So far in 2026, Democrats have flipped legislative seats in: Arkansas New Hampshire Texas Florida (today) That adds to their 2025 gains: Dems flipped seats in Iowa, Mississippi, & Pennsylvania specials, plus in New Jersey and Virginia's regular elections. GOP has flipped 0 seats over that period.

Disney has cancelled their deal with OpenAI. They planned to invest $1 billion into the company and let Sora have access to AI generate videos of characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. (Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...)

this is a massive win www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

👀 🧵

The bifurcation of the economy is a social, political, and economic disaster for democracy & poor long term planning besides.There just aren’t enough rich(ish) people to sustain this model, especially as prices rise. But the middle tier of everything is being hollowed out by corps anyway.

Ruth Simmons (aka Auntie Ruth) was president while I was an undergrad at Brown. Her being there (and being so revered!) shaped me and what I saw as possible in higher education. A bright spot in an academy that often treats black women abysmally. Well-deserved.

Whenever I hear about the leaky pipeline, I recall an interview I saw when I was an undergrad with a woman in STEM who said "I'm all for getting more women into the pipeline but people don't realize that the pipeline is full of acid." NIH and other grant terminations exacerbate this situation.

There was ONE ATC in the tower at LGA during last night's crash. ONE ATC, at LGA!, dealing w ALL air and ground traffic, including a plane filling w a strange smell and no gate to return to. The Pentagon wants $200B for a vanity war, but our ATC towers are empty. Budgets are moral documents.

‘While state and federal prosecutors have sent record numbers of people to prison for violent crimes and property- and drug-related offenses, the US retreated from prosecuting and punishing white-collar crime, despite a tsunami of elite-level wrongdoing.’ www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

This is so horrible. And so scary for travelers. And no one is saying why this happened - which is that the necessary staff has been cut by Trump’s administration, putting all air travelers at risk.

I know breaking news is hard but I've several articles about the crash at LGA yesterday/today and none mentioned the persistent understaffing of air traffic control, and the absolute chaos the trump administration added to the system in the past year.

If a market is structured so that exponential returns on short term investments matter much more than anything else, then you distort the context of rationality so thoroughly that it’s just ✨fantasy ✨ brought to you by capital. Which is not to say this purposeful delulu does not have real effects 🤷🏾‍♀️

*salutes beaver comrades*

So, the easiest way to achieve the main goal of the war would have been not to start the war

I am not sure I am broken by it but the old world has been broken. And it is absolutely true that I would not have believed it was so frail.

People tend to think of functional illiteracy as just being unable to read words aloud or such. What it *really* means is such as not being able to perceive subtext, context, understand who the audience of something may be, etc. Media illiteracy is fundamentally part of functional illiteracy.

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

Utilities are convincing lawmakers around the U.S. to delay bills that would allow people to buy solar panels, plug them into an outlet and begin generating electricity.

Controversial but - students *perceive* they have been failed when what has happened is they have failed to understand information retrieval is a skill requiring effort. I don't believe a zero friction experience is realistic or desirable in learning, actually.

This was one of the central topics that @parkermolloy.com and I discussed in our recent Theory of Change episode about how the right gaslights America, and what to do about it:

Holy shit we might have a cure for sickle cell anemia

Mueller absolutely saved Trump’s ass. He’s just too stupid to realize it. That’s the irony that’s screwing us all. The institutionalists keep institutionalizing while Trump sets about destroying them.

I'm not a political consultant but i feel like dems could probably get a lot of leverage out of pushing for green technologies that would wean the us off being dependent on oil in this particular moment

“What was really surprising to me during my initial dive into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or journalist, it doesn’t take long before you smack your forehead into the low doorframe of race science, because it’s baked into this technology”

The English-speaking world is falling in rankings of life satisfaction (The Economist)

We don’t have universal healthcare for the same reason that white southerners poured cement into their community swimming pools rather than let their black neighbors swim in them. Racism is ruining ALL of our lives.

