Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

US Government Deploys Elon Musk’s Grok as Nutrition Bot, Where It Immediately Gives Advice for Rectal Use of Vegetables ok, that's enough 2026 for today futurism.com/artificial-i...

VERSION 2.0 of the Segregation Tracking Project is here! New data on racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and schools over the last 30+ years for every school district, metro area, state, county, congressional district (new!), and more! edopportunity.org/segregation/

If you feed a mess of notes into a machine, and you don't know what you want to say, you will produce confused garbage. If you know what you want to say, craft your notes in an organized fashion so that the machine produces a coherent article...that's writing. You've only saved yourself some typing.

Wingspan, but make it data viz!

new most bizarre moment of the Olympics just dropped Norwegian biathlete wins bronze medal, then, totally unprompted, reveal he cheated on his GF, she left him, and he wants to apologize publicly hoping she takes him back www.vg.no/sport/i/vr5g...

"More than half of all multilingual students in South Portland, and nearly half in Portland, were absent on some of the most affected days. Between Jan. 20 and 28, Black and Hispanic students in Portland missed school at a rate 30 percentage points higher than their white peers."

It is really worth your time to stop what you're doing and read this INCREDIBLY reporting from Minneapolis by my talented colleague Bianca.

Look at this: @inquirer.com has digitally preserved the interpretative signage removed by NPS, and used annotations to explain what specifically was flagged before removal. This keeps the content publicly accessible (for now) while doing newsworthy reporting www.inquirer.com/news/philade...

I talked to the principal at my kids' middle school yesterday, and he said about 30% of kids have not been showing up. Hard to fathom the academic and mental health impact this is having on kids, parents and teachers.

This is such a cool illustration of how the Mercator map distorts the size of Greenland, which looks as big as the whole continent of Africa on that map but is actually the size of Mexico.

"A Minneapolis couple said that ICE agents deployed tear gas... around them and their six children — the youngest only 6 months old — as they tried to maneuver their car out of a tense protest on Wednesday night." They were driving home from a son’s basketball game. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Sure. AI companies have ALWAYS been training their models on Wikipedia content, which under the free and open access model is available to anyone — including AI companies. Agreements like these require AI companies to limit and offset the strain they place on Wikimedia infrastructure.

"The emu was returned to its owners unharmed. No charges were filed."

Happening Now: Students have walked out of school and are protesting against ICE in Saint Paul, Minnesota

I'm back into journalism after four months of maternity leave! What did I miss?

A very sobering and important post. Even though sometimes AI can be very helpful for translating complex medical information into plain English, seeing my own family members rely on the AI summary from Google for health information makes me worried.

Personalized software *prevents* you from resonating with community; it blinds you to the many interpretations of media; it lets you stew in bad ideas and never encounter challenges. Community commuting requires you to encounter & parse & build with others, and sometimes compromise. That's good!

Former BLS commissioner Bill Beach says the agency has lost 25% of its staff since January. 40% of leadership positions are vacant. And DOL leadership “does not seem to support the Bureau.” #ASSA2026 #EconSky

Other than the clear top-of-alphabet favoritism in this list (9 out of 20 have names that start between A and C? Typical biased media) this is a great list. Subscribe to The Onion, too, obviously, but this is a very good way to spend your money on good people.

A 6-year-old boy is missing after ICE arrested him and his dad in NYC last week and shipped them off to separate facilities. www.thecity.nyc/2025/12/02/i... @thecity.nyc @gwynnefitz.bsky.social

not sure if this means that LLMs prove that "evil is real", so much that it proves that LLMs can understand what bad behavior is in the cultural context in which they were trained, even without being explicitly told

Logging into Bluesky after Shabbat, what did I miss folks?

The opposite of the Moms for Liberty wave should get more attention

this is what scientific progress is all about www.404media.co/breathing-th...

Louisiana residents are having problems getting the COVID-19 vaccination, particularly for children. Some of the big chain pharmacies won't vaccinate children in Louisiana, even with a prescription. From @wwno.org #lalege www.wwno.org/public-healt...

Schools in Western NC saw a massive spike in homelessness after Hurricane Helene -- but because of the vagaries of the federal funding cycle, only a handful of counties had McKinney-Vento money available to help those kids. Read this amazing collab between AP and local outlets:

Published this and got a reader email asking me when women will be serial killers at the same rates as men. Not quite sure what that has to do with sixth grade girls learning STEM, but certainly a question to ponder.

With the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina arriving tomorrow, I was privileged to be able to tell the stories of young students and educators who lived through that time -- in their own words.

“Dear Law maker, I really be trying to do my work so I won’t be getting in trouble but I don’t be understanding the work,” wrote one student to a legislator. “They don’t really hands on help me.”

"AI-generated text output by Politico Pro’s Report Builder details fictional lobbying efforts of “the Basket Weavers Guild” and “the League of Left-Handed Plumbers.”"

I now also have a (work in progress) list of #DataViz specific resources as well! Link: nrennie.rbind.io/data-viz-res... You can find links to tools, papers, books, blogs, and websites that are related to data visualisation. I'll be adding more resources soon 📊 #RStats #Python

"“We just didn’t think that this would affect us because we were never late, we never missed anything, everything was proper and legal in our case,” she said. “We just did not realize that people were being detained for nothing.”"

Has anyone tested if GPT-5 knows how many states have an R in them? GPT-4 was confidently, comedically wrong.

I absolutely love this anecdote from a column about humanities professors adapting their classes to AI:

“I want to be heard,” Ms. Osintseva said. “I am often told that we can’t change anything. But a human always has a choice between violence and peace.”

NEW investigation reveals how AI keeps students under constant surveillance. It's creating a Big Brother-like atmosphere where even a private joke can lead to arrest. I found one Florida school district that involuntarily hospitalized kids >70 times for mental evals because of surveillance alerts.

“We wanted to test the guardrails. The visceral initial response is, ‘Oh my Lord, there are no guardrails.’ The rails are completely ineffective. They’re barely there — if anything, a fig leaf.”

Negotiating a records request fee from $2,822 to $29 remains one of the achievements I'm most pleased with in journalism.

'Mohammed Qassas from Khan Younis in southern Gaza said his children are so hungry that he is forced to storm aid trucks. “I have young children, how am I supposed to feed them? No one has mercy. This resembles the end of the world,” he said.'

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements This is a big deal

one of the single best deals in streaming. i've been paying for PBS Passport for years. it rules

'In Kodiak, Alaska, KMXT estimated the cuts would slice 22% from its budget. Public radio stations in the sprawling, heavily rural state often provide not just news but alerts about natural disasters like tsunamis, landslides and volcanic eruptions.'

the comments on this post are one excellent bird pun after another

"Holovaty doesn’t hate AI—Soundslice uses machine learning to do its magic—but is mixed on LLMs. He compared his experience with ChatGPT to dealing with an overzealous sales team selling a feature that doesn’t exist."

"We have lost journalists in conflicts, some have been injured, others taken prisoner. But none of us can ever remember seeing colleagues die of hunger....We refuse to watch them die."

An article about a deepfake video also included a fake quote ... from a disinformation researcher.

“AI is always available. It never gets bored with you. It’s never judgmental,” says Ganesh Nair, an 18-year-old in Arkansas. “When you’re talking to AI, you are always right. You’re always interesting. You are always emotionally justified.”

Payphones are making a comeback! apnews.com/article/verm...

Ever since the former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics was dismissed by the Trump administration in February, I wanted to hear her story. Peggy Carr was among a string of Black senior officials fired in early 2025. (1/3)