never take freedom of the press or access to news for granted. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/...

Not all heroes wear capes.

IMPORTANT: Before the fascist attack on Senator Alex Padilla, Kristi Noem said that her gestapo in California were staying to "liberate the city socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country." Don't let that slide by.

Oh. My. God. This is horrifying.

there is a go fund me to support the surviving husband of jonathan joss www.gofundme.com/f/help-king-...

This is super cool.

So just finished Season 2 of The Last of Us and what were they thinking!? That wasn't Seattle rain.

Been speaking to a LOT of panicked faculty, parents and students here in China today. Now is when students at snagging visas for summer exchange trips and camps (so not just those heading to college). The lack of info on how temporary this "pause" may be is freaking a lot of people out.

Do they make you submit proof of citizenship when you RSVP?

Real quote from the teenager who is about to start applying to college in a few months: "Wait. You mean you can own the land the house is on? And you don't have to give it back to the government?" Guess this one's been in China long enough.

Oh. My. God.

Just finished Ancillary Justice. In awe of the craft behind it. Why have I not run into this book sooner?

Fighter jets are DEI now?

Yay!

Doesn't feel like a good sign that the dude's already practicing his "thoughts and prayers" face. They know Grok can't land planes, right?

What the what?? I know a lot of people who work in auto plants, and I have yet to meet someone who is doing it with the hope that their kids, too, will work at the auto plant. The dream is typically for the kids to do something that makes more money or happiness. Those are the jobs of the future.

Interesting dive into parts of how China's social media censorship works. Makes some excellent points about what it is NOT.

One of the most shocking things I have read for a while: t.co/lg46ijHLDF

What the what!?

My salt fork made it all the way to China!

Now, that's a flex.

Deeply concerning: US citizen lawyer getting detained and his phone searched on reentering the U.S. at Customs. www.freep.com/story/news/l...

🚨UPDATE: Rümeysa Öztürk has now suffered three separate asthma attacks while in DHS custody. She has not received her required asthma medications—a violation of her fundamental right to medical care. This is cruelty, it is neglect, and it is a damning moral and legal failure.

As journalism becomes harder to do (and harder to get paid for), it also becomes more dangerous.

Your tariff rate is your star sign divided by the number of boys you've kissed, multiplied by one

...And that's how I started the day by panic-buying a Macbook.

“It was as if the detainees’ lives were worthless,” another said. The flight attendants who spoke with ProPublica believed those lives were not worthless. That, many of them told me, is why they no longer fly for ICE Air. It’s also why they decided to share their stories: tinyurl.com/bdz5dc5f 10/

very important and I've been hearing the same

Every so often I go back to my Twitter account and remove bits and pieces of it. What's most interesting about the process (for me at least) is how many things I reshared over the years have already been removed because the original posters left.

A game you can play at home: read the op/ed that led to Rumeysa Ozturk's abduction and ask yourself: have I ever publicly posted something more inflammatory than this?

Took the kids to a performance of Rite of Spring last night in Nanjing, and there was someone famous in the audience (evidence: half the audience turned around to take pictures of him). It must be weird to not be able to attend a show without your presence becoming part of the show.

A note to would-be US visitors: “You have greater rights as a criminal than as a foreign national coming with a visa.” "Here’s what you need to know about your rights when entering the US" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Pretty scary precedent to set. wapo.st/4bUzDoY

Right now, I help over a hundred students understand laws and risks in countries they're considering studying in, and things like this make me so nervous for those considering the US. As Trump Broadens Crackdown, Focus Expands to Legal Immigrants and Tourists www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/u...

Again, I don't know how the Onion will survive this headline environment: www.cbsnews.com/news/egg-pro...

The 13-year-old agreed to watch Charade with me this week (after I assured her it would be in color). And yet again we both loved the ending, and we are now puzzled over when endings to movies stopped being so good.

Watched Some Like It Hot this week with the 13-year-old, and it was shocking how progressive and modern it felt compared to *waves arm around to encapsulate all the stuff in the news now*.

This is so terrifying, I can't even... (gift link) How a Columbia Student Fled to Canada After ICE Came Looking for Her www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/n...

Kid 1's classmates, for their IB diploma CAS project, played the following for their school-wide radio show this week: 1. YMCA (because Trump is famous in China for dancing to it) 2. A very, very positive take on SpaceX 3. Erika (the German march associated with the Wehrmacht) 🤐 (No words)

Gee. Never woulda seen that coming... 🤦

Another good Amazon alternative thread

The global university hunt to find a future place for the 11th grader has been so stressful it wasn't until finding one that seems almost perfect (in-budget, access to research in the right field, not at present risk of losing funding, in a safe city) that I understood how bad this mission was.

Some good alternatives to Amazon in this thread.

Yet another important investigation out of Wired. Ashame Musk is giving them so many opportunities for great journalism. Next up, I guess we'll be selling the pig-butchering kingpins gold cards. www.wired.com/story/starli...

"In all, ProPublica found, more than $39 million has been earmarked to DOGE in the Trump administration’s first month. "For perspective, in recent years Congress had allocated around $50 million a year for the IT modernization initiative that DOGE supplanted, budget records show."

Recommend bookmarking this www.ncsl.org/financial-se...

Perfect timing.

As a journalist who covers extremism at the local level, I think it’s a mistake to view Trump’s Napoleonic statement as solely about presidential power. Consider if it’s interpreted as a wink and a nod for any extremist to act outside the law to “save” the country as they see fit