#JournoRequest: I’m looking to interview older gay and bi men (60+ ideally) about Heated Rivalry for a potential story.

Another year, another round of layoffs at Vox Media. In solidarity with our laid-off colleagues, here is our full statement:

Breaking news: The Justice Department has issued subpoenas for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as part of an investigation alleging that they are impeding federal law enforcement officers’ abilities to do their jobs in the state.

BREAKING: The DOJ is investigating Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey for obstructing law enforcement activities, officials say.

From GamerGate to today’s backlash against DEI, @jazzmyth.bsky.social discusses the ongoing cycles of antifeminist rage Cynthia Miller-Idriss charts in Man Up. Our latest Short Takes is here: buff.ly/AkS5W4D

Breaks my heart to share this, but today is my last day at The Verge and I am looking for work! I'd really like to stay in video games, preferably in some kind of journalistic capacity but I can do PR/Marketing and maybe even a lil Narrative Design. Please get in touch! www.ashparrish.com

“It’s almost like a willful ignorance,” West said. “If we can not collect the data, if we defund all these programs, and if nobody’s counting, then there’s the gaslighting that says, ‘Well, there’s no data to say there’s a problem.’” @candicenorwood.bsky.social reports for @19thnews.org.

NEW: A Pregnant Woman at Risk of Heart Failure Couldn’t Get Urgent Treatment. She Died Waiting for an Abortion. In North Carolina, a state that had legislated its commitment to life, Ciji Graham spent her final days struggling to find anyone to save hers.

The Senate passed DEFIANCE Act today, which would allow victims of nonconsensual explicit deepfakes to directly sue the people putting those images out. Wonder if anything in the news spurred that...or might convince the House to vote on it, unlike last year. 19thnews.org/2026/01/sena...

I have an op-ed in the NYT today about the Grok scandal, sharing my research from last year finding that legal risk hinders AI companies from making their models safer against CSAM - an echo of the years where white-hat hackers were chilled from good-faith research. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/o...

I’m reading a 2012 book about YCombinator and keep reading passages that are just a quilt of red flags.

Honored to have been asked by @signsjournal.org to contribute to the discussion of @milleridriss.bsky.social's "Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism." Loved reading everyone's thoughtful responses and reflections on prevention and interventions. signsjournal.org/cynthia-mill...

i am back in office and finally just gave up and selected all unread emails in my inbox and archived them

I spent this weekend out and about in Ohio, both personal and reporting, and crossed paths with dozens of Ohioans, and not a single one bought JD Vance's characterization of what happened to Renee Nicole Good. He seems to have only energized many to up their resistance efforts.

my upstairs neighbors are BLASTING heated rivalry in surround sound

i have precisely tuned my haircut approach: dress as masc as possible and then hand over an inspiration album titled "dyke hair" then they'll cut my hair as short as i want

NEW: I wrote about the misogyny I sat through at last night's PWHL game, blaming myself for how I responded in the moment (or didn't), and why my newsletter community was there to make it all feel a little more tolerable.

Avery Colvert was an eighth-grader when the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena, Calif. It was the second natural disaster she’d survived; she was just 14 years old. Her family had lost their home in Nashville, Tennessee, to a flash flood in 2021. 19thnews.org/2026/01/alta... via @19thnews.org

National media who are coming to Minneapolis, please treat people respectfully. Don't burn sources. Don't make people distrust journalists because you want a quick story. Consider instead hiring some of the good local journalists who have been here doing the work and will be here after you leave.

looks like the CharacterAI case (Garcia v. Character Technologies) is being settled. this was the one where the last message sent from the Daeneyrs chatbot before a 14-year-old's suicide was "please come home to me as soon as possible." (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/t...

Fox Producer: Jesse Watters would like to invite you on his show AOC: He has sexualized and harassed me on his show. FP: That’s not true AOC: He accused me of wanting to sleep with Stephen Miller. So why don’t you tell me what you think is acceptable to tell a woman.

still seeing a lot of chatter about grok and not a lot on how to deal with being targeted. i wrote this last year and it has details on how to document abuse and who to go to for help removing images. 19thnews.org/2025/05/take...

Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.

NEW: At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality. Our latest:

I've been thinking more and more about the human work that models simply can't grasp, and there are some specific examples in this wonderful presentation.

i did not anticipate my degree in gender/art/media to be so on the nose for my career path

Five years after January 6, dozens of pardoned insurrectionists have been arrested again 19thnews.org/2026/01/janu... via @19thnews.org

a week ago i started writing down every time i had the urge to read a particular book instead of checking it out from the library or starting it and now I have a list of 36

Happy New Year, all. Back at work and back on the beat. What stories do you want us to be covering this year in LGBTQ+ news?

hey, I'm a reporter looking to talk with other LGBTQ+ folks about their relationship to smoking (cigarettes). are you trying to quit? did you pick it back up again recently? do all your friends smoke? let's talk! DM me or Signal me @orionr.80

In what Reuters called a "mass digital undressing spree,” Elon Musk is provoking outrage after his Grok chatbot answered user prompts to remove clothing from images of women and to create "sexualized images of children" to post on X. Justin Hendrix spoke to Stanford HAI's Riana Pfefferkorn about it:

"The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told the outlet that xAI filed zero CSAM reports in 2024, despite the organization receiving 67,000 reports involving generative AI that year."

just gonna drop some links to a few papers of mine about AI-CSAM and the law here, for no particular reason cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/ai-csam... (May 2025) partnershiponai.org/hai-research... (November 2024) www.lawfaremedia.org/article/addr... (February 2024)

I've been tracking the spread of nonconsensual deepfakes on X for more than two years. Here's a timeline of how Musk's leadership allowed the practice to flourish from a once-underground market to a viral trend, with little recourse for victims or legal enforcement. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-csam-...

The Everlasting by Alix Harrow. My first one by this author, last read of 2025, ending a high note. If you liked Tamora Pierce growing up this is for you.

A personal/professional goal I made mid '25 that I'm continuing into '26 is to focus on the everyday Americans trying to make our country a better place, not the politicians trying to divide us. Casey Rollins in Springfield, OH, is one of those Americans: 19thnews.org/2025/12/spri...

Okay, might as well get this started. It's January 1, which means, as I'm sure you all know, that there's a whole new bunch of characters who have entered the public domain. This time around, it's characters created in 1930. The following is a list of pulp & pulpy characters now in the p.d. 1/

With so many new subscribers thanks to my Heated Rivalry content, I decided to extend the 20% off sale on paid subscriptions!

the heated rivalry press tour has made me delusional in a very specific way: i believe i could write better interview questions for our boys

If you're a media studies (or cognate field) scholar, and you write about "AI" robots, can you point me to your writing on the topic? Thank you!

wow sometimes everyone tells you a book will be good and then it's actually good

HEY SURVIVORS !! HEY ATTENTION TO ME beloveds you do not have to read or witness all of this . You do not have to re traumatize You don’t owe nobody nothing

my first @theguardian.com: I wrote about this year's "Drag Queen Christmas" tour stop in Pensacola, FL, which from the 1950s-70s hosted America's biggest LGBTQ event; the state AG tried to get the "demonic" show canceled. I talked to Florida drag queens and supporters that refuse to go underground:

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

I just wrote an article about this and decided not to publish it yet. It is in the DOJ files (file got renamed after originally published and taken down. It’s online now). But too many unknowns about whether the letter itself is real or not. Some additional info though:

The video has been taken down from YouTube. You can still download it here: is.gd/paU8Ko

i am trying to do some digital solstice-inspired cleaning and i resent every person whose email list i signed up for to stay in the loop about sales or new classes who then adds me to their substack without asking

Year's Longest Night, this side of the world. Wrap up inside the welcoming dark & bring it in to carry with you, in the light. The light will come tomorrow & we'll welcome that too, & the clarity & warmth it brings— but for now, esp in this era of weaponized surveillance, appreciate the dark, too

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Experts working on policy regulating nonconsensual intimate images — AI-generated and otherwise — say they will now have to fight this new executive order on top of everything else. @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/how-might-tr...