The best political feature I read last year was @kerryhowley.bsky.social on Pete Hegseth in @nymag.com nymag.com/intelligence...

How much did it cost? The planning started months ago, possibly preceding or during the shutdown. How much were we paying for this while we weren’t paying for food stamps?

[it was actually worse when they pretended (or truly believed!) it was about democracy and scolded as cynical anyone who argued otherwise]

A college sophomore at an Occupy rally could not have generated such a grotesque outsized caricature of US imperialism

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

As it happens, I have experience with high-level government demands to stop an explosive, accurate story from running, and I also have experience with 60 Minutes spiking a story I was involved in, so I have thoughts about the travesty at CBS. If you want some journalism anecdotes, here are a lot:

I'm not great about tooting my own horn. But as an independent journalist whose work is reliant on contributions from my readers, it's part of the job. So here's a post and thread on my work over the last year and beyond -- and why you, reader, should subscribe. (Plus, shameless dog photos!)

I responded to the film differently, and a good deal more positively, but this is a fantastic essay. defector.com/one-battle-a...

“prices work” is left-coded

thinking for no reason at all about my very first job, which was at a censored newspaper in Myanmar and seemed very distant from my life and my country

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

There is a tremendous opportunity for a brand new generation of media outlets to rise up right now because many news outlets that spent decades painstakingly building their credibility are seeing it torched by bootlickers with incredible speed.

CATO INSTITUTE: Despite DOGE slashing jobs, government spending in every month of 2025 “was greater than in every other year .. An observer who did not know when DOGE started could not identify it” on a chart. 🤡 www.cato.org/blog/doge-pr...

Hello, at the University of Minnesota, we're hiring a visiting creative nonfiction writer for the next 2-3 years to teach a 1-1 (one grad class, one undergrad class) and potentially sit on some MFA thesis committees. This job will give you time to write you next book: hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/371...

Not that it will but the willingness of Americans to obey is a very funny contrast with our self-image and should probably prompt some reflection bsky.app/profile/jonf...

A tiny trial in New York has shown that personalized mRNA vaccines can provoke massive, lasting immune responses against pancreatic cancer, even as sweeping federal cuts now threaten the fragile labs required to produce them. theintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-breakthr...

worth pointing out how we first came to know this. In populations affected by measles, deaths from other infections are elevated for YEARS afterward. So scientists started comparing blood samples and looking for antibodies.

!!!!!! nymag.com/intelligence...

This reaction from a guide at @auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social offers a profound and urgent insight. From iandunt.substack.com/p/thank-god-... HT @mgcroadster.bsky.social

Any theory about a way out of Trumpism must contend with the fact that parents of both children who have died of measles maintain they were right not to vaccinate. You will not convince people they’ve done harm. You can only present them with new choices.

This really was one of the most heartbreaking articles I’ve read in a while. I don’t think people comprehend the scale of destruction wrought by this administration already, not even close nymag.com/intelligence...

some great sentences in this one

As so much reporting about RFK Jr. fails to meet the moment or worse, this piece about what it's like with people with actual expertise and the goal of saving lives rather than culling them to work for his HHS from @kerryhowley.bsky.social is should-win-major-awards good: nymag.com/intelligence...

impeccable and harrowing, by @kerryhowley.bsky.social: nymag.com/intelligence...

How RFK Jr. destroyed the CDC. Another banger from Kerry Howley @kerryhowley.bsky.social nymag.com/intelligence...

This piece is amazingly written! No surprise but thank u @kerryhowley.bsky.social & @nymag.com

I wrote about the private, intimate, often ridiculous agonies of working for a man who think you’re a monster nymag.com/intelligence...

Every day is a good day, but today is an ESPECIALLY good day, to re-share @kerryhowley.bsky.social's profile of Pete Hegseth. nymag.com/intelligence...

Radical jihadist communism actually began in Iowa City. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/c...

Tonight! 11/17 at 7 p.m. in Prairie Lights bookstore, Jen Percy will read from 'Girls Play Dead', joined in conversation by Kerry Howley events.uiowa.edu/event/35042

🦆 Bird flu in WA: This is the first-ever human case of H5N5 avian influenza. It's been seen in animals before, but never before in people. It was confirmed in a Grays Harbor County resident that had backyard poultry which may have mingled with wild birds. doh.wa.gov/newsroom/h5n...

tariff level with china should be set at zero except for literally anything my parents want to buy my kids off amazon, in which case it should be 10000000 percent

Realizing that the massive funding boost for secret police is going to be undercut by the inherent corruption and graft in this administration is a weird feeling

“i don’t want to hear about the affordability” is a gift

just tried to buy a $150 coat for my kid and was met with $103 in tariffs. is this because of the socialist mayor

consistent libertarians exist and they look like @ilyasomin.bsky.social

the end of something

sorry but mamdani and cuomo should have worn blue and yellow hats, respectively

normalize not knowing why anyone wins

The great @attackerman.bsky.social on Dick Cheney www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Yawning at the limited government folks warning that a democratic socialist mayor of New York is an existential threat, but who remain guardedly optimistic about an authoritarian president.

people living under autocracy inevitably view state-sponsored news with bemused derision; we should do the same

They finally built a machine that can simulate peaking on edibles

Join us tonight at 7 pm for a reading by Rachel Corbett and conversation with @kerryhowley.bsky.social !

Why did Indiana University attack and cut its own student newspaper? Well, in a twist of irony any English professor would call clichéd, it turns out IU did it because they were angry about the students' reporting on a FIRE report naming IU as the worst public university for free speech in the US.

If only the East Wing of the White House were a confederate general cast in bronze

“‘If he ever had us, he lost us,’ one current Army general told The Washington Times.” x.com/mikerglenn/s...

very quick pivot from “these are violent terrorists committed to destruction” to “these are irrelevant low-energy retirees”

Sliwa on transportation: “I like to avoid yellow cabs. As you know I was shot in the back of a yellow cab in 1992 by the Gambinos.” You can’t beat at NYC mayoral debate.