The Washington Post was consistently doing some of the best climate reporting out there in recent years. This is a huge loss (h/t @sammyroth.bsky.social) open.substack.com/pub/climatec...

We are in the midst of another racial reckoning. This one purging all the gains of the former and then some.

Don’t believe the claims about ‘kids safety’ behind the push for Online ID checks. They are and always have been about surveillance and censorship. @cassiewillson.bsky.social is spot on in this video

NEW: Abigail Spanberger this afternoon ordered that all state agencies leave ICE's 287(g) program. This means that the state police (and some other agencies) will no longer be empowered to detain and arrest people for ICE. Big, big move by the governor within weeks of coming into office.

The cycle from Amazon killing bookstores to Bezos axing the books section of the Post is something

always bears repeating that this is NOT a financial decision. jeff bezos is worth over 250 billion dollars. he can afford to lose many millions and never even notice it. this is, at its core, a political and personal decision by bezos to destroy the post

I think one thing people outside Minnesota don't understand is that after Good and Pretti were killed by feds while observing, the most normal people you could imagine have made peace with the fact that they could be next, and they are still out there because they say it's the right thing to do.

Everybody has it backwards. Billionaires aren’t buying up these institutions to make money. They’re buying them to kill them. Same as the oligarchs destroying government and social programs and things like weather forecasting and regulatory bodies. They’re creating a world they control completely

One immediate effort (and the @postguild.bsky.social will likely share more): www.gofundme.com/f/standing-t...

The mass layoffs at the Washington Post feel worse than the ones made during 2020, especially after the ones at NBC News, CBS, and the WSJ. So many smart and experienced people will leave the industry forever.

A lot of people cannot just start a paid newsletter or become freelancers to sustain their careers. The sports, metro, and international desks did work that requires *team* resources, like legal checks, documents, access to archives, and long-term beat experience.

My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power

NEWS: The cuts were so severe that at least one department head asked to leave The Post rather than be included in the planning. Peter Finn, The Post's international editor, requested that he be laid off once he learned about the scope of the cuts to his section. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/b...

It's hard not to feel like a crazy person when I've been shouting about this at the top of my lungs for 5 or 10 years (even back on the platform where I nominally had half a million followers) and ... nothing happens. (I know @chrislhayes.bsky.social knows, but I'm not sure why it never resonated.)

“Immiseration is one of the ruling class’ most powerful tools these days, and that feels like the only logic today’s layoffs have…. Today’s cuts feel like a PR move as much as a corporate one, a reminder of the power of the rich, who can make worse so many lives…” aftermath.site/washington-p...

I would just reiterate, that it seems unlikely that I, Just A Guy, A Regular Guy, knew more in-depth detail about Peter Mandelson's links to Jeffrey Epstein than the Prime Minister off the United Kingdom who was at the time considering appointing him as Ambassador to the United States.

I personally do not think some rich man should be able to buy an institution like this like a toy and then break it when he doesn’t want to play with it anymore. bsky.app/profile/benm...

My favorite genre of Epstein emails are powerful people emailing WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN about how MeToo has gone too far and the woke mob must be stopped.

‘Our findings suggest that Al-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation - particularly in safety-critical domains.’ (HT @williamcb.bsky.social)

‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’ arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

Floored by this story. A man wrote a pollite email to a federal prosecutor objecting to the deportation of an Afghan seeking asylum. DHS responded with an administrative warrant to get the man's info from Google, then visited his home to intimidate him.

Devastatingly sad. Every Labour MP should be forced to read this. In fact, every MP, who rushed back to Parliament to vote to save one steel mill, whilst hastening the collapse of dozens of universities - and harming the students, staff, communities and economies universities sustain and support

Everything in this report reflects on what we value, for communities, for peripheral places, for young people, for education, for the future - and it looks like we’ve got it all wrong.

Fucking surreal that people dressed like this and carrying assault rifles are permitted to kidnap people off our streets

Excellent article but stark reminder that for all the perceptions of universities as ivory towers for elites, they are actually vital hubs in towns n cities supporting local businesses and providing key services as well as education….

