thank you for the outpouring of support! those of us laid off from Teen Vogue yesterday are now sharing our GoFundMe to help us cover our emergency expenses now that we've lost our incomes, as we get back on our feet.

"Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Lewis brilliantly takes us through the building of this conservative network -- biiig woof to this particular slide from me :

@beccalew.bsky.social talks for a bit about the promise of the Microchip — I think the subtext here (the one I'm thinking about anyhow) is the parallel between the "promise of the Microchip" and the "promise of AI"

Extremely disturbing developments here www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

So excited about the upcoming release of Equator! "We began to imagine a new cultural venture, one that rejects the nihilistic idea that the powerful do what they please, and success is the only measure of moral virtue."

““They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,” the Turkish activist ErsinÇelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.”+

New from 404 Media: ICE to buy tool that tracks locations of hundreds of millions of phones every day. Billions of pieces of location data. ICE previously stopped using data remotely harvested from smartphones. Now it's buying it again. Usually used w/o warrant www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Does anyone have any good recs on literature about the rise of celebrity CEOs as a cultural and/or economic phenomenon?

A cool CFP for academics studying podcasting! criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Powerful analysis by @beccalew.bsky.social in @theguardian.com what looks like a recent backlash against diversity on digital platforms is in fact rooted in the 1990s, when masculinity, entrepreneurship & deregulation fused into a high-tech civilizational project www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

On this week's @onthemedia.bsky.social: @micahloewinger.bsky.social asking @beccalew.bsky.social about some of silicon valley's technocratic right-wing roots; Buckley and George Gilder to Marc Andreesen, Futurism to Fascism. You might already know it, but i guarantee you know somebody who doesn't.

Hi hello @onthemedia.bsky.social is rerunning some interviews I did. One with @beccalew.bsky.social and another with Bluesky CEO @jay.bsky.team. The episode also features @mmasnick.bsky.social, and @mollyfication.bsky.social’s excellent interview with @amandahess.bsky.social. Great show! Listen:

@beccalew.bsky.social sempre no ponto

“Without immediate intervention, the last remaining reporters in Gaza are going to die.”

The horrors are coming so quickly but this one really hurts www.nytimes.com/live/2025/07...

Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale announced today that, “The Abundance Institute, in partnership with Stand Together, is raising $4M to place a strike team of 15-20 AI-native software engineers, data scientists, & product leaders inside the FDA…” 7/7/25 1/ blog.joelonsdale.com/p/engineerin...

“Families across California told the Guardian they were exploring options to stockpile hormones, researching how to get care outside the US, growing increasingly fearful that parents could face government investigations or prosecutions, and discussing options to permanently flee the country.”

The chapter of RFK’s most recent book - that he wrote to defend his belief that COVID was actually a weapon designed to target white people and spare certain groups like Jewish people - in which he talks about how he does not believe germs actually cause disease is called “The White Man’s Burden.”

Buried in a Senate budget bill is a massive giveaway to corporate developers and fossil fuel companies. It forces the sale of at least 2 million acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land in 11 Western states *every 60 days* until millions of acres are gone.

Another flight of an aircraft with no call sign circling above anti-ICE protests. It took off from March Air Reserve Base, circled above Paramount, and is now circling above downtown LA (the National Guard is moving protesters away from the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown)

important note: the LAPD has figured out it can get footage from Waymos: www.404media.co/lapd-publish...

LAPD helicopter circling immigrant rights protesters behind the pride month rainbow-lit city hall

This is why we can’t let up on calling out weaponization of antisemitism, even in our darkest moments. Because it is precisely in those moments when the fascists in charge take advantage of our pain in order to target others.

As many of us have said many times: the weaponization of antisemitism is the tip of the spear for the fascists. They are using cases of antisemitism, real and false, to implement their illiberal agenda. The main reason being that liberals are less likely to fight it in that context.

Thrilled to share that this fall, I'll be joining the faculty at MIT as an assistant professor of comparative media studies! It's a scary and strange time to be in academia, but I'm grateful to have the chance to keep researching/teaching/thinking with people I greatly admire.

From @palumboliu.bsky.social, @moiradonegan.bsky.social and more: Honor the Stanford hunger strike!! stanforddaily.com/2025/06/01/f...

Check out the latest from @katejsim.bsky.social and @juliapowles.bsky.social on the regulation of tech-facilitated child sexual abuse academic.oup.com/oxford-law-p...

It was a pleasure speaking with @palumboliu.bsky.social for his podcast "Speaking out of Place." Check it out here! speakingoutofplace.com/2025/05/25/g...

Also: I assume Harvard will try to sue fast and fix things, but the cruelty this letter unleashes *today* will induce lasting fear and panic not just on the 6800 international students at Harvard, but also on all international students in this country, even if there is a swift TRO. Why stay here?

Note that courts have already thrown out similar investigations by both Missouri and Texas as an obvious and blatant attack on @mmfa.bsky.social's First Amendment rights.

“The Joe Rogan of the left” is already the wrong goal. What I learned from @beccalew.bsky.social is that the right has dense networks of well paid podcasters who cross-endorse each other. It’s the system, not the hero.

For the June issue of @thenation.com, I wrote about the Harper’s letter 5 years later, and how under a quarter of its signatories have spoken out about Mahmoud Khalil and other campus activists imprisoned for speech.

Incredibly brave hunger strike from Stanford affiliates. I suspect there will be attempts to brush this under the rug and hope it goes away; it's up to us to spread the word. stanforddaily.com/2025/05/15/s...

"Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over. During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial, the Facebook founder’s argument was, in so many words, that platforms like his are not what they used to be." www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Today, my firm won a $31 million jury verdict against XPO Logistics and its subcontractors for negligently causing the death of 25-year-old Josué Calá. Corporate negligence threatens us all, and in an age of vanishing regulations, holding them accountable in court is vital to our safety.

This isn’t just about one racist woman in Minnesota. It’s about a pattern that’s played out repeatedly in recent years—a sort of patronage system for bigotry that’s become embedded in conservative fundraising culture.

This is fucking wild.

The fact that the racist Jeffrey Epstein pal Steven Pinker gets to be the voice of what academic and cultural standards should be here tells you pretty much everything about this entire political and institutional moment www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/u...

People will laugh at this Andreessen take, but it is possibly the single most representative expression of the Silicon Valley ideas that got us here. fortune.com/article/mark...

Since the argument about “defund” being a bad word to use in political discourse is going on again, I will just observe that the present regime has made such violent terms as “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” disqualifying words to use. There is no word that can’t be turned into the wrong word.

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.

RIP Leonard Zeskind. "Blood and Politics" has arguably been the single most influential book for me in researching and opposing white supremacist movements in the U.S., and I know I'm not alone. Rest in power! www.kcur.org/news/2025-04...

An underrated aspect of human colleagues is that they can tell you when you shouldn’t post something.

I have good news for people looking for the example that best illustrates the current VC/ai landscape.