“They’re basically torturing people into signing off on their own deportation,” said one attorney. Superb, deeply reported story, via @charpentier.bsky.social

People often disparage the press — and we often get it wrong — but almost everything you know about this administration is not because pundits go on tv or social media and pontificate but because of relentless reporting from real journalists at institutions that give them resources to do so.

Here's who the Washington Post just laid off.

I really urge you to not just shake your head at the headline of this but to read each word, to imagine each step these kids took, to sit with the terrible dilemma of the mother, to imagine the principal driving toward Whipple.

One day, if we are lucky, the erasure of American history will itself be remembered as a shameful chapter in American history

How sad is this? The CDC closed its FOIA office, so this story could only be published because a Danish journalist provided Rolling Stone with the documents, after obtaining them through a freedom of information request to the University of Southern Denmark www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

This is so good.

Hey everybody, it’s the 250th anniversary of Common Sense, whose luminous author Tom Paine, figured centrally in the American Revolution, the Enlightenment and the movement for Democracy still sweeping the Earth. The times hath found us.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to memory-hole Jan. 6, thousands of videos from the riot live on ProPublica’s website and other places. Additionally, much of the deleted DOJ database can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (Published Jan. 2025)

Wanna see real-life miracles? Fund scientific research. A team of US scientists just cured Alzheimer’s in mice — and there is now hope that the disease can be reversed in humans. futurism.com/health-medic...

James Merril’s poem “Christmas Tree,” written while he was dying of AIDS. 1995.

This is an almost shockingly wise essay. I'm glad I've finally read it.

This is a very good poem.

One citizen said that federal agents in Idaho pointed guns at her children, ages 6 and 8, and dragged her 14-year-old daughter out of a truck and zip-tied her. The mother told investigators that an agent threatened to “fucking blow your head off.” By @nicolefoy.bsky.social

"You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear" Mark Twain www.gutenberg.org/files/8475/8...

From Frederick Douglass's 1867 "Composite Nation" speech, a defense of Chinese migration to the United States at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was intensifying. teachingamericanhistory.org/document/our...

Hell with it, I'm just going to post the whole thing here via screencap and alt text. It's Kaleb Horton, man, his writing always deserves the second read, especially since it could have just easily been lost forever like so much else. Read it, share it.

I will never forget having to edit Jamal’s final, posthumous piece for the Washington Post, after he was murdered. He was calling for free expression in the Arab world. You can read it here : www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/glo...

“With immigration agents under intense pressure to deport thousands of people each day, Ms. Lopez was pushed through the system swiftly and was deported within four days of the factory raid. As a result, Jorge is now cared for by two siblings who are barely adults themselves.”

Here’s video of federal agents doing a drive by pepper spraying that hit a father and his one-year old on Saturday when the Feds were hitting Little Village and Cicero

From @dansinker.com, "What I Need You To Understand, Notes from Chicago in Late October" dansinker.com/posts/2025-1...

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

This is so good. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This really hasn’t gotten enough attention this week. @wired.com #ICE www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.

A free, independent press that holds our public servants accountable for lies is the bedrock of democracy.

A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

good night

Senator Merkley is on hour 20 of reading How Democracies Die, mixed w commentary, on u.s. senate floor

After being detained by U.S. Customs after returning from spring break, Harvard University undergraduate Andrés Muedano reflects on the challenges and unexpected fears international students currently face. #Harvard www.harvardmagazine.com/undergraduat...

Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen...they promptly let the individual go." The reality: Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. A must read from the very talented @nicolefoy.bsky.social:

In Harvard Magazine, a devastating dismantling of the legacy of an alumnus, John Roberts. He held himself out as an institutionalist, and then used his position as Chief Justice to slowly dismantle the rule of law in America, laying the predicates for totalitarian dictatorship.

Truly excellent new piece by Lincoln Caplan in @harvardmagazine.bsky.social on John Roberts, seen in full. Careful, meticulous, devastating case on how "institutionalist" has enabled destruction of crucial institutions. Including his now discredited court. www.harvardmagazine.com/legal/suprem...

There’s a lot in here that deserves a pull quote, but this is the most egregious. I need people to recognize the gravity of the situation here in Chicago;

The First Amendment explicitly guarantees: -the right of the people peaceably to assemble -to petition the Government for a redress of grievances -the free exercise of religion -freedom of speech If this priest had also been press, ICE would have violated all five 1A freedoms at once.

Journalist Mario Guevara has been deported. He spent three-plus months in ICE custody after livestreaming a protest, before being flown out of the U.S. on Oct. 3. In a recent post, he wrote: “My dedication to my work cost me my freedom.”

Here’s Kaleb Horton on Charles Portis. slate.com/culture/2020...

Still shocked by the news about Kaleb Horton. I only knew him through his writing, but his writing meant a lot to me, and I'm really sad that there won't be more of it. Everything @mattdpearce.com says here is true. He had the gift. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-last-m...

“Steve Held, the journalist arrested tonight and taken to a so far undisclosed location, was part of the reporting team that exposed the falsity of ICE’s official narrative on the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas González. His work speaks for itself.”

Holy shit. Kaleb Horton was a standup guy, a monumental talent, and just so sincere about his love for his family, his hometown, and his craft. Gutting, cutting, huge loss for all of us.

I was saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Kaleb Horton. (See thread below.) One of the best American writers of his generation. Most recently at Rolling Stone, but at every outlet where his byline appeared, he had that very rare gift for literary eloquence that read like ordinary speech.

One of the best pieces by Kaleb Horton ever is no longer easily available, because of course MTV wouldn't maintain actual good music writing done for its site once. Thankfully I found it again via some digging: his 2016 memorial to Merle Haggard on his passing. Link here, screencaps to follow.

Here’s Kaleb Horton on John Prine. pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...

Rest easy, Kaleb Horton. About the only post 2016 election piece worth a damn, and one of the few that showed how 2024 was going to happen too. web.archive.org/web/20221130...

One of the most humane people I've ever sat down with. I think about this book all the time. What a loss.

I experienced this last week & refused, saying I had never before been asked to provide the names of any analysts I was planning to quote to get a comment. Spox replied that maybe they were D donors. (In that case, it was 3 retired top military JAG officers.) I guess that was not a weird oneoff.

we wrote about this WH tactic recently. they’re asking journalists for expert source names and then using them to look up political donations in FEC records to try to discredit those sources as biased. www.npr.org/2025/08/18/n...

Looking up something in the Boston census of 1900, and these are just other families on the same pages. 2 children surviving out of 14 1 child surviving out of 5 0 children surviving out of 10 3 children surviving out of 4

For the latest @harvardmagazine.bsky.social, I talked to Brandon Terry about recent rollbacks of civil rights and how we've been telling ourselves the wrong story about MLK and the Movement. www.harvardmagazine.com/social-scien...

There is absolutely no way that AI would have made the same choice that Stanislav Petrov made on the 26th of September 1983, when he literally saved the world.