Re entry into a community, a space or relationship is earned, not a given. A resource of unrepentant abusers is that they have drilled into the rest of us that we owe them infinite chances. We don’t. Chances are finite. Those are the breaks. often they want to be absolved without changing. Pass.

For a v long time, I conflated "person who can make good art" with "person who has a functioning moral compass." I think that transference (based on appreciation, love, enthusiasm) is something a lot of us do. It hurts a lot when we find that our appreciation was hijacked so someone can do bad shit.

'“Back then there was a clear national vision for universities, and they were mostly publicly funded,” he says. “Now you stand or fall on your student demand.”' (Colin Riorden, former Essex VC) Read, and weep. 2/2

'When it opened, the campus housed a GP surgery and a new dental clinic offering free treatment to local people. This was followed later by the forum – a library and art gallery shared by the university and local people.' 1/2

Why aren’t more older adults getting flu or COVID-19 shots? ihpi.umich.edu/news-events/...

In particular, leveraging mental health conditions here in a very pointed way to prey on the superficial 'mental health awareness' floating around is especially vile when you consider that being kidnapped; fearing for your family; and experiencing systemic racism all cause extreme mental harm.

Seeing yet another 'using whistles is disablist' piece circulating: for the 40 millionth time, using disabled people as cover like this is disgusting and calculated to prey on people who are anxious about doing the wrong thing. Doesn't escape notice that white people are the worst offenders.

The unfathomably cynical hermeneutics of the American political theology has done more to advance nihilistic disbelief than anything in contemporary pop culture.

Martinez: "[I] sat in federal court and watched from 20 feet away as the border patrol agent who attempted to kill me testified at a hearing. Agent Charles Exum—Charles Exum, my attempted executioner was Charles Exum—I hope the government does not consider my use of his name here to be...doxxing."

Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano, 11 years old. In dreadful ICE detention for nearly a month.

The revelations about Munro were so difficult because the marks of the horror are, in retrospect, all over the stories I found most important in my life.

The revelations about Munro were so difficult because the marks of the horror are, in retrospect, all over the stories I found most important in my life.

The way the public participates in these trials is also extrajudicial deterrent from speaking up against sexual violence, which is in many ways more powerful than any court case. This is part of the potential Epstein, Bannon, and their allies saw from the online alt-right

There’s literally a straight line between Trump, Epstein, and the retaliatory lawsuits against women who came forward with allegations against celebrity men like Amber Heard and Blake Lively. They all even have the same PR folks. And yet people still refuse to see it

What the public does not understand about these retaliatory cases is that what is on trial is the ability for men to abuse their power against women without consequence. When women lose defamation lawsuits for speaking up, men win the right to abuse with impunity

I was looking at an academic book by some random dude. It seemed interesting, until I got to the dedication, and... oh no.

I'm worried that the broader public isn't really understanding the Epstein Files. The problem isn't that everyone in the files is a secret pedophile, it's that all the people are corresponding with him because they *don't care that he's a pedophile*. It's a story of elite impunity.

There is a case to be made that any board of a university that signed an agreement that required paying a fee has breached their fiduciary duty and I think somebody should explore it

"Offices belonging to Elon Musk's social media platform, X, in France are being raided by the Paris prosecutor. Its cyber-crime unit is conducting the searches, it said in a statement on X. Europol is assisting." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Three-byline alert: 🚨 “.. Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, who .. addressed the agents on speakerphone, asking them questions as well as praising and thanking them for their work on the inquiry ..” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

Peter Mandelson leaked a sensitive UK government document to Jeffrey Epstein while he was business secretary that proposed £20bn of asset sales and revealed Labour’s tax policy plans. ft.trib.al/dT7pS1s

Horrifying. ICE confirms measles outbreak at Dilley family detention center. www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-dil...

Arizona, too. tucson.com/news/local/b...

No shortage of practical guide books in the 18th century... #history #food #medicine #disease #anatomy