Choke down the nausea and stay for the kicker. Student journalism FTW.

I sat down with Naomi Klein (@naomiaklein.bsky.social) for our Reframe series. We dug into the bizarre frame of AI as a solution to the climate crisis. Per usual, I was pretty blown away by her analysis. The stickiest insight for me is her description of a three-legged stool.

In 2016 I spent a day hanging out at the Post, sitting in meetings and talking to staff. It felt like a well-appointed pirate ship that has sailed to the edge of the abyss and returned with Bezos's wind in its sails, ready defend its treasure and launch a raid on the future. What an awful reversal.

Jacob Zuma, Jeffrey Epstein, a British fixer, and a Russian model walk into an intimate dinner in London... www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026...

There are so many lines worth a pull quote in this extraordinary @codastory.com essay by Garry Pierre-Pierre that I don't know where to start. Just read the whole thing.

"Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea showed how spreading a narrative can erode sovereignty before any force is necessary ...Is America now doing something similar to its closest ally?" Few people know this playbook like @antelava.bsky.social. Heed her.

This is exactly the future imagined by people working in tech and human rights when adoption began to accelerate. They've been warning us for a decade, and advocating for limits, but local successes in restraining police use of these tools pale beside the wholesale abuses now occurring.

It is a long time since I lived in Madison but I really, really like the work @wisconsinwatch.org is doing. This is an example both whimsical and very serious: wisconsinwatch.org/2026/01/wisc...

Sundance paid for me to travel to the festival so I could moderate a panel on the politics of AI. They pulled me last minute because of my q's for this movie and support of Ghost in the Machine. More details on the pod this week about what happened, but this thread makes me proud I got booted.

The adminstration's lies keep running head on into the bulwark that is the Times's visual investigation team: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Hamba Kahle to the unbelievably brave Renfrew Christie www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/w...

Newsroom raids and searches of journalists are hallmarks of illiberal regimes, usually intended to intimidate journalists from reporting and to deter their sources from sharing information with them. We need to make sure these practices aren't normalized here. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/u...

Anti-corruption populism is coming (back) to America

Reading about the renewables boom in South Africa while sitting in rural upstate New York, where many lower income residents rely on wood-stoves because other energy sources are just too costly. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/c...

Exactly the right frame.

The decline of thicker #Arctic sea ice by decade in the month of December... this has wide-ranging impacts. More info on this data: climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data...

Interesting: Journalists at Politico and E&E News say they won an arbitration case over the use of A.I. tools in their newsrooms. "This case marks one of the nation’s first major labor-arbitration rulings addressing the impact of AI on journalists’ work." wbng.org/2025/12/01/p...

You could read this story as another awful pixel in a large picture, but @gwynnefitz.bsky.social connects the human reality of children woken by armed men in the dead of night, and the urgent questions confronting police and elected officials across the country.

An exceptionally clear explanation of the regional and local forces at play in the unfolding horror of Sudan's war.

The assault on the BBC is the culmination of a long campaign by right wing press barons in the UK and their US allies. @joelsimonsays.bsky.social connects the transatlantic dots, and argues for an urgent testing of strategies to fend off existential risk.

"Today, a media conglomerate led by Orbán’s allies, known as the Central European Press and Media Foundation, or KESMA, controls nearly five hundred outlets, all of which echo the government’s every utterance, be it state propaganda or the nastiest smear campaign..." www.cjr.org/opinion/vikt...

Many news orgs are "all-in" on AI, fearful of repeating the errors of the early digital era, but what if the real risk lies in handing chunks of our business, our civic function, and our values to a handful of hyperscalers? @alixdunn.com prodded me to think that through with her for @themaybe.org

AP reporter Regina Garcia Cano looked into a few of the men killed in Trump's extrajudicial strikes on Caribbean boats. "They were laborers, a fisherman, a taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a local crime boss who contracted out smuggling services" apnews.com/article/trum...

Despite Zohran Mamdani's coalition-building among South Asian New Yorkers, caste barely figured in the campaign. @yashicadutt.bsky.social spoke with Dalit canvassers and parsed his legislative record on an issue that animates both supporters and his critics on the Hindu right.

