New from @garymarcus.bsky.social and me— Chatbots are: 1. Bad at providing info during breaking news events 2. Used by many people to find that info anyway 3. Making it harder for journalists to get their material seen online 4. Great vectors for manipulated media and propaganda Not great!

Stories built on "U.S. officials," especially ones published just hours after an action, are rarely the actual inside story. And papers shouldn't be playing like they are.

And there ya have it… Officials from top Wall Street firms will be traveling to Venezuela to investigate “investment prospects” of the country. “The trip will feature about 20 officials from the finance, energy and defense sectors.”

Trump: "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so."

But what if Maduro’s involvement in the drug trade was an “official act”?

Good thread here 👇

Some personal news 👇 (Which I forgot to post for over a year.)

Damn. This really steps on @propublica.org's new motto for 2026: "We love our Mommies."

Here’s a story about billionaires resisting a one-time tax. Here’s how the top 5 did last year: Musk: $726B, up from $421B a year ago Page: $257B, up from $156B Ellison: 245 billion, up from $209B Bezos: $242B, up from $233.5B Brin: $237B, up from $148.9B. ips-dc.org/resource-ric...

Tatiana Schlossberg, the climate journalist whose terminal illness and position in the Kennedy family thrust her into the national spotlight late in life, died today at age 35. www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

Income tax and wealth tax are two different things that do not at all work the same. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Also, we already mark to market certain publicly traded assets for both gains and losses, so maybe yes, if we insist on income tax.

On one hand, who cares, she’s a TV “reporter,” not in the top 300 of important court watchers. On the other, when elites become so unmoored from basic standards of behavior (Don’t Take Secret Yacht Vacations From Billionaires isn’t a close one), society is in deep trouble.

I couldn’t remember who exactly Biden pardoned, other than Hunter, Dr Fauci and Gen. Milley, so looked it up. I learned that that Biden had pardoned not only the members of the J6 Committee but also every staff member and the police officers who testified. www.justice.gov/pardon/media...

As the Times story on the CA Billionaire Tax Act notes, if the Act is adopted in Nov. of 2026 it will impose a tax on all individuals who were resident in CA as of Jan. 1 (i.e., next Thursday). It is very unlikely billionaires can really move before then. Is that constitutional, though? Read on. /1

More seriously, as most readers here know I helped draft the CA billionaire tax initiative text and you just can't get out of it by setting up a couple of LLCs in Florida. We have thought about how to block these fake paper moves for 4 years.

President Trump’s spiteful defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize Board may backfire, as the latter is now demanding Trump’s psychological records, prescription medication records, and tax returns in the discovery process. trib.al/LUCScTR

I’m all too familiar with this expression.

The media criticism is fair. But it's quite hard to give sustained attention to something that's not happening. A murder is an event.

These declines are MASSIVE. And the comparative silence in media coverage is absolutely DAMNING. “Why are ppl always so afraid of crime?” THIS is why. When crime goes up, media trips over itself to report it. Falls to pre-war (!!) levels? Just CRICKETS.

"Kavanaugh Stop" went from a skeet on here to Bluesky meme to crosspollinating over on X to Brett Kavanaugh's burner account seeing it there to a whiny defensive footnote about it in a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. Juice.

We at ProPublica obtained internal government data in May that showed the Trump administration knew the vast majority of Venezuelans sent to El Salvador had not been convicted of violent crimes. Our reporting is featured in Frontline. Read our full coverage: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

A graduate teaching assistant who gave a University of Oklahoma student a failing grade on a psychology essay will no longer be teaching at the university

OK I've watched it. One key piece that hasn't been discussed: DHS didn't just decline to comment, they explicitly referred all questions to El Salvador.

Standing by the story but… not ascribing motive or placing blame or objecting or Resigning

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

In 2022, Bari Weiss ran this viral first-person piece by a top Levi’s executive. She claimed she was hounded out of the company because of her vocal stance on COVID restrictions. There are no quotes from the company. Or her colleagues. Not even a “no comment.” www.thefp.com/p/yesterday-...

I found it interesting how, in that recent City Journal focus group with Republican Gen Zers who praised Hitler and criticized Jews, nearly all the Zoomers converged on Vance as their "ideal president"

Excellent piece that explains why Denmark’s childhood vaccine schedule isn’t right for the United States. Every major publication should run a piece like this. @jakescottmd.bsky.social: www.statnews.com/2025/12/19/d...

You have to read to the 23d and 24th grafs of the Times story on Trump's big drug-price "deals" to see that they're basically hype. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/h....

If you're rich, you get to help your fellow elites create problems while you're in power - and then you get to be valorized by media after you leave office when you conveniently claim you want to fix those problems you created, but now you have no power to do so.

Oh, them. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

The Epstein file is the only thing Trump has ever taken his name off of

This is all probably tax exempt.

(b)(1) No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.

Oh.

For @nymag.com I reported on 88-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was recently a victim of credit card fraud. Among my findings: The Norton campaign listed a deceased person as campaign treasurer for 2.5 years Between '23-25, amid q's about her mental acuity, Norton loaned $110k to her campaign

It gets even more pathetic— x.com/RepBeatty/st...

People mocked that piece about white millennial men getting shut out of the workplace. But here's an endorsement of it from an extraordinary white man who by dint of his own talent and hard work had to overcome the Woke odds to reach the position he has today.

This is basically the Platonic ideal of a penny stock scam www.wsj.com/business/dea...

The Onion, 23 years ago. theonion.com/no-blood-for...

Hey @radosh.bsky.social, will you please follow me?

New @propublica.org: @emsimani.bsky.social analyzed nonprofit tax filings and found that more than 1,000 charities have stripped DEI-related language from their mission statements this year. www.propublica.org/article/dele...

One of the Oracle (ORCL) Stargate data centers in Michigan doesn't have financing after Blue Owl (OWL) pulled out. Increasing signals that capital is starting to turn away from the sector having gorged for the past year.

A story that should shock our collective conscience: After Trump Cuts to Kenya Food Aid, Children Died of Starvation

NEW: Here's the searing tale of one woman's struggle to feed her family after the Trump Administration imposed a man-made food crisis. Beautifully written by Brett Murphy & @annamaria.bsky.social www.propublica.org/article/trum...

NEW: Humanitarian officials staged a last-minute plea to Trump officials at their fancy hotel to re-start food aid $ for a huge refugee camp in Kenya. The Trumpers blew it off and babies starved. @annamaria.bsky.social & Brett Murphy www.propublica.org/article/keny...

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is suing the state of Tennessee on behalf of Monica Meeks, who was fired from her job at the state's commerce department after comments critical of Charlie Kirk made from her personal Facebook account shortly after he was killed. /1

Why, it's true these are only "potentially" divisive! If you're having Xmas dinner at the Fuentes household, they'd be downright uniting.