered text messages reveal how Republican operatives are working INSIDE the North Carolina State Board of Elections. Full story: https://nclocal.org/2026/07/02/elections-liaison-dallas-woodhouse-instructs-board-chair-not-to-hold-vote-on-campus-polling-site/

We're so starving for consequences we're reading Vatican press releases

I thought I was doing a small story on confusion over the sudden disappearance of water fountains on a popular South Mississippi biking and running trail. What I found was a bigger story about homelessness, the meaning people find in the things they love, public infrastructure and civic engagement.

here is what i think: we're not consumers or spectators, we are participants with agency. you should not hope that democrats will do anything. you must work to force them to do the right thing. the odds are long, but we are far from the first americans to face long odds. we will win.

i took a time traveling victorian era orphan to visit this today and he said we should all be embarrassed by how shabby it is compared to the columbian exposition before kicking me in the shins and running off

That’s some shit Chris Farley would’ve fallen through on SNL

Yes to this & also I'm reminded of Alice Wong's assertion in the Introduction to Disability Visibility: "Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society."

An excellent use case for why people really need to be able to define “AI” and recognize it’s an umbrella term, not a synonym for heavyweight commercial LLMs/frontier models.

Exclusive: Trump is using tens of millions in taxpayer money meant for national parks to fund his desired projects, including White House paving stones he had promised to pay for, documents obtained by @michaelscherer.bsky.social show:

This is completely heinous. The goal of Republican legislature in NC is painfully and pathetically obvious. Less diversity, less equity and less inclusion.

The amount of human suffering, injury, and illness that has been avoided by the advent of hormonal contraception is staggering; the amount of human potential, talent, and innovation that it has unleashed should make you weep with gratitude.

Anti-semitism is absolutely a real thing and as a Jew I am deeply nervous about the worst faith people in public life working relentlessly to rob the concept of all gravity by making it synonymous with "anyone not fully supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu and everything he does."

Everyone this man has hired has a name that you would make up in a panic at an improv show.

I curated a (mostly) exhaustive list of Juneteenth celebrations across the country. Chances are there’s one near you!

It’s been five years since Alex Jones lost InfoWars to the Sandy Hook families. As the verdict came down, he asked: “Do these people actually believe they’re getting any money?” He hasn't paid them a penny. Well, The Onion is going pay them anyway. The new InfoWars begins July 2nd at 8 p.m. ET.

Obama shouts out "those ordinary people in the Twin Cities who braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look our for their neighbors and sometimes for strangers because they knew that was the right thing to do"

The Trump administration is further gutting the Department of Education and undermining special education and civil rights. Every student deserves a quality education, not chaos and uncertainty. This is a reckless decision that could hurt some of the most underserved students.

This move will be devastating for families. RFK Jr. shouldn't be in charge of your kid's classroom. Students with disabilities need education experts at the helm - not a dangerous charlatan like RFK Jr.

Advocates for students with disabilities fear that moving special education out of the U.S. Department of Education will undermine support for vulnerable students.

The social internet got turned into a giant dopamine farm by a handful of companies who literally hired the same psychologists who design casino floor layouts, and the policy-makers just threw up their hands and said "guess we better ban kids from using the internet then"

No, it's because only 3.1 percent of the Dutch population live in poverty as opposed to 20 percent of the British population. The Guardian really needs to stop publishing irresponsible lifestyle crap as news. (The Avondvierdaagse is a nice tradition though.) www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

And I’ll just add that MST3K could not be made today, either. Okay, admittedly, you probably could make it today, and now that I think of it, we ARE making new episodes today, and they’re coming soon, but I wanna be an old guy complaining about shit, too!

i assume banning kids from social media will be accompanied by a huge investment in teen-friendly communtiy spaces (like youth clubs) and social activities? No? Huh.

Journalists have a duty to tell the public that the president and his aides are seriously considering suspending habeas corpus *when it is happening* rather than saving it for a book rollout over a year later

Listened to an NPR story this morning about mass child starvation in Senegal without a single mention of Elon Musk, the guy who gleefully created the conditions for the mass starvation

we’re so desperate for good news we've accepted the scaffolding as our wire mother

David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, died Thursday. He was 88. www.latimes.com/obituaries/s...

If you were to count out a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a half days. A billion seconds would take you 31.7 years. But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years — to reach that point today, you would have needed to start counting around the time that neanderthals went extinct.

Just read that Jane Yolen passed. She wrote 450 books in her career, and published her 450th this year. Fantasy, science fiction, books that changed kids lives

I am not being hyperbolic when I say (tech) capitalism is alienating (making strangers) of us at a staggering scale. Alienating us from ourselves, each other, touch, feeling, thoughts…from the intimacy and care of touch, bedtime stories, prayers, poems, drawings, community, love

I wonder what social media would be like if people were taught in k-12 school to name and identify logical fallacies

Occasionally I recall that prominent men’s rights activist Paul Elam once said in an interview that his red pill moment (extremely cursed phrase) when he decided that all women are castrating shrews was a time in middle school when his Mom made him take his diarrhea medication