Over the past three years, I have pretty much only reported on one facet of trans healthcare: how narratives about evidence quality has been misused to fearmonger. This op-ed does a great job explaining evidence quality and contextualizing gender-affirming surgery within the larger field.

“Using strategic language like “weak evidence” is how anti-trans groups have effectively misled a general audience. Low-quality evidence is different from saying that treatment is harmful.“

“Despite little evidence that Flock cameras actually reduce crime, the company markets its products as powerful crime-stopping and deterrence tools.”

TONIGHT Several people were arrested at the end of the Trans March, the kick-off event for San Francisco Pride weekend. Police officers ran into the crowd & handcuffed people, allegedly for earlier acts of vandalism. People were heard yelling "Get off him!" & "What the fuck?!"

France recorded ~1,000 excess deaths during the record-breaking heatwave this past week, with 85% of the deaths being people aged 65 and over. The sharpest increase are people dying at home in the Île-de-France region that includes Paris and its suburbs.

The decision could save Bayer billions of dollars and put an end to lawsuits alleging the company withheld the health risks of Roundup.

I keep thinking about how if AI were actually a threat to the fascist regime, as tech-pilled radicals often wish-cast, they would be spuriously arresting people who use AI instead of arresting people for making zines

Ummm…

Cutting back on beef and biofuels could help improve food security and mitigate climate emissions.

Must-read story by @drilledmedia.bsky.social and @propublica.org. Beyond Denial: How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study @themadstone.bsky.social @amywestervelt.bsky.social @katieworth.bsky.social

I cannot believe we are STILL talking about trans mice. As I previously wrote: "As they beat the drum of “insufficient evidence,” you’d think that they would relish the chance to generate more evidence. Of course, these studies do conflict with their reality—or at least reveal a more nuanced one."

examples of what the FBI included as evidence of "Antifa terrorism" in the Prairieland case: -Narcan spray -Anarchist tattoos -a highlighted copy of Emergent Strategy -a zine made of a 2019 review of Hereditary and Midsommar from @reproutopia.bsky.social -First Aid Kits -seeds for garden vegetables

Statement by @sciamunion.bsky.social on Springer Nature's sale of Scientific American and massive editorial layoffs right before a successful union vote is counted. www.wgaeast.org/wgae-scienti...

i'm at the death of american journalism. i'm at the death of american science. i'm at the combination deaths of american journalism and science.

I have a new piece out today with @404media.co . The headline is a question that came to me as I was reading yet another batch of public records where YA books were being relocated to adult sections. Tfg there are experts who could set me straight. Ty @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social for editing me.

Norway is banning generative AI for schoolchildren under 13 starting in September.

this essay is worth a read, and resembles it a lot of aspects of my and others’ experiences (though it over generalizes— I know many transmen and nonbinary people who hated being “girls” and wished they were afforded opportunities to transition earlier).

Let me recap this real quick: - Man never went to a doctor ("I assumed it was a muscle problem and went to my chiropractor, who treated it as a muscle issue.") - Man is talking about an AI tool he built as a AI "future-of-work work" consultant

NEW: For @autonomynews.co, I spoke with three providers of gender-affirming care about how they're continuing to serve patients in the face of Trump administration attacks:

RFK Jr. in his official capacity as HHS Secretary has twice attempted to interfere with scientific journals about vaccine-related papers. One paper showed vaccines are safe and he wants it retracted. The other allegedly showed that vaccines cause autism and he doesn’t want it retracted.

NEW: Google's AI Overviews are treating entities from the SCP Foundation — the famously fake fan-fiction universe — as if they're real. The AI feature often contextualizes SCP entities as actual discoveries while describing made-up SCP records as "official" documents. futurism.com/artificial-i...

New article from the Brennan Center (co-authored by UW colleague Rachel Moran) on how news deserts leave voters vulnerable to election misinformation. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

A bonanza for fans of the natural world: the digital library sharing 64m pages of scientific knowledge with everyone

$765 million of your tax dollars being paid to *not* develop wind power.

