@joshuabenton.com nails it: Australia has revised its news "bargaining" initiative to add a tax to its platform-news bargaining nudge. But it continues the fiction that this is about IP theft and not advertising monopoly. Better get serious fast about new taxes. www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/aust...

you can tell they are not in fact "vilified" because they're not afraid to whine about how they shouldn't have to suffer paying more in taxes on their second homes where millions of their struggling renter neighbors can see it

Happy Mother's Day from IDLES www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfG0...

Agree with @joshuabenton.com's analysis here. My critique of the bargaining codes was never to suggest we shouldn't tax the platforms to support journalism (we should!). It was always about the design and framing of the scheme (which continues to be problematic). www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/aust...

The latest on Australia's tortuous path to extracting money from Big Tech to support local news outlets. #journalism www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/aust...

New by me —> Australia’s building a great system to fund local journalism using Google and Facebook's dollars — but it doesn’t want to use it, preferring to keep pretending the free market is at work. www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/aust...

Callais is probably the clearest example of why the norm that places the individual justices' decisions above public scrutiny needs to end. These guys said racism was over then every red southern state immediately rushed to disenfranchise voters. Alito and Roberts should be hounded by journalists.

Alito has now written two opinions drastically limiting the fundamental rights of ethnic minorities and women, which was the kind of thing you would have expected from a guy angry about both groups being admitted to Princeton, something known at his confirmation www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/p...

they did it. you're literally watching history and the end of Reconstruction play out in real time

Rob Dreher can go back home to Louisiana!

My New One at Slate: “The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century; This evisceration of the Voting Rights Act requires us to take SCOTUS reform more seriously.” @slate.com slate.com/news-and-pol...

To repeat: Twitter does not exist. Research about Twitter in the 2010s is useful and interesting for understanding Twitter in the 2010s. But that is not X in the 2020s, and pretending the two are interchangeable is a category error. I see it all the time and it’s frustrating.

Only because this has come up more than once this week: it’s fine to collect discourse data on X. But to do so with rigor you need to explain why not bigger platforms and use recent literature. Twitter does not exist. An availability heuristic filtered through nostalgia is not systematic collection.

Mound Bayou, a self-sufficient Black town in Mississippi founded by formerly enslaved people that thrived for decades. Mamie Till was famously protected there as she sought justice for her son. Today, White South Africans are displacing those descendants www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2...

An absolute masterpiece of the form. What actually is that form? I can't really explain. But a masterpiece of... something.

one reason I'm increasingly intolerant of "data centers gave me lyme disease" type fear mongering is it spreads www.propublica.org/article/mich...

I understand that it is deeply inconvenient for everyone with money and power that the richest man in the world is a Nazi, but the richest man in the world is a Nazi

Just as a raw politics level, Janet Mills' veto of the data center moratorium in Maine suggests that she ultimately has no interest in running for office anymore

when we say "bari weiss is not good at her job" we mean that, literally, she does not know how to do extremely basic shit at her job because she is wildly unqualified to run a television network and doesn't know how anything works

At a time when the president is starting wars, sniping boats, taking bribes, gutting vaccines and decimating foreign aid, The Atlantic publishes two (2) articles decrying a New York Times podcast where a Twitch streamer says shoplifting isn't a huge deal.

It really isn't fair to expose Alex Jones to Tim Heidecker like this, the media equivalent of giving a medieval peasant Doritos.

Even saying that Musk is posting "about race" is softening what is happening here, which is that the world's wealthiest person is committing himself to spreading overt Nazi propaganda.

shoutout to everyone who insisted that weiss was a hyper-competent genius who would work her magic on CBS

What Bovino means: About a third of the population isn’t white.

The ADL permanently sacrificed its reputation to get in good with a massively dangerous antisemite and white nationalist. They defended him and stood up for him even after his Nazi salute. Here's how he repays them. This is what happens when you think you're using bigots. They're always using you.

I'm crying, this is so funny, he has absolutely no idea.

Scenes from a personalist regime: Congress appoints a position to provide accountability for state media - Trump removes her for not being sufficiently supportive.

fuuuuuuck

He repeatedly told police and immigration agents “he had a copy of his birth certificate and his Social Security card at home in Austin that he could show them, but was denied the opportunity.” Another U.S. citizen deported for Driving While Brown.

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

Revoking kids' visas because their parents criticized Elon Musk.

this headline is such a great example of “racecraft.” musk isn’t passively posting about “race,” he is actively writing psychotically racist agitprop www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Got asked an ideology question during my talk at Chicago and shared that my first question is always "Which viewpoints are y'all looking for? Folks who say I'm not human because I'm Black?" Say it with your whole chest. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

cool that rigorous empirical work and someone’s viewpoint are the same

Thomas’ mask comes all the way off. By the end it sounds like he’s sidling up to the notion of taking up arms against progressives abcnews.com/Politics/sup...

NEW—I got an exclusive excerpt from a USAID whistleblower's new book that made me gasp multiple times. It details Trump's dismantling of the humanitarian aid agency & his team/DOGE's shocking ignorance to public health. 'Into the Wood Chipper' by Nicholas Enrich is out tomorrow. Read excerpt here:

"losing the decades-old tax breaks could hinder its ability to maintain its headquarters in Richmond and carry out its operations." ah well, isn't that kind of the tradition? www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/u...

For me, a big “aha” moment in law school was when I realized that every year, the handful of normal, median-ish guys (they were all guys) who would land huge clerkships seemingly out of nowhere were all officers in the student FedSoc chapter

"In an email to Semafor, Hall told Semafor that while he uses AI in a 'limited way,' all 'written ideas, angles, summaries, takes, and editorial judgments are mine.' He said the mistakes were the result of problems with his production process." www.semafor.com/article/04/1...

Don’t miss the latest from @lizdye.bsky.social on Trump’s frivolous litigation strategy for Public Notice @atrupar.com, which will have you… rooting for Rupert Murdoch??

What's so crazy about the way @emilysweeney22.bsky.social has blown up (for all the right reasons) is that she was using social media to promote her work at the @bostonglobe.com back when most of her colleagues didn't even know what it was. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/s...

Less than 5% of indictments ever go to trial. Plea bargains ARE our criminal justice system And all those nice sounding constitutional rights disappear the second you sign a plea bargain - no matter what heinous evil police or prosecutors committed to pressure you to sign away those rights.

I come away from this thinking Adam Back is a thoroughly reasonable suspect as Satoshi Nakamoto, and that the article has not really even got close to convincing me it's him www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/b...

Lawgeeks, here is the administration's emergency motion to resume construction of Trump's vanity ballroom. Unusually for appellate work, it includes three exclamation points in the first four pages. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Let’s talk about how this works and why we have older devices. When I started doing cabin integration back in 2017, we actually had a 2020 launch date. We bought the tablets the crew used for Artemis II back then. To not spend as much, we limited our choice to devices that were in the ISS catalog.

LMAO at Duke radio calling for a celebration tech on UConn

Jaysus Effin' Christ. I hope this leads to a better policy of scrutiny. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/b...

The elite attack on universities has already substantially eroded academic freedom and free speech. People should be hired based on merit. We should avoid any procedure that punishes applicants or faculty based on political views. And no ideological quotas or monitoring of faculty.

Every tech person I know that’s gone deep in AI comes away realizing that Claude can already do a surprising chunk of their job and this is the worst the tech will ever be. How far behind tech is the rest of the world? Optimistically 3-5 years, but big tech's pace since November has surprised me.

I'll take "More Stupid Plans That Won't Do What He Thinks" for $1000, Alex.