Do I already own a thousand notebooks / planners / agendas in every size, style and color imaginable? Certainly. But THIS notebook — this is the one that is gonna change EVERYTHING.

as someone who likes to collect cool or new words, you would not believe my delight just now when i discovered my e-reader saves a list of all the words i look up while i’m reading

[worst possible stuff happening everywhere] man why do I feel bad

"more than 1,000 counties — one out of three in the nation — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist." Uhhh... this is catastrophic for democracy. www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/new-...

next time you're in a national park, take some photos of the signage and upload it to help these archivists www.404media.co/save-our-sig...

As more journalists are driven out of their jobs, I keep hearing this drumbeat of "it's ok -- they can start their own newsletter or publication." Some can. But becoming your own business is a huge job, and will eliminate many talented reporters from the public sphere. Here's why. (1/5)

Texas can't adequately warn people about deadly floods, but it can immediately let me know that a cop got hurt 250 miles away from me.

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose. www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

Also to make an em dash all you have to do is put two dashes in a row in Word, and the program makes it for you. Wordpress too. Anything an LLM is doing is stolen from actual writers and I'll be damned if I'll let a plagiarism machine dictate how I use language, grammar or punctuation.

I kept hoping this myth would burn itself out, but no — the idea that em dashes are a sign of AI writing just keeps spreading. I finally couldn't take it anymore, so I crashed a segment into the latest Grammar Girl podcast. 🧵 APPLE PODCASTS: bit.ly/4kV4HbF SPOTIFY: bit.ly/45YGCfh

Stop spreading this garbage about em dashes in ACTUAL EDITED PROSE OH MY GOD. Plenty of actual human beings know how to type em dashes! We’re called “writers” and “editors” — maybe you’ve heard of us?

Come what may, I will bet on us, every time, because there is no other bet worth placing. I am all in, fam. I will never stop looking for openings and aiming at them. I will never stop reaching for people and saying, “Take my hand. We can do this.” Because we are worth it.

🧵Today is Friday, July 4. Good morning ❤️ We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all [people] are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,

Take advantage of your 4th of July BBQ to talk to your friends and neighbors about constructive tactics to counter fascism and keep community members safe.

anyway, in the wise words of @prisonculture.bsky.social :

"The problem with AI isn't that it can do your job. It can't. The problem with AI is that your MBA-brained boss's boss doesn't know how your job works and thinks AI can do your job at fractions of a penny on the dollar, and hears the siren song of 'maximize shareholder value'." MBA-brain is real.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

🧵 addressing the argument: "AI won’t replace teachers, but it will save them time and make them more effective.” Adding edtech doesn't necessarily save teachers time. A recent study found that LMSs sold to schools over the past decade+ as time-savers aren’t delivering on making teaching easier.

brb gonna make “daily ice cream habit” my whole personality

schadenfreudescrolling

I am “listening to birds with my Merlin app” years old. I regret nothing.

Here's a little tip some of you may appreciate: if you add '-ai' to your query, Google will stop showing you that very annoying overview answer that's usually even more wrong than what regular AI throws at you.

"Choose a lane and do what you can. That’s all any of us can do and still live our lives... Give yourself some grace and remind yourself that you can be part of building up what’s been undone, more radically and boldly." [email protected] prisonculture.substack.com/p/the-strugg...

"When [genAI] is used to diagnose cancer or automate soul-crushing tasks that require vapid toiling, it makes us more human and should be celebrated. But...we are now at risk of stripping away the core competency that makes our species thrive: learning not what to think, but how to think."

time for my emotional support ice cream

Scotland is transitioning to a Wellbeing Economy, meaning that the health of its economy will no longer simply be based on GDP, but instead on the quality of life of its citizens. 👏👏👏 www.gov.scot/groups/wellb...

Treating "emotional truth" as decoration you can sprinkle on top of some robot's structure and research displays such a sad misunderstanding of what it means to be emotionally truthful and thoughtful in the first place. You may as well put frosting on a piece of styrofoam and call it cake.

Literally begging you to post about Just Some Stuff. We will see the news I absolutely promise. Twenty people will repost the same exact thing about the news. Only you can post about a turtle you saw

What he said, and amen to it.

my hottest educational take is that schools should actively, non-punitively teach students how to admit when they don't know something, aren't sure or have made a mistake, with various teaching frameworks adapted to support this ideal, because people who can't admit fault are breaking the world

An anti-authoritoadian axolotl in Austin! #NoKings #ATX

ON TOP of the ethical reasons to not use AI, it's also 1) bad at what it does 2) literally makes you stupider 3) has HUGE environmental costs: every search is equivalent to pouring out an entire bottle of water. It's not worth it to generate a cutesy emoji or have it write an error-riddled draft.

NEW from me: #SkinnyTok influencer Liv Schmidt is making an est. $100k a month from the Skinni Societe, a group of girls encouraging each other to starve themselves. I joined the group and found at least 15 members who are still in high school. Here’s what else I saw: www.thecut.com/article/infl...

Found a baby songbird? Here's a newly updated chart!

finally doing that thing you didn't want to do because now you have something you want to do even less

Grateful to everyone who shared their thoughts with me for this piece about the difference between how people imagined they would show up for a moment like this one, and how we're actually showing up—and how we can begin to close the gap between aspiration and action.

This is absolutely terrible news. With the shifting regulatory climate (i.e., antivax ratfuckery), Moderna has withdrawn their application for their eagerly anticipated COVID-flu combo vaccine. This vaccine offered better protection than getting each shot separately. h/t @merz.bsky.social

If you do in fact want Covid boosters for yourself or anyone, you can submit public comment to the FDA here: www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD...

🔗 Quick reminder that unlike most platforms, Bluesky doesn’t algorithmically penalize posts with links! So if you are posting some striking image or screenshot from elsewhere you don’t need to bury the link in a reply; just include it in your post so everyone will have the context right away.

Sometimes I make service-y lists just for kicks. bookshop.org/lists/novels...

A favorite small detail: a student told me she and her friends take a photo of themselves pretending to focus on their work and… then it turns into them focusing on their work?

A new report finds the bottom 60% of U.S. households—or *two-thirds* of the population—can't afford a “minimal quality of life": housing, health care, and other necessities. "Indicators like GDP and unemployment tell us the economy is thriving. But they don’t reflect the reality of most Americans."

The bottom 60% of U.S. households earn $38K/year on average. To afford a "minimal standard of living," they'd need $67K. "Americans are working harder than ever, but the benefits of that hard work are not being distributed in a way that supports upward mobility.”

"AI" uses em-dashes because the writers whose (appropriated) work it's trained on use them. I use them a lot, personally, and of course just about everything I've ever written was chucked into the training bin without my consent or assent. So, you know, whenever you see an "AI" em-dash, think of me.

just made myself a fourth coffee at 4pm to get my brain to work and I, for one, feel confident in saying that this time - this time! - an additional mid-afternoon coffee will make me more productive, and will not instead make me anxious as all hell, then entirely unable to sleep tonight

Look For The Helpers No. 6 is up! You can save the Corporation For Public Broadcasting! open.substack.com/pub/sallyann...

If we all do something, big or small, as regularly as possible, we change the whole calculus of this mess. We build momentum. People like to be on winning teams.