I count 10 cities in 2025 that are on track to have the fewest murders since at least 1970. Newark is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1956 (though only have data through Oct this year) and San Francisco is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1942.

So I am going to say something about romance as a genre. A lot of people think that romance is ignorable because <insert thing they think about romance> and romance authors don't count because <insert thing they think about romance>. This thread is not about whether you have to like romance.

In 2023 I became obsessed with videos of dads in cargo shortswaiting in parking lots during Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. So when she came to town, I grabbed a camera and headed down to talk to them. I thought it'd be funny. It turned out to be something else entirely.

The Kansas City Chiefs are set to receive $1.8 BILLION from the state of Kansas for a new $3B football stadium 🏈 socialize the cost, privatize the profits, baby 🙌🇺🇸

Trump shares and endorses a post calling for Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp to be arrested

A San Francisco supervisor says that bricked Waymos slowed the fire department’s response to last weekend’s blackout. If this is true, it’s very damming.

Big ups to Marty Lederman @martylederman.bsky.social who flagged this argument that SCOTUS relied on (that regular forces refer to military forces, not federal law enforcement).

Btw this is one of the biggest reasons why it’s not as easy as people think to start up independent newsrooms or just be an indie journalist on substack. If you are actually holding powerful and rich people to account, you WILL need legal representation. Not a matter of whether but when

#BREAKING The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the State of Illinois on National Guard deployment. Under the law invoked by President Trump, he must be unable "with the regular military" to "execute the laws of the United States," it finds. Full ruling here: cst.brightspotcdn.com/80/88/05a75e...

Just a reminder that we saw this coming. As I wrote in early November: “It’s a sign, court observers say, that the conservative majority on the court appears split on how to handle the case. Otherwise, the justices would have acted already.” www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/10/s...

CC: IL-DOT, RE: The rebuilt Chicago-Springfield-St. Louis ROW.

1 - the exec branch can't decline to spend $ Congress appropriated 2- the fed govt can't use federal $ to extort states over policy/political disagreements 3-the fed govt can't use federal $ to impose conditions unrelated to the funding program 4-the fed govt can't use federal $ to coerce states

The Biden DOJ had a perfectly legal avenue to release this to the public—a response to a FOIA request. They may have even been legally obligated to produce it in response to the FOIA request. And they decided not to, to protect Donald Trump’s reputation? What?

The DOJ lawyer who cleared the way for this abortion ban is Josh Craddock, a fetal personhood devotee who believes the 14th Amendment requires states to ban abortion. He also wants to revive the Comstock Act: ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

Trump: "Anybody that disagrees with me will never be the Fed Chairman!"

Bloomberg gift link, good for 7 days: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

The Department of Veteran Affairs has quietly implemented its abortion ban following a DOJ memo issued last week. This will affect 9 million veterans and their dependents, and has been a long time coming: It was outlined in Project 2025. www.ms.now/news/abortio...

Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.

A Democratic congresswoman sued the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees to stop it from adding the president’s name to the institution, arguing that only Congress has the power to do so.

A friend was processing the George Wallace collection at the Alabama state archives. She sent me a copy of a letter to Wallace parents asking him to not “stand in the schoolhouse door” in June 1963. It was from my parents.

Three days after releasing a large tranche of Jeffrey Epstein documents that contained few mentions of President Trump, the Justice Department disclosed thousands more files that included wide-ranging references to the president.

New: We obtained thousands of internal chat messages from the ICE team creating viral videos of raids and "EPIC takedowns." A scramble to satisfy the White House and "feed the beast" spawned a new "propaganda" machine, current and former officials told us. "It's a war!" wapo.st/4s6YnC5

"The US press have suffered about as many assaults this year as in the previous three years combined, the organization states in a new report." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"

Democratic lawmakers visit ICE facility in Broadview after judge confirms they cannot be denied access www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/22/d...

NEW - ‘Painful day’: Missouri officials react to Chiefs announcing move to Kansas From @jasonhancock.bsky.social & me missouriindependent.com/2025/12/22/p...

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly: "Take heed. Kansas is not a flyover state. We are a touchdown state." #ksleg

Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in a “literal double bind,” with a bracelet on one ankle from his criminal case in Tennessee and an ICE bracelet on the other ankle from his immigration case in Maryland. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland is in a bind, too: talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/abreg...

BREAKING: The Trump administration is suing D.C. over its ban on semi-automatic (AR-15) weapons. DOJ's Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon is seeking a court ruling that D.C.'s law "prohibiting registration of the AR-15 by law-abiding citizens violates the Second Amendment."

“Second-term presidents typically wind down fundraising after their inaugurations. President Trump has ramped it up. We traced $500 MILLION back to 346 DONORS, and found that MORE THAN HALF have benefited from actions taken by Trump or his administration”

Trump’s new envoy admits his goal is to steal territory from a NATO ally.

Tell me again how schools are biased against boys? "Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled" apnews.com/article/scho...

ICE agents illegally break into a woman's bathroom in a NY nutrition bar manufacturing plant. "Pull up your pants," says a male agent. The agents only had a warrant to review employer documents. They didn't have a warrant to search for, detain, or arrest anyone there.

New: They survived a Cybertruck crash. Then a fire killed them. Tesla has marketed its trucks as seemingly impenetrable — bulletproof, with shatter-resistant glass and able to contain blasts. What happens if those same features trap people inside? www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

Updated story on Chiefs coming to Kansas. Team owner Clark Hunt is in Topeka, posing with Gov. Laura Kelly to celebrate the deal. #ksleg via @crazeywriter.bsky.social and @anna-writes.bsky.social kansasreflector.com/2025/12/22/k...

Among the many issues with Weiss’s memo on the CECOT story, most of the additional info she’s demanding, about the administration’s legal rationales and the prisoners’ criminal histories, was actually covered in this piece that ran earlier this year on—wait for it—“60 Minutes”.

Landry rushed to clarify he isn't resigning as governor of Louisiana and this will be, like, his side gig I guess. The state constitution explicitly bans state officeholders from simultaneously holding any federal office.

Via @ulaakuzi.bsky.social: Eritrean imam dies in ICE custody as detainee deaths hit 20-year high —> religionnews.com/2025/12/21/e...

Watched it again tonight. It really remarkable how flawless it is.

This. But electric.

Waymo Suspended Service in San Francisco After Its Cars Stalled During Power Outage www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u...

The New York Giants have had a bad decade, but this fact cheered me up. “The Cowboys' Super Bowl drought has reached 30 years. Every NFC team has made it to a conference championship game during that span except the Cowboys.” www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/...

Trump says he’s appointing Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as “special envoy” to Greenland. Landry has previously expressed support for Trump’s plan to invade Greenland.

All of these links went to promotion of this story earlier today. All these links are dead now — that's how thoroughly they've scrubbed this.

Some real recency bias by tech bros

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Seems worth noting at this point that Weiss's internal critics at the Times were correct and her many apologists among elite pundits were wrong

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

New Orleans gets one big snowstorm and suddenly they’re all Arctic experts

In the email, Alfonsi said the sources in the segment “risked their live to speak with us.” She added: “We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories.”