Just in case you need some good news today: researchers at U of W have figured out how to turn plastic waste into acetic acid (primary ingredient in vinegar) using the sun. This has the potential to really help us reduce plastic waste. uwaterloo.ca/news/media/w...

“The ICE warehouse jail in Merrimack is not opening. For the people who would have been detained there and their loved ones, this is a real win. It also proves something larger: detention expansion is not inevitable. Everyday people can stop these facilities.” afsc.org/news/how-sma...

😭

NEW: Virginia lawmakers just passed a bill that'd forbid sheriffs and local police from contracting with ICE, if ICE doesn't say it'll follow state laws and agree to let its agents be prosecuted. Everyone seems to agree that'd spell the end of ICE contracts in Virginia: boltsmag.org/virginia-bil...

The new thing is landlords using ai photos for their property listings. Totally legal. Total scam. The whole economy is oil and scams.

Yesterday, 92% of us voted YES (w/ 99% participation) to authorize a strike if @propublica.org management refuses to compromise on core issues. We need a fair contract that will protect the in-depth investigative reporting that our readers expect. Support us: www.gofundme.com/f/support-pr...

Sigh. I have to change my search engine, don’t I?

Absolutely not. If you are using AI to write you should 100% be ashamed. Shame is one of the last bulwarks against a total slop apocalypse. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/b...

it's a real mindfuck to see the leadership of a publication creating some of the most important journalism of a generation trying to screw the people doing the work

To future-proof my book contract (better safe than sorry), I added an AI clause that says AI tools of any kind cannot be used in the review or preparation of my book (also no genAI art can be used for cover, etc) Very grateful to @slstalter.bsky.social for example from her most recent contract.

This is a huge problem for anything like a democratic info system& not one that will be easily undone or remedied. The sanitation of the info environment will require very large investments in producing, aggregating, legitimating, and distributing/making available info from independent/new venues.

Everything everywhere is basically the exact opposite of what it could so easily be news.ballotpedia.org/2026/02/27/i...

Good morning! The website of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy is LIVE! And it’s 🔥. You need this resource pinned in your favorites. Especially now. 14thamendmentctr.org

people don't realize how concentrated GOP fundraising is. more than half of all money that they got in 2024 was from donations over $1mn. it's like 200-300 rich cranks that keep the party operating. underrated explanation in why they've gone so insane.

must be nice

Sitting here as a Black person, thinking about how I am not allowed to say “I told you so” in a few years when the guy with the SS tattoo turns out not to be a key ally for multiracial democracy

So honored that my book, White Power: Policing American Slavery, will be the first in the new W. Hodding Carter III trade imprint from @uncpress.bsky.social. For those attending #OAH2026, please join us for a celebration of the new imprint! Pre-order the book here! tinyurl.com/mwcc4977

The anti hero everyman who’s a jerk but *your jerk* is a troupe that must die in politics. Because it turns out that a jerk is just a jerk regardless of context.

Freedom mobs are 100% the best of America and also one of the least-known parts of our history. There were freedom mobs busting people out and getting them to safety in Milwaukee, Chicago, Wilmington OH, Cass County MI, Syracuse, Troy NY, Boston (several) etc etc.

This is brilliant and clear, funny campaigns like this should be taken up everywhere. There’s nothing the heads of these companies like less than being mocked & creating salient & coherent cultural backlash against what everyone feels is a pathway to interrupt and slow some enshittification.

About 70% of the U.S. economy runs on consumer spending. But as wealth concentrates at the top, the richest 10% can’t spend enough to sustain it — while everyone else can’t afford to. Reminder that trickle-down economics simply doesn’t make sense. It’s a hoax.

"You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right." Goddamn, Melville could really cook.

The way I can feel my eyes lighting up with unhinged zeal looking at this map.

We got a DM the other day with a fun request from a local family: Could we find this nice BART train operator who always waved and beeped at this special little rider? And if we found him, could we deliver him a thank you card!?  So we got to work …