Thanks to @saragoud.bsky.social for including my AI bubble aftermath story in the @thebulletin.org roundup on Big Tech's 2025 impacts. Other pieces look at AI and surveillance capitalism, Silicon Valley vs aviation safety, and the economic risks from DOGE's meddling. thebulletin.org/2025/12/a-ye...

Americans appear evenly split along partisan lines on the Trump administration having sent US military forces into Venezuela to capture Maduro. But the lopsided opinion on who should decide the future of Venezuela's leadership is still very striking.

BREAKING: Multiple oil tankers hit by U.S. sanctions appear to be making a coordinated attempt to break the U.S. naval blockade on Venezuela’s energy exports by departing all at once. w/ Anatoly Kurmanaev www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/w...

This is incredibly important journalism that also underscores how dire US vaccination rates have become.

"That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.” The AI-powered software for drafting police reports comes from Axon, the tech company that sells law enforcement products such as TASER devices. futurism.com/artificial-i...

My contribution to this discussion was just added. I worry about regime change aftermath and the explicit efforts to link this to access to oil and what this means for norms against territorial conquest.

Reminder to always double-check unverified images and videos on social media. Think twice before resharing.

The Bellingcat Discord community is currently discussing events in Venezuela and digging up lots of stuff here discord.com/channels/709...

My wife and I are ringing in the new year with the flu. It's especially frustrating since we were both vaccinated. Be safe out there.

Mamdani took over the @NYCMayor account on Twitter but old Eric Adams tweets are still active. That means Mamdani's name and face shows up for old tweets he didn't send. You're probably going to see a lot of screenshots like this where Mamdani appears to praise Netanyahu, but they aren't by Mamdani

One of the best parts of my mornings while growing up was reading the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in The Plain Dealer. I collected newspaper clippings of my favorites and eventually all of the books.

January 15th 11:15 am CT we're hosting a grammy award winning musician, best selling fiction writer, and nuclear expert/artist for a discussion of the intersection of art and science. Join us! pages.thebulletin.org/art-science

It's not even peak flu season and New York State has already hit a record number of cases in a single week. Stay safe out there, especially when indoors and in crowds. Masks still work. gothamist.com/news/new-yor...

The Gang Discovers America Runs on Immigrants, Part 537

All of the money that changed hands in the Teapot Dome scandal totaled less than $10 million after adjusting for inflation, and it was considered so corrupt we still teach it in high school government classes a century later.

I'm grateful for my brilliant students. One wrote about impacts of last weekend's debacle: "if we only talk about #Waymo, we will miss a critical, broader conversation around how San Francisco’s innovation policy still treats the city as a laboratory first and a community second." archive.ph/x6Iyq

WSJ also notes that the Trump administration is aware of rising electricity prices becoming a political problem even as the administration boosts data center development. But then only cites DOE Secretary's claim that building more energy generation for data centers will eventually lower prices.

An indicator worth watching when it comes to the AI bubble.

A grandmother will spend Christmas with her family after ICE held her for nearly five months. She’s had a green card for 30+ years and lived in the U.S. since childhood. Her detention ended only after public and congressional pressure. www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-...

Seriously though, renewable energy companies should keep tripping over themselves to remind the Trump administration that clean power can help with American energy dominance. That might still work. www.latimes.com/world-nation...

Not sure this "Golden Fleet" vision featuring "battleships" is optimal for sealing off the first island chain, let alone the Honmoon. But the South Korean shipbuilding industry may be cautiously excited.

“These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”

NIST reassures the world that despite atomic clock power outage time is not broken. www.cbsnews.com/colorado/new...

"Dozens of the firefighting companies that the government relies on are built on immigrant labor. Worker advocates and the Forest Service’s internal watchdog have estimated that as many as 70 percent of these firefighters are undocumented." Those immigrants do some of the "most carcinogenic work."

