we, in the United States, through Trump’s mass deportation scheme, have engaged in abductions and torture for the past year, none of it in secret, much of it attested to in legal documents. there is nothing to expose, only to face.

blog.cloudflare.com/building-our... initially thought Cloudflare was coming out pro-union here but they mean the other kind of workers

Nothing says "let's do the fucking news" quite like not letting people do the news

www.wsj.com/world/europe... is this good

Curious what the story showed? See our @hrw.org research: www.hrw.org/report/2025/.... US gov responsibility for torture and abuse.

You reach down, you flip the Waymo over on its back. The Waymo lays on its back, its battery baking in the hot sun, spinning its wheels trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that? www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKGA...

Heading into what's already looking like a, let's say, challenging 2026, this lovely little piece stands for science too. Do the work. It'll help.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/the-... "the Dominion Voting System strategy for journalism" sounds a lot cooler when you don't know that Dominion Voting Systems was eaten and sold for parts by private equity following the successful lawsuit

buttondown.com/perfectsente... this week in sentences: uncool, crystalline, early, contemptuous, golf, flesh, posthumously, guarded, shrubbery, name, ensemble, cells, eminently, transcend, clown, shrimp, so many ways, landmass

Listening to an interview with Andrew Ross and man, I was so lucky to meet weirdo academics like him during Occupy Wall Street, what a good egg

Is geography an intellectual situationship? So much literature that consists of geographers basically going "what ARE we???"

as someone currently finishing: I don't regret doing a PhD because I went in pretty certain that the TT career track wasn't for me, but I did have to contend with faculty who annoyingly took it personally that I had different professional goals despite them agreeing the job market was dogshit

Haven't seen a holiday season with this big a redacted document drop from the feds since the Torture Report

Sorrows of young lurkers.

20,000 words, 150 footnotes, 100+ timeline events = our attempt at documenting and synthesizing all the ways that the federal government has attempted to destroy access to gender-affirming care since January unbreaking.org/issues/trans...

Sometimes courage is not the presence of hope but the absence of fucks

Dave? Dave Brooks? The intern-marrier?

I started reporting this story after I’d been back at work for a few months and was starting to once again feel overwhelmed by the amount of pain and harm and cruelty at work in the world. Talking to people about how they are finding ways to care for one another helped.

Fury Road is a Christmas movie

"and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy"

6 years ago, a federal ban on gender-affirming care for young people was absent from the national Dem agenda, seemed unlikely to almost everyone who isn’t trans. 6 years ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene was a QAnon crank with a crossfit gym. Yesterday her ban passed out of the House with three Dem votes.

This is an effort to limit DE’s subsidy of ICE contractor Avelo Airlines. Bc the DRBA is an independent agency jointly administered by NJ & DE, the DE leg can’t directly tell it what to do - but Rep. Gorman & Sen. Seigfried’s two bills will accomplish quite a lot using the power they do have+

This is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill. Today she claimed, "For far too long, children have been sexually exploited under the malicious falsehood of so-called gender-affirming care."

It's a rough fucking night.

Support workers, not slop. bsky.app/profile/prop...

since my dissertation defense is on zoom and that feels anticlimactic I have begun to plan my presentation as a multimedia performance lecture including an overhead projector and maybe a CRT (leaning into the software history angle with era-appropriate tech) I will probably regret this lol

www.wired.com/story/people... oh no someone is already doing molly for software bugs people are going to be confused

Going on Shark Tank to pitch "molly for bugs"

Ending 2025 with the grounded sense of hope I picked up in Chicago, as told here:

Gonna start an online magazine called Sprawling that will basically just be Wario Compact

Join leadership and experts from @aaup.org AI team and Mijente for an online press conference on the urgent concerns about Palantir Technologies' involvement with the Department of Education. fedscoop.com/palantir-edu... TOMORROW Wednesday, December 17, 4PM ET Register here: bit.ly/4p3iCh7

NY Post is going to have a headline like "FEMININE WILES" re: the WH Chief of Staff, aren't they

Looking for an available domain name is the I Ching for answering the question "should I make this dumb idea a real web page"

the animal hospital gave my dog fentanyl when she had major surgery

Good news, my dissertation manuscript was deemed "defensible" and I can notify the department of my defense date

once again it is "telling people my dad died on Christmas so no I don't really have holiday plans" season

Fun professional news: I'm one of the two new Editors at Large at @urbanomnibus.bsky.social, a publication of the Architectural League of New York. please get in touch if you have ideas you'd like to develop into commissions on any broadly-defined NYC architecture and/or urbanism topics!

Watching The Big Short, which for a week Ramsey has been calling "the money movie"

Having a lot of conversations that bottom out in "unfortunately and as you may know, capitalism" lately

It's the most wonderful time of the year (time to remember A People's History Of Tatooine)

buttondown.com/perfectsente... this week in sentences: credibility, cough, soil, wallpaper, golf, annoying, sisterhood, daisy

Devastating realization that the rapidly increasing retirement age means I may never have someone attempt to recruit me for one last job

me: hey man how's it going scott galloway: women showing feet is a social cancer we can solve by making boys do war

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/...

a newly murdered thing of the sea

Doesn't seem like corruption at all, I'm sure this is okay.

“If the complexity makes measuring the water use of a given data center difficult and contingent, isolating the effects at the level of a single user or prompt is nearly impossible.”

Was reminded of a Gen Z media artist trend I love which is using Google Sheets as a personal website or CV when I hit a Gemini popup like "get deeper insights from this spreadsheet" man these are cells of mostly GIFS

Going to be so pedantically mad if the dumb "Pax Silica" international critical minerals supply chain agreement doesn't actually include silica or high purity quartz in its priority minerals