New: Months before Bari Weiss pulled the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, her outlet The Free Press was joking about the megaprison Trump has lawlessly deported people to. "The hottest campaign spot…the new Jeffrey Epstein jet…the place to see and be seen." @andrewperez.bsky.social @swin24.bsky.social

“You can still get them a gift card in time, you piece of shit. You worm” - companies via email today

"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"

There are around 2,900 working households in the town and 7,800 in the micropolitan area (metro area, but for rural places). There are 13,000 people who work in the micro area. This layoff hits 25% of all employees in the area and 40% of the households. The place is going to empty out.

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Thread that pretty much breaks down all the ways Weiss undermined herself, her job, her staff, her institution... and it doesn't matter if she did it with intent or malice or ideology or (most likely) ineptitude. And in the end, she Streisand'd the piece and its content and politics. Brava.

imagine the kind of person you would have to be to watch that 60 Minutes segment and think "I must do everything I can to defend the people in charge of this process of sending people to be tortured."

i’ll just say that this isn’t the behavior of people who think their allies are on the verge of establishing a thousand year reich, much less holding control of the national legislature next year

Still got it baby www.esquire.com/entertainmen...

Long profile of Director Bhattacharya in Science. Lots of perspectives. www.science.org/content/arti... 1/13

<peer review emails this week>

it’s pretty pretty pretty grim to have the vice president literally repeat the rhetoric of white nationalists and then have the most powerful newspaper in the country say “he’s trying to split the difference” because he chose not to enunciate the 14 words.

One of the strangest & most unhelpful things I heard from Tracy Beth Høeg (amid strong competition!), the RFK Jr ally who wants the US to adopt Denmark's vaxx schedule, was when she said athletes are fit so don't need vaccines Um, OK 😔 www.today.com/health/teen-... www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y5q...

“It turns out that banishing the slur from public discourse was, in fact, important. Because now it’s back and it turns out that it does matter when subtext becomes actual text, when terrible people enable open hatred and bigotry, encouraging others to emulate them, degrading us all.”

Mood

This is Bari Weiss in stonewalling, chin-out, "I won't let the haters get to me" mode. Whether she gets away with it will be determined by whether Sharyn Alfonsi's colleagues at 60 Minutes and CBS News decide to fight back. Pelley, Stahl, Cooper--this decision goes on everyone's permanent record.

the Candace Owens stuff is bad for the gop but its Not happening in a vacuum. Things are on track to get much worse once President Trump himself is not leading the ticket. I report and explain in this morning’s FIRST DRAFT newsletter for @zeteo.com Read & subscribe plz: zeteo.com/p/our-maga-c...

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.

My quote of the day Masha Gessen

Not to downplay the ideological valence here, but this also smacks of the classic “editor who makes unnecessary last-minute changes/requests to seem like they’re doing something” trope.

💬 Viewpoint: The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission’s strategy to address chronic diseases in children relies on weak, voluntary, and unsupported initiatives while neglecting proven, evidence-based public health interventions. ja.ma/4qiHfax

So Bari Weiss’s first real editorial intervention at CBS is to repress coverage of American concentration camps.

Via @liamjscott.bsky.social at the other site here’s the full email from 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. She’s putting her career on the line by fighting here. And she’s fighting for all of us.

Here’s a gift link to this stunner Washpost story, quoting the 60 Minutes correspondent on the CECOT story, who accuses Bari Weiss of spiking the piece all because the Trump Administration wouldn’t comment. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO.” wapo.st/3YL4T3D

This is why actual knowledge - not just Jeopardy-style recitation of flashcard facts - is collaborative. If I need to understand something so far outside of my realm of expertise that I can’t get far enough reading solo, I figure out who’d know more, and have *gasp* a conversation…with a human being

Right, this line Vance used was a very common line used by segregationists. Here's Rep. Mendel Rivers (D-SC) reacting to the Brown decision, which he said "would bring mongrelization of the Caucasian race. He added that he for one won't apologize for being a white man."

All of these links went to promotion of this story earlier today. All these links are dead now — that's how thoroughly they've scrubbed this.

Being even baseline literate in the 2020s is like never working out but slowly becoming the strongest person on earth as everyone around you eats shredded newspaper and chugs poison

the vice president is a klansman

Not to be too conspiratorial, but this story would undoubtedly portray the Trump admin in a bad light (they sent innocent people to be tortured through a process the Supreme Court unanimously held lacked due process) and now CBS isn't airing it on time.

I wrote about the conservative quest to restore the "true" Constitution, the Antebellum Constitution, shorn of the egalitarian nonsense in the Reconstruction Amendments, a document that replaces equality with a society of dominators and the dominated. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Ask any gay person what "theater kid," when used as an insult, means. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u...

Skilled-worker visa holders who traveled back to India this month to renew their US work permits are now stranded far from home after their appointments were abruptly canceled by U.S. consular offices and rescheduled for months later.

Boy, cutting off the transcript at “I think that’s premature” when Kaine goes on to talk about all the other ways Congress has to force compliance in the full quote seems more than a little dishonest

As Arendt and Sartre and so many before have told us -- the goal is not to replace truth, but to render the entire concept of shared truth to ruins. To fray all bonds of fellowship and shared ethic among a free people.

I think this is why fascists love AI art, not because it is good, but because it is bad. Not because it is original, but because it is stolen. To make art as an expression of skill and craft and humanity reinforces humanity. To push a button that steals art and call it your own is domination.

Podcast Jay…err…NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya made an appearance at TPUSA to continue railing against public health and COVID19 mitigation. He and his buds have been destroying US science and public health for a year because their feelings were hurt. youtu.be/e9gMZ1sme0k

HPV vaccination could prevent most cervical cancers, but only 27% of eligible adolescent girls worldwide have received the vaccine. Data suggest that a single dose may be protective. Research findings from the ESCUDDO trial are summarized in a new Quick Take video. nej.md/3MFcHBr #MedSky #IDSky

Americans & Europeans needlessly exposing African babies to preventable diseases just to see if they can find something that would justify their preexisting antivaccine beliefs is not only unscientific and actually anti-science, it is very much reminiscent of colonialist, racist human rights abuses

NEW: Shaun Maguire has also not deleted a false post on X that states slain MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was "definitely pro Israel" based on a Threads post from another man named Nuno Loureiro (an extremely common name.) I just spoke to the man who posted on Threads, who is upset about the lies/

World War II Navy veteran Ira “Ike” Schab, one of the dwindling number of survivors of the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 105.

I think bigotry has become a kind of loyalty ritual among young republicans, it’s how you show you’re one of them www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

The trump administration is laughing at you. Read our reporting in here about how much the GOP elite across different cliques and branches of govt weren’t sweating last night at all because they all knew they had a Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche authored insurance policy built in

Paywalled but... a bit of good news. We'll have to watch what happens next.

it is one thing to say "here is what our measurements tell us about the playing field," it is something very different to leap from that to "and here is why we have a better understanding of your specific circumstance and your particular electorate than you, the person who represents the district"

House member WAR is a reasonable guide to how much slack you should cut red district Dems but it is not a terribly good basis for shittalking sitting reps. as Brian Scalabrine once said “I’m closer to LeBron than you are to me.”

Its absolutely wild how boring and accurate this thread is (WAR is a stupid metric when every American election is 50+1)... and how insane it is making people.

They came to me and they said "Sir it's time for your weekly cognitive test, something we make all healthy presidents do" and I said thank you. That's very nice