“They’re going to bring back suffering and death,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I don’t say that with any hyperbole, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

“The thing that’s been the most difficult so far is that, in all of our interactions with the government, they’re denying that any of her birth certificates, which are from Laurel, Maryland, her records of immunization, medical records — they’re denying the authenticity of them.”

This was, broadly, the experience in Albuquerque. The bus was free for students, but bus drivers had discretion to enforce it, and so a member of Together for Brothers, a young men of color org, suggested "well, if it's free they don't have to check for passes and decided if we're students or not."

Holy hell

Ooh a spicy dek: “These funders — including the American Journalism Project, which drove the creation of Houston Landing — have increasingly been picking the winners and losers in American journalism, with no consequences when their calls go badly wrong.” Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud.

Before satellite mega-constellations began taking off in 2019, satellites used to go months without risking a collision in orbit. Now they have less than a week to take evasive maneuvers, and the window keeps shrinking. My @sciam.bsky.social story below. www.scientificamerican.com/article/sate...

“.. Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops .. come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.” @defenseone.bsky.social www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/...

Some US bomber crews in WWII even carried photos of Tommy Tucker, the celebrity squirrel whose wardrobe had "as many as 100 handmade costumes, including 'a coat and hat for going to market, a silk-pleated dress for company,' and 'a Red Cross dress for visiting the hospital.'"

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google. My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence! go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

NEW: President Trump is expanding the previous 19-country travel ban to a whopping 39 countries (plus the Palestinian Authority), and appears to expand a block on legal immigration to now include spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens, who were previously exempted.

Seems like an understatement to say that AI slop is massively complicating scholarship and education at this point. www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-s...

I’ve written essays for Orion, Emergence, Washington Post, The Guardian, NPR, and many others. It’s my favorite form! If you need to assign an essay or want a new writer—particularly for nature and environment stories—please send me an email.

The anti-Semitic mass shooting in Australia will cause a national conversation and policy change. We know this because the 1996 Port Arthur massacre led to significant restrictions on guns. The shooting at Brown will do nothing. We know this because it occurred on the anniversary of Sandy Hook.

Zoe Weissman - survivor of 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL Mia Tretta - survivor of 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, CA Both are now students at Brown University in Providence, RI.

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

60,000 is the *low end* estimate.

Instacart charges shoppers different prices for the same grocery item - revealed by many volunteers shopping at the same time for pickup at the same store. Grocery bills inflated by algorithmic pricing. Investigation by @moreperfectunion.bsky.social @consumerreports.org youtu.be/osxr7xSxsGo?...

Wild example of AI slop creating massive public inconvenience and disruption while wasting taxpayer dollars.

"Susan’s husband Jim Tincher said he was shocked to be notified by neighbors that his wife had been arrested. He spent all day trying to find where she was being held, with Minnesota elected officials like U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and U.S. Sen. Tina Smith assisting in the search."

Starcloud and Google's Project Suncatcher have proposed launching energy-hungry data centers into space to harness sunlight more efficiently 24/7. But such orbital data centers would entail significant environmental costs. My story for @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/data...

He’s like, ‘I think I did see your house. It was the blue one, right? Yeah, it’s floating down Route 35. It’s on fire.’” A brilliant @scrawford.bsky.social story on New Jersey's endless cycle of rebuilding the shore. And yes, there is a climate angle. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

"The second Trump administration has done everything in its power to make it easier for the people in Silicon Valley to push AI on America and the world. It has done this, in part, by framing it as a national security issue."

Really looking forward to this as someone who became more intrigued by Truman after reading a lot of books about the Korean War.

404 Media is making a print zine! About the surveillance technologies used by ICE. 16 pages, riso printed. Shipping early January. Features reworked versions of our best reporting and a few new things. We're very excited! And hope to do more if people like it: www.404media.co/404-media-is...

Teleoperated robots can be useful. Using them to create an illusion of autonomous humanoid robots, however...