A year ago, I wrote about NYC's parking corruption using publicly available data and evidence. @nydailynews.com today reports an Adams admin official giving out NYPD placards like candy. No wonder parking agents, civilians employed by NYPD, rarely ticket these bogus permits. tinyurl.com/3mc9cpt3

Fascinating new research paper asks: why did Biden receive so little political credit for his enormous investments in manufacturing? Turns out people give all the credit to governors (ironically, in this case, mostly red-state governors who were hostile to the policy!).

Here's a video about my recent investigation into more than two dozen accounts using AI-generated doctors and health professionals to push dubious advice and sell products on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube: indicator.media/p/ai-generat...

This investigation was a collaboration with @motherjones.com, @nashvillebanner.bsky.social, News Channel 5, Nashville Noticias, and the Institute for Public Service Reporting - Memphis You can find links to stories here + our methodology write-up: www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/...

"Crying girls will make you rich." That's the actual pitch from a marketer selling packages of emotional videos that brands use to flood TikTok with undisclosed ads. I just published an investigation into industrial UGC campaigns. What I found is troubling. 🧵 indicator.media/p/crying-gir...

Since PlowNYC is currently offline, I decided to take matters into my own hands and built a map to track snow removal efforts by DSNY using the department’s extensive GPS data from its fleet of snow removal vehicles. You can find the tracker at kcinbk.github.io/SnowDay_NYC/

Clean energy went through a lot this year, but it still managed to dominate new power deployment in the U.S.

For @nysfocus.bsky.social and @thecity.nyc , I took a deep-dive into NYC’s Department of Social Services. OT spending has soared while frontline positions processing SNAP and Cash Assistance applicants remain unfilled, impacting the city’s most vulnerable residents (with @reuvenblau.bsky.social)

You can actually see the changes—the removal of human causes of climate change—side-by-side on the Internet Archive. web.archive.org/web/diff/202...

I was sent some screenshots of HTML sites around the 1994 election cycle, one of the really rare to find examples of websites playing a part in politics so early. I'll get them on the archive but now you get them too.

Refugees feeding refugees: Sudanese families fleeing violence find little aid at Chad border reut.rs/3M7Wvs9

Made a precinct-level map on the results of the NYC six ballot measures. - A majority of voters in almost every single precinct on Staten Island voted against all of these proposals. - Affordable housing–related measures proved popular even in some affluent neighborhoods and also outer borough.

Not all misinformation requires sophisticated tech or AI. For @craigsilverman.bsky.social's @indicator.media, I deep-dived into these accounts generated millions of views—and potentially handsome profits—with a little clever editing and an understanding of how strong emotions drive clicks.

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:

I wrote about how foreign apparel sellers rushed to cash in on Charlie Kirk’s death. Within hours, these astroturf accounts started flooding Facebook and Instagram with merch ads. Some of these paid posts even claimed “100% of the profits” would go to his orgs and family. tinyurl.com/4x253yn7

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are walking and driving south to escape Israel's Gaza City offensive. https://wapo.st/4pwffkf

Jarvis: I hate to say this to my friends here at CNN, mass media is dying, so they're taking the last of these vestiges of institutions that matter and they're trying to turn them into propaganda organs under threat from the head of the FCC

Israel’s minister of culture announced plans to cancel the funding for the country’s top film award ceremony after a 90-minute drama about a Palestinian boy won best feature on Tuesday night. nyti.ms/4mla5oe

Conservative voices are now coalescing around the idea of “online radicalization,” claiming Kirk’s suspected shooter, a white, Christian male, was groomed into a violent leftist. Quite a surprising turn, given their past hostility to the concept rigorously researched by academics and journalists.

If the federal show of force in Washington has had a deterrent effect on crime, it appears to have deterred entirely normal aspects of city life, too. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/u...

An AP investigation finds that Silicon Valley companies sold surveillance technology to Chinese police and security contractors, ignoring warnings that the tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

When I reported for a leading Chinese-language newspaper in NYC years ago, I often had to explain: “No, I can’t take your red envelopes.” Even now, seeing them still give me anxiety. I wrote about my personal experience on my SubStack. kcinbk.substack.com/p/a-former-i...