Just dropped the biggest and baddest thing I’ve ever worked on: 22-minutes documentary into how science is rewritten by corporations and we pay the cost. Hope you queue it up for your night and give it a watch!

I'm spending half my hours this summer working on this. It is incredibly satisfying to see the inverse of the editorial production process in editorial preservation. Journalists, have you ever thought about what will happen to your stories 100, 200 years down the line?

what

New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...

Starting this next week, because reporting news is not enough, I have to look at old newspapers too.

Post-information society

An important, complicated addition: "MIT to be closing three of its four major libraries, demonstrates a significant retreat from that commitment to truth and knowledge." You literally cannot do science without libraries.

Here's how the Trump administration is chipping away at transgender health care access for adults With more than 30 interviews with trans adults, treatment providers, conservative activists and trans rights activists over the last two months. For @nbcnews.com: www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

The Struggle Against Data Centers in Oregon | Part One: “Surrounded” Here is the first part in a series on data centers in Hillsboro, Oregon and the community fighting back against data center tax breaks and expansion.

“You wouldn’t expect,” Blessing’s [singing] teacher said, “such a huge voice to come out of a tiny body like that.”

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

NEW: One interesting thing about the "missing scientists" claims is how similar they are to another theory that's been circulating in the "natural health" world for years. I wrote about why some of these claims reach the mainstream and others don't. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Tapping the sign:

For the past year, Columbia Journalism Investigations and @insideclimatenews.org have investigated the push to mine more lithium. The results: We mapped every proposed project in the country, and the first story in the series examines the impacts on tribes. insideclimatenews.org/news/0305202...

"Last year, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published its long-awaited report on the environmental impacts of nuclear war. The last time it did such a comprehensive study was in…1985." Important @thebulletin.org series kicks off with intro by @francoisdm.bsky.social

After many failed attempts to subpoena trans kids' private health records, DOJ is now trying to get them via criminal grand jury in Texas. "This is mafia-type behavior," Shannon Minter tells @hurwitz.bsky.social. This will be a new test of blue-state shield laws. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

New from 404 Media: spoke to four people who attended a trade show where senior ICE officials spoke about how much Palantir is supercharging their arrests. List of 20 million people on ICE agents phones now; increased chance of successful arrest from 28 to 80% www.404media.co/ice-agents-h...

hi, as some of you know Them was sold last month and i was laid off as a result. this is a gofundme for myself and my colleagues who have been impacted, pls share and donate if you feel called <3 www.gofundme.com/f/support-la...

Texas eliminated 5 Democratic seats with no voter approval. Louisiana suspended election with no voter approval. Tennessee erased last majority-Black district with no voter approval. But VA Supreme Court blocks redistricting map approved by 3 million voters www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

This is a good as time as any to say that I am doing an independent study on AI's effects on journalism as an information source this fall for my MLIS. Any case studies, readings, examples? Send them my way, building my reading list out.

🧵 "The internet isn’t just an endless archive anymore." 🌐 Journalist Philip Bump argues that preserving journalism & digital history is essential for understanding what happened online. 📚 Read the Q&A with Bump & more in VANISHING CULTURE, free or purchase in print: archive.org/details/vani...

A mystery donor in Nebraska is spending $1.6 million on a ballot initiative banning trans girls from girls' sports—duplicating an existing state law. Uihlein is spending $800k on the same in Maine. What do these two states have in common? Close Senate races. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

NEW: Less than 72 hours before Weber State University in Utah was scheduled to host a conference on censorship, presenters were told not to discuss identity politics, or be removed from the official program agenda. www.404media.co/how-a-univer...

The Internet Archive, Wikimedia, academics, and hobby archivists are having trouble finding hard drives or are having to pay extremely high prices for them.

The left is the only US political faction that grapples with the actual science of decarbonization and calls for the phaseout of fossil energy rather than an "all of the above" energy "abundance" that will never zero out emissions. 🧵

Something I am thinking about today is that there is this weird, false history that presumes trans children and their transitions began only with the confines dutch protocol anyways, read this interview and the book "Histories of the Transgender Child"