"A majority of Brazil’s supreme court judges have voted to convict the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a military coup, leaving the far-right populist facing a decades-long sentence for leading the criminal conspiracy." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

"The most devastating of ruling powers have always counted on superficial leniencies to prevent overwhelming dissent, manufacturing a complicity that comes in the shape of complacency..." on The Time of Cherries — Xiao Yue Shan minorliteratures.com/2025/09/03/t...

NEW: A major AI copyright legal showdown just took a huge twist today. Facing a class action on behalf of book authors that could've seen it pay over a TRILLION in damages for alleged piracy, Anthropic has agreed to settle instead: www.wired.com/story/anthro...

Since 2023, translators and interpreters have seen work dry up, rates plummet and their jobs reduced to editing AI-generated output. Some are leaving the field, others are considering bankruptcy. All despite any major upgrade in translation quality. This is how AI is killing translation work:

I'm preparing to publish the next installment of AI Killed My Job. This time, the focus will be on translators. If you or someone you know has had a translation job (including translator, interpreter, game localizer, etc) impacted by AI, and you'd like to share, please do: [email protected]

The Translators Organizing Committee (TOC) is hosting their next solidarity drop-in session! 📍 Where: Zoom 🕢 When: Wednesday, August 13 7:30-8:45pm ET 📨 Email us to reserve your spot! [email protected]

Donate to the Sameer Project, which continues to do crucial mutual aid work in Gaza: linktr.ee/thesameerpro... And join and support upcoming workshops that @workshops4gaza.bsky.social runs to benefit the Sameer Project. Writers, artists, and educators can also submit a proposal to teach a workshop:

Melody Makeda Ledwon will receive the 2025 Momentum Grant for Early-Career Translators, Words Without Borders announced today. The grant recognizes Ledwon’s translation from German of the novel Knives, Tongues by Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner. Learn more here:

So another one of these came today and I took a closer look. Some of its claims seem pretty wild. But they include citations in tiny print at the bottom, after an invitation to "check the facts." So I did. You may need to sit down for this: Andrew Cuomo is not being entirely honest!

ChatGPT may be down, but you know what's not down? Over 4,000 pieces of literature from 147 countries and translated from 141 languages by actual people and not LLMs—and every single piece is free to read. Just saying! wordswithoutborders.org

Hey let's support these forest defenders! Every warrior is part of a web of money, care, strategy & time. People who can't be warriors for whatever reason can be part of the rest of the web www.gofundme.com/f/accsvm-oly...

I have completely deleted my Duolingo. I was informed by one of my kids that the company has removed most of its employees and 70% of the company is run by AI. I urge everyone to delete their app.

NEW: Mohsen Mahdawi has been freed from detention. “We are pro-peace and anti-war,” Mohsen told a huge crowd outside court after his release. “To my people in Palestine: I feel your pain, I see your suffering; and I see freedom and it is very very soon.”

Whose Corner Is It Anyway has been organizing for YEARS with street-based, low-income & survival sex workers who use stimulant & opioid drugs, including safer use & Narcan trainings. Donate to them to spite RFK Jr & strengthen their movement! www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Maybe you have a harm reduction center in your state or region? Project Weber/RENEW is one of ours. Donate or volunteer to spite RFK Jr & save people's lives & dignity. weberrenew.org

there is a decent chance i never spend a single dime at target again in my life www.startribune.com/target-gave-...

Anywhere you can create relief, room to breathe & move, slack in the line, for someone whose ropes are tightened by a violent government or the forces that brought it to power, you are doing something useful.

Fellow authors, I love you, and I know it feels like we don’t have a choice, but B&N and Am*zon both scheduled sales this week to preempt Independent Bookstore Day, a hugely vital source of income for indie bookstores. Please don’t promote their sales; please promote your local indie this week.

There's simply no ethical way to support Harry Potter in 2025. It's not possible. $0.20 from every dollar you give JK Rowling goes directly to physically harming a trans person and that's not a joke or an exaggeration.

Along with @lgbtiscotland.bsky.social, we've published our reaction to the judgement in the UK Supreme Court today. There will be more we want to say to trans people directly once we have a chance to catch our breath. www.equality-network.org/uk-supreme-c...

Excellent analysis of the Trumpian Right’s assault on empathy: a vital precursor for the dehumanising still to come. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Presenting the #InternationalBooker2025 shortlist. Find out more about all the books, authors and translators: thebookerprizes.com/ibp2025

Spectacular view of 100,000 people attending the #HandsOff march in NYC

#PVDlocal / #RIlocal: Let’s shut down ICE detention in RI once and for all. Send written testimony by 3pm TODAY 4/3 to [email protected]. Even better if you can come to the hearing, 4pm @ the State House Room 313. Testimony toolkit: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

This is what the opposition did in the Hungary Parliament when they passed the Pride ban. May we have congresspeople with an ounce of the courage.