Vital work from @lighthousereports.com and Sudan War Monitor. sudanwarmonitor.com/p/rsf-ethnic...

As Google's news czar Richard Gingras was a hugely influential presence in the conversation over journalism and big tech for 15 years, but he seldom faced more than mildly skeptical questioning. In Vienna last month @antelava.bsky.social flipped the script www.codastory.com/authoritaria...

I am taking particular pleasure in the complete collapse of trans-as-unbeatable-wedge-issue narrative this morning. It might be an 80-20 issue in voters minds, but it has to be on voters minds to matter. The results in VA demonstrate that it is very much not on voters minds.

The most slept-on ballot question in NY was no. 1, allowing the expansion of xc ski facilities at Mt Van Hoevenberg in exchange for land being added to the Adirondack park. It looks like passing narrowly after supporters did almost nothing to explain its merits. spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-...

This NYT story about how Mamdani dealt with the opposition by the city's elites fails to mention one particular elite institution: The NYT editorial page, which last June railed against him as "uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges... lacks political savvy" www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/n... 1/

NYT or THE CITY. You decide.

Total turnout is already near 1 million As points of reference:

This is a cute, savvy-seeming headline, confirmed by 3 Republican sources, and no-one else. It's also a woefully inadequate way to map the legal, fiscal, and messaging terrain that Trump and the next mayor will battle over.

Federal agents many in masks at Broadway and Canal moments ago questioning a man, a bunch more agents just walked away. "Can i call my mom," the man asks, he's now being loaded into a car and being driven away. More TK @thecity.nyc

Remember when the internet was this resilient, decentralized thing, designed to route around problems?

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

New in @niemanreports.org: Media watchers say recent court orders have given Gautam Adani, the Adani Group's billionaire owner, increasing censorship powers over his critics, representing a grave threat to press freedom in India. niemanreports.org/india-lawfar...

Anyone from the AI world who thinks ‘agentic AI will replace journalists’ should read this piece. Anyone who thinks ‘public service journalism is dead’ should read this piece (or revise their understanding of ‘public service’)

Lastly, from a business pov: this is such a dogshit deal. Spending $150 million for a publication that has fewer than 200k paid subs subscribers, no advertising, and revenue about $10 mill a year. This is not a money making business but instead an outrage making business. And now it’s CBS.

JUST IN: Chicago journalistsa re suing DHS and ICE over force used against reporters: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Peak college application season for high school seniors and their families, and some pretty clear signaling from UMich in this full page ad in the print edition of today's Times.

And what has consistently fueled popular resistance to authoritarian leaders from Kenya to Ukraine and beyond? Corruption.

This likely won't be the last deportation for committing an act of journalism, and it is a warning that indiscriminate arrests by local police around protests will be used as tools and pretexts.

Georgia (the country) is on the frontlines of resisting Russian style repression. Aggressive tactics targeting the independent media have continued escalating, including the case of Georgian journalist Mzia Amaglobeli (see thread). cpj.org/2025/10/geor...

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador. Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

This is what the Indian government does to civil servants it doesn't like and can't fire.

I never do stuff like this but what the heck ... it's the start of a new era in public media ..

Absolutely clear documentation of assaults on at least two journalists by ICE officers, who also caused a serious injury to a third. There must be accountability for these attacks on reporters and on their first amendment rights.

One likely winner is emerging from the years-long fight to build a casino in New York City. It's Donald freaking Trump. nymag.com/intelligence...

Something like this happened to me too: I had my doctor call in a prescription (asthma) but they couldn’t find it initially. They clearly wanted to give me the vaccine but were stumped. I finally suggested they looks at my scripts and they found one for an asthma inhaler. I got my vaccine.

Kathy Hochul's executive order should make it easy for everyone in New York to get a COVID vaccine without a prescription, and without citing an underlying condition. The reality in local pharmacies is very different. @lauren-hartley.bsky.social has this guide to navigating the uncertainty.