This tweet, for a Ross Barkan story that copied my lede and reporting, now has more than 10x the views of the original. Ross hasn't apologized or acknowledged it; maybe he's just waiting for me to shut up. Without any explanation, I'm left to wonder how many times he's done this

Here’s another thing folks might not know, a truck does about 10,000 times the damage to a road than a car does. blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/t...

How bad is the Colorado governor's commutation of Tina Peters' sentence? So bad that even the Republican DA who prosecuted here pushed back, and told Polis to talk to the county officials who have to deal with threats that followed Peters' felonies. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/u...

Ross Barkan's plagiarism mini scandal has barely been discussed on Bluesky. We should be taking note of it. Especially since, now that he has responded on Twitter, his explanations are ridiculous.

Manic Monday: New Yorkers Prep for Morning Rush With LIRR Still On Strike www.thecity.nyc/2026/05/17/m...

LOL same magazine, fortune.com/2026/05/11/a...

Same people who are standing in front of college grads telling them to eat shit and like it.

From the people who brought you stealing your work. And your identity. And your likeness. And your job... now comes, stealing water from the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country. Who woulda thunk it? bsky.app/profile/calm...

The answer is no. There is no way that smartphones are responsible for a 40% decline in worldwide fertility rate. This is what the graph looks like from 1970 to the present (from @ourworldindata.org).

I love how this article is 70% breathless fearmongering before you get to the last section which says: “U.S. officials don't believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests”

Hey remember when he totally didn’t pressure the New America Foundation into firing a critic of his company when he joined their board? It’s neat how critics get chased out of work while supplicants are lavished with money, right?

Our simulations show that if one ignores the effects of ongoing institutional racism, efforts to end institutional racism are not necessary.

israel's role in undermining and overwhelming the international system is going to come back to bite it in the ass in a way the country simply does not have the foresight to perceive

Joe: I am a 73 year-old retired mechanic in Forsberg, Nebraska. My 3 biggest problems are Iran's uranium enrichment capability, the casting of Helen in Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey," and the ability of Tennesseeans to check out "Roots" from a library 1000 media outlets: can we please talk at length

In 1980, in the run-up to Reagan's victory in that election, a group of far right Christian preachers organized a "Washington for Jesus" rally that is a precursor to today's Christian Nationalist prayer event in DC. youtu.be/hnUmpCwBJs8?...

Even when it's an entire stadium booing them, the AI hucksters cannot wrap their heads around the fact that no one wants the shit they're selling.

“The wrong response to an essay like this is to say, ‘Well, this is true and this isn't true’” is just utterly disqualifying

a $200 fine is substantially worse than no fine at all, it just highlights how absurdly pointless any of the “consequences” for elites are for breaking the rules

Explicitly, that’s why several of them tell us why they’re doing this and want us to print that

Seconding the opinion that this would be a bloodbath.

Who came out on top in the negotiations between President Trump and China's Xi Jinping? We asked four unvaccinated Buffalo Sabres fans who'd been ejected from an NHL playoff game.

The Amazon LOTR series has black hobbits, elves and dwarves, and the people that you would most suspect reacted exactly the way you think they would

Jost reportedly dismissed the idea of Hegseth treating the Pentagon to a Pulp Fiction prayer as "too ridiculous"… weeks before it actually happened.

this crime led to one of the dumbest American foreign policy laws to that point in history, the so-called Helms-Burton (Libertad) act. the shoot down caused pres Clinton to relent after longtime opposition and it led to a major crisis with European and NAFTA partners.

RIP to my favorite dive bar beer, a true legend, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. This is a genuine bummer. www.jsonline.com/story/money/...

Not eye rolling so much anymore. I think the center was as robust as I had accounted for. Don’t think I was wrong there. I think I was just underestimated the destructive potential of the slouching beast. And the pace with which it was closing the distance to Bethlehem

Tina Peters tried to overturn the 2020 election the right way. By Jared Polis

Will just reiterate that in the many years I covered Polis closely, he never showed particular interest in the topic of over-sentencing, nor in criminal justice reform generally. This decision would read a lot differently if Polis had any sort of record as an advocate for clemency.

All politics aside, the Bari Weiss/Tony Dookie (not going to bother learning how to spell his name) saga is a great illustration of where rampant known-nothingism gets you. "You mean the shit we pull in the US doesn't fly in Taiwan? An outrage!"

Some of the identified individuals the US killed in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific showed "no indication of involvement with drug trafficking." And even if they were traffickers, they'd be low level. Killing them would make virtually no impact on the cartels or drug trafficking into the US.

2026

You may not be interested in Strait of Hormuz. But Strait of Hormuz is interested in you.

Q: Biden described Xi as a dictator. Do you think Xi is a dictator? TRUMP: I think President Biden was an incompetent president. He gave us the Iran nuclear deal. (The Iran nuclear deal was actually made by the Obama administration ... )

15 May 1910 | A Polish Jew, Abram Mirenberg, was born in Radomsko. A worker. In #Auschwitz from 16 October 1941. No. 21620 He perished in the camp on 20 October 1941. --- 📖 Jewish prisoners at KL Auschwitz: https://lekcja.auschwitz.org/29_zydzi_en/

“I am not saying our investment process is to just give him money for anything he wants,” they said. “But to be honest that wouldn’t have been a bad strategy: never bet against Elon.” there they are, the four simple words that have replaced entire books on market theory

While Trump was in Beijing, Iran was letting Chinese ships through the strait, just to drive home the point that China and Iran get along a lot better than China and the US.

Any journalist who expresses surprise that Trump got nothing in China should hang up their hats. It's not just that he's a buffoon and an easy mark. Agreements at summits are typically pounded out by "sherpas" ahead of time. Trump assumed Xi was, like him, impulsive and desperate for a deal. Ha.

Even worse than putting a hit our on Jesus, T: He was a Vegan. bsky.app/profile/atru...

You can pay a human for this kink and feel way better about it. Just sayin.

"This is the seventeenth recorded Ebola outbreak in DRC since the virus was first identified in 1976", says @drtedros.who.int at @who.int presser. 500,000 US dollars from WHO contingency fund for emergencies have been released.

Very normal

To wrap: the Chronicle, once again, is treating it as a mystery when students respond negative to schools making bad decisions driven by politics, because understanding the university isn’t its job; providing moral support for administrators is its job. It’s really sad what it’s become.

"while walking through downtown San Francisco to interview Riley in person, I watched a small plane cruise above the skyscrapers, dragging a banner through the cloudless sky that read, “STOP HIRING HUMANS.” It would have fit perfectly into one of Riley’s cartoonishly dystopian worlds"

"While she wasn’t short on resources or help, she realized how emotionally fraught and all-consuming raising a newborn can be." Thinking tonight about this great @maustermuhle.bsky.social story on the need for free diaper programs.

Phoenix Sgt. Dusten Mullen told a Chandler police officer that his goal was to get kids in jail if they wanted to break the law. “My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all…so my goal would be to get all these kids in jail if they want to break the law.”

"immigration, crime, national security, higher education, and national elections" is the most conservative agitprop coded list of coverage areas i think i have ever seen

The scrolling images on their website are so funny

One of my favorite things to do living in liberal western WA is to explain to ardent "environmentalists" how recycling is actually hastening global warming and watch the "reduce-reuse-recycle" programming of their youth fight an existential battle against their adult understanding of climate change

The bio of Jeff Bezos' "free diapers for babies is the gateway drug to Marxist tyranny" lady from her short stint at The Boston Globe clears up some things.