We're not applying for an NEA grant due to their anti-trans requirements. Stand with us and help us replace our annual grant by making a donation today. buff.ly/7bmxm3J

if you're in the US and despairing about people being pulled off the street, you need to find your nearest immigrant defence/deportation defence group and learn how to do stuff like this www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021...

Statement from Drop Site News on Israel’s Murder of Our Colleague Hossam Shabat: We Hold Both Israel and the U.S. Government Responsible 🔗 Read here: www.dropsitenews.com/p/statement-...

BREAKING: Yuval Abraham, co-director of Oscar-winning documentary "No Other Land," says Israeli settlers beat his co-director Hamdan Ballal, injuring his head and stomach — and then Israeli soldiers invaded the ambulance he was in and seized him. Ballal's whereabouts are now unknown.

"Working at PEN America has given me a firsthand look at how liberal institutions suppress pro-Palestinian voices." mondoweiss.net/2025/03/why-...

#OtD 22 Mar 1974 Scottish workers in the East Killbride Rolls Royce factory refused to work on plane parts from Pinochet's Chile. They kept the refusal up for 4 years, leaving the engines outside to rust, before they went missing one night stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9...

Friends from Gaza feel unprecedented levels of isolation & desperation. A reminder to the rest of us that Palestine is not your passion project. It's not your political medallion. It's a place with a people who are being killed & tormented by their oppressor, a bully funded by this nation.

All but 5 of my 21 book-length translations, three of which were longlisted for the International Booker and one of which won the PEN America Translation Prize, were used to train Meta’s AI.

Wow. Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum officially recognizes Palestine as a state. Here she welcomes Palestinian ambassador Nadya Rasheed. Sheinbaum is Jewish, supports Palestinian self-determination, & unapologetically condemns Netanyahu's attacks on Gaza. Historic & inspiring leadership. ❤️✊🏽

Reisner outlines additional concerns to do with the future of creativity and knowledge work, which after all have economic considerations that generative AI throws a wrench into. I hope you'll read, share, and enjoy the story.

Proof is different than suspicion. And generative AI remains an obscure technology: Companies do not like to talk about how it works, or what they've taken for it to work, even as they place it into products that millions or billions of people use every day and insist it should change the world.

At this point, everyone suspects that generative AI has been built with stolen material—and in fact, since September 2023 when we published our analysis of Books3 (linked below), we've known for sure that 183,000 books had been pirated for this purpose. But LibGen dramatically increases the scale.

Meta initially considered licensing books. New legal docs show that a Llama senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Paying and waiting wouldn't do. So they sought—and received—permission to torrent LibGen.

NEW: LibGen contains millions of pirated books and research papers, built over nearly two decades. From court documents, we know that Meta torrented a version of it to build its AI. Today, @theatlantic.com presents an analysis of the data set by @alexreisner.bsky.social. Search through it yourself:

powerful detailed account of ICE captivity "To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me...Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

URGENT ACTION ALERT: Over 400 Palestinians murdered overnight as Israel and the US intensify their genocide in Gaza. Read our full action alert: loom.ly/eyUy0qM

In this interview Schumer says he agrees with Trump’s decision to pull $400 million from Columbia. A university in his own state. And he’s unconcerned about the unlawful arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, one of his constituents. He is a traitor who needs to resign.

The deportation of Dr. Alawieh is a shocking and disgraceful violation of due process and the rule of law. The Trump administration’s lawless targeting of people with legal immigration status warrants the strongest possible condemnation.

#PVDlocal: Dr. Alawieh's students and colleagues are rallying in her name at 6pm on Monday, 3/17, outside the RI State House. (That's all the info I have right now.)

BREAKING: Trump Invokes 1798 Wartime Law that Paved the Way for Japanese Internment. The repugnant law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, will allow Trump to detain and deport noncitizens without due process, writes Zeteo’s new legal contributor @kimwehle.bsky.social, professor of constitutional law:

Furious to report that the US deported Dr. Alawieh despite a judge's order that either came too late or was ignored. Her cousin has filed a complaint in MA district court. If there are ways to support going forward, I'll do a fresh post. www.providencejournal.com/story/news/l...

They're trying to deport my colleague from the med school and holding her without counsel. She was coming back from a visit to her family. If there are ways to help I'll let you know. www.providencejournal.com/story/news/l...

Among the material devastation to everyday people, Senate Dems have now blown a hole in their ability to work with the House. We had an agreed upon plan, House took immense risk, then Senate turned around midway and destroyed it w/ a fear-based, inexplicable abdication. They own what happens next.