RIP Tom Robbins

Just heartbroken that we all lose Tom Robbins. The greatest teacher, mentor, person a girl could hope to know. The best reporter a city could hope to call its own.

"The population will reach the south of the Strip – and from there, with God's help, move to third countries under President Trump's plan. This is a change in the course of history. Nothing less. That's the essence." www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Read this, laid out plainly and with essential context, on starvation in Gaza and why “The outline plan… would be gaming the system, not preventing widespread starvation.” www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ma...

Federal Judge Orders Appointment of Rikers Island ‘Remediation Manager’ www.thecity.nyc/2025/05/13/f...

ICYMI: New York State is currently keeping 404 people in prison simply b/c they have no place to go. That's the only reason they are locked up right now. The state law dictating early releases by DOCCS bars them from being sprung straight into shelters. www.thecity.nyc/2025/04/29/h...

EXCLUSIVE: Two DOGE employees have access to a network used to transmit classified nuclear weapons data and a separate network used by the Department of Defense, sources tell NPR.

FDA to suspend quality-control program for food testing due to staff cuts

I look at close to 100 stories a week and even more outside of work. I’ve done this ten years. This is among the most horrific things I’ve ever read — testimony from dying children whose access to medicine has been cut off by the Trump administration. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

In September 2021, I interviewed longtime organizer Claudia Muñoz, who was so deeply alarmed by how Operation Lone Star was unfolding in Texas. I’d known her a long time, and I don’t think I’d ever heard her so shaken. I have been revisiting our conversation:

Yeah, maybe prison/imprisoned isn’t even the right word. Does not fully capture the situation here. “Human Rights Watch is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.” www.hrw.org/news/2025/03...

I think the key word is imprisoned in El Salvador, not just deported to El Salvador. It’s not like he’s walking the streets of San Salvador. He and all the others are trapped in a foreign prison, apparently indefinitely.

“Deported to El Salvador” really doesn’t capture what’s taking place at all. They’re locked in a foreign prison, unsentenced, for an unknown length of time—potentially, according to Noem, for life.

"The officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building. One said, ‘No, he’s not the one,’ like they were looking for someone else. But the other said, ‘Take him anyway.’"

Nice lil scoop over at @hellgatenyc.com: Cuomo used ChatGPT to write his housing plan, which contains several gibberish sections. The former governor cannot even be bothered to proofread his housing plan or make sure it makes much sense. hellgatenyc.com/andrew-cuomo...

Eight people in South Sudan, including five children, died on a three-hour walk to seek medical treatment for cholera after US aid cuts forced local health services to close, the UK-based charity Save the Children said reut.rs/3E9kB27

Food Banks Tighten Their Belts as Federal Cuts Keep Coming. Patrons Don't Know Where Else to Turn www.thecity.nyc/2025/04/09/f... @haidee.bsky.social with a sobering and thorough look at worried food banks around New York City

A paper I always teach my students: An empirical sound model that indicates harsher conditions either have no effect on crime or, quite possibly, make things worse. Harshness is not about safety. It's about cruelty. With the data to show it.

We need deep reporting on this generation of NYC COVID kids—teenagers now—who and they lost, especially in poor communities. What are schools seeing, places where kids lost a lot of parents and caregivers?

So are they imprisoned for one year? For life? These people whom the US has sent to prison but who are not serving actual sentences? apnews.com/article/el-s...

“'Gaza is a killing field and civilians are in an endless death loop,' Mr. Guterres said in prepared remarks to journalists at United Nations headquarters in New York." www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/w...

“More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza,” he said. “No food. No fuel. No medicine. No commercial supplies. As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened.” —UN secretary general António Guterres

this is a staggering amount of money to build camps—suggesting that building & running a gulag will be the primary function of the otherwise gutted Trump-state in last fiscal yr: "D.H.S. allocated about $3.4 billion for the entire custody operation overseen by ICE" www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/u...

Israel has not allowed aid into Gaza for more than a month, the longest stretch since the war began www.unicef.org/press-releas....

It is not tied to curbing antisemitism, though — it is tied to the Trump administration’s pretending that peaceful protests against Israel’s leveling of Gaza, protests that include many Jews, are antisemitism

Rotar’s ongoing criminal case touches on several fronts — mental illness, a court system struggling to handle complex cases, and violence on Rikers — that criminal justice reformers say exacerbate harm and lead to repeated trouble with the law. www.thecity.nyc/2025/04/03/a...

the authoritative @costsofwar.bsky.social concluded that from Oct. 7, 2023 to March 26, 2025, in #Gaza were killed more #journalists than these wars combined: U.S. Civil War+ World War I + World War II + Korea + Vietnam+ Cambodia+ Laos+ Yugoslavia(1990s and 2000s+ Afghanistan+ #Ukraine

In which I try to call things what they are. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/o...

The bodies of more than a dozen aid workers have been recovered in southern Gaza from what a United Nations agency described as a "mass grave," a week after they went missing following attacks by Israeli forces.

NYU canceled a planned speech by the former president of Doctors Without Borders because she planned to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and cuts to US AID. This is what actual campus censorship looks like.

No food or supplies have been allowed into Gaza in over three weeks

Video footage obtained by NBC News shows the moment Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested. Oztur is a Turkish national and doctoral student at Tufts University with a valid student visa, her lawyer says.

Separate Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have killed two media workers, including Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat aje.io/ylcl1j

BREAKING: A 32-year-old man died in a holding cell in Brooklyn's central booking on Friday morning while waiting to be arraigned, according to public defenders familiar with the case. hellgatenyc.com/brooklyn-hol...

A woman died on Rikers this morning, the fourth person in custody to die *in one month*. www.nydailynews.com/2025/03/20/w...

Trump changes have "forced more than a third of global organizations that provide essential HIV services to close" by February, and "hundreds of thousands of people are losing access to HIV treatments as a result." www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/18/1...

Totally agree with this. Flying a person to a third country that they may never have been to, directly into a prison where they are going to be forced to do hard labor, is not a deportation; it's something else entirely.

Israeli air strikes pounded Gaza, killing 254 people, Palestinian health authorities said, and threatening a complete collapse of a two-month ceasefire as it vowed to use force to free its remaining hostages in the strip. Follow our live coverage: reut.rs/4iWbvV1

In which I try to put it all together. The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attack on Trans People www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/o...

After the Robert Brooks murder, Hochul vowed reforms. But she and others refuse to name the 15 DOCCS staffers out on administrative leave after the Messiah Nantwi death. She also refuses to say if a report by WillerHale into prison culture will be made public. www.thecity.nyc/2025/03/17/h...

NY Prison officials are censoring @hellgatenyc.com's journalism, the deal between illegally striking guards and the state, and lots of other basic information: hellgatenyc.com/new-york-pri...

There is no getting around it. #Trump #Musk #Vought #Rubio will kill millions with this move. #PEPFAR is a program, which formerly had deep #bipartisan support, broad involvement of #faith communities and others. And they've killed it. And they will kill #millions. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

BREAKING: Department of Homeland Security officers have detained Mahmoud Khalil – a recent Columbia University graduate who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment. @premthakker.bsky.social reports open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/...

"You have to put more pressure on the media to come and do coverage here in Gaza; we need foreign journalists to come and join us, to speak about our suffering, to spread this reality. I want them to come here and just report what they see." www.cjr.org/the_media_to...