I started my Substack because… why not? For my first post, I wrote about how the NYC FARE Act — which bans mandatory broker fees for new tenants — has yet to trigger any significant rent hikes. tinyurl.com/4tfnbyfr

Amazing presentation, fascinating data: www.pewresearch.org/journalism/f...

"More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube - overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%)" www.bbc.com/news/article...

NEW: A cottage industry of unlicensed, unregulated driving schools in New Jersey are targetting the state’s immigrant population, evading the system carefully set up for safety.

First Take should do a segment like this: If beef were a sport, where does the Trump-Musk beef rank of all time?

She’s essentially calling a naturalized citizen "illegal" in another comment, while her a district- including Whitestone, Flushing, and Little Neck- has a significant population of foreign-born Chinese and Cantonese residents. Curious how the local Chinese-language press will cover this, or not.

New from 404 Media: Republicans are trying to cram a ban on AI regulation into the Budget Reconciliation bill, which would stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years. www.404media.co/republicans-...

"The leader of a Bulgarian spy ring helped Wirecard fugitive Jan Marsalek organise an airlift of 200 personnel from Kabul for the CIA during the military retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, a court in London has heard." What a lede. www.ft.com/content/17c9...

🚨 🚲 NYC CYCLIST ALERT 🚨 🚲 Have you been stopped by NYPD during the recent crackdown on cyclists in New York City? Confidentially talk about it with reporters at Streetsblog NYC. Get in touch by emailing [email protected] or sending a secure message on Signal / WhatsApp via the QR codes below:

"... reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek ... are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why." — Great read from Cade Metz and Karen Weise

The @dallasnews.com is hiring a Cowboys beat reporter? I know someone highly passionate and extremely available.

Great reporting by @sophlebo.bsky.social on dangerous vehicles in NYC. Lax enforcement is also allowing out-of-state plates to keep roaming: over 4,000 such vehicles were caught at least 15 times in 2024 and still haven’t paid their fines, accounting for 45% of the most egregious repeat offenders.

This chart was made in America by skilled artisans. It also provides important context for understanding our current tariff situation.

Back from two weeks in Asia. What did I miss in the US?

For Slate, I dived into what a viral real estate influencer in NYC may reveal our increasingly polluting news environment of, and how a profitable business model of amplifying polarizing political and cultural content is making it even worse. slate.com/technology/2...

📈 MTA Bus Cameras caught 419,433 vehicles double parked or blocking a bus stop for 4+ minutes in their first 5 months. That $23M reasons for drivers to park legally! reports.jehiah.cz/bus_enforcem...

Here is an interesting observation on the USAID saga: Last year, the Republican-controlled House overwhelmingly voted to send $1.6 billion to the agency, which would distribute it to civil and media organizations abroad to push back against Chinese influence. www.congress.gov/bill/118th-c...

For @hellgateny.bsky.social, I wrote about thousands of drivers in New York City continuing to display fraudulent parking placards despite receiving multiple fines, highlighting how existing laws and enforcement efforts failed to deter these repeat offenders. hellgatenyc.com/crackdown-on...

The number of car crashes following police chases has skyrocketed under Mayor Eric Adams. https://buff.ly/49HhKbT

This is gold. Can't wait to read how this "bias meter" tool will label the prosecutors and the defendants in the same article. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/b...

👀 Fun tidbit from experimenting with the PullPush API to dig through Reddit data: Children's Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine group RFK Jr. founded, maintains a Reddit account and has made over 1,400 posts since 2020. Their top destinations? r/Conspiracy and r/Conspiracy_commons.

After four years of mostly researching social media misinformation and climate communications with First Draft and later Brown Information Futures Lab, I am looking to return to journalism, particularly data-driven and investigative journalism.

As 🌍 COP29 is underway, I want to share again my final research on what we CAN do to improve climate change communication for Brown University's Information Futures Lab. (Thread)