as i keep saying, the things to do to secure elections are to volunteer to work the polls or to serve as an observer, & to pressure your *state representatives* to take steps to further secure voting locations and ballots. you should also learn about how election administration works in your area.

New from 404 Media: the FBI has been unable to get into the iPhone of raided Washington Post journalist because the phone had Lockdown Mode enabled. Apple markets Lockdown Mode mostly to stop spyware like NSO. Here, a real world example of it stopping access too www.404media.co/fbi-couldnt-...

This is the business in Uptown that got randomly tear-gassed by ICE a few weeks ago. Guess they didn’t like it

The fact that competent people have too much dignity to do this work gives me as much hope as anything

Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning. Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

Midwestern earnestness carries with it a real intransigence.

Eight great reads (and one listen) about the miracle of Minneapolis: www.headsupnews.org/p/people-pow... includes @adamserwer.bsky.social @erikhane.bsky.social @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social @kerryhowley.bsky.social @mollycoleman.bsky.social @jamellebouie.net @pkrugman.bsky.social @brucespringsteen.net

A moment of silence that ends with someone shouting "fuck ICE!" and the crowd roaring in response

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara: "People have had enough. This is the third shooting in less than 3 weeks. The MPD went the entire year last year recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn't shoot anyone ... this is not sustainable."

Years from now, it'll be difficult to explain the things people in media were wailing about before all this. Sophomores writing underconsidered op-eds about cultural appropriation. Protests against demagogues on campus. YA drama. "Mobs" on Twitter. These were the threats to free society.

I mean it’s true that there are “paid agitators” in Minneapolis. There are 3000 of them and they’ve assassinated two people.

Normal cops would have been furious at the first shooter just for opening fire into a fucking dogpile of cops.

the way they used to go on about federalism …

i don’t know what i thought i would be doing right now two weeks ago, but it definitely wasn’t worrying about Will Stancil

the video i just saw from minneapolis is a public execution, full stop.

In the Other Place the distinction between the phrase “white woman” and “race traitor” has basically been erased

It absolutely hurts to be outside. I don’t know how you quantify motivation like this.

Superb reportage on Minneapolis from one of the all time greats.

If the admin's strategic goal was to break public resistance to immigration enforcement activities, it was a tactical mistake to go to the Twin Cities.

I wrote about Minneapolis. nymag.com/intelligence...

"it’s unclear when or whether Liam will be able to return for his stuffed turtle, his hat, and his W worksheet" sahanjournal.com/education/ic...

I bought a doll here last week and my daughter hasn’t let go of it since

This piece is very well reported and written. It’s clear-eyed, precise and gives important context. And yet it’s a great illustration that there’s this fundamental, unbridgeable formal constraint that makes it essentially impossible to plainly call this what it is. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/u...

These goofy billboards were up when i lived in Myanmar. They explicitly justify authoritarian force by blaming everything on “external elements” and “foreign nations.” Just something to think about when they use the words “foreign invaders” to justify assassinating an American poet.

The best political feature I read last year was @kerryhowley.bsky.social on Pete Hegseth in @nymag.com nymag.com/intelligence...

I'm not great about tooting my own horn. But as an independent journalist whose work is reliant on contributions from my readers, it's part of the job. So here's a post and thread on my work over the last year and beyond -- and why you, reader, should subscribe. (Plus, shameless dog photos!)

I responded to the film differently, and a good deal more positively, but this is a fantastic essay. defector.com/one-battle-a...

“prices work” is left-coded

thinking for no reason at all about my very first job, which was at a censored newspaper in Myanmar and seemed very distant from my life and my country

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.

CATO INSTITUTE: Despite DOGE slashing jobs, government spending in every month of 2025 “was greater than in every other year .. An observer who did not know when DOGE started could not identify it” on a chart. 🤡 www.cato.org/blog/doge-pr...

Hello, at the University of Minnesota, we're hiring a visiting creative nonfiction writer for the next 2-3 years to teach a 1-1 (one grad class, one undergrad class) and potentially sit on some MFA thesis committees. This job will give you time to write you next book: hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/371...

Not that it will but the willingness of Americans to obey is a very funny contrast with our self-image and should probably prompt some reflection bsky.app/profile/jonf...

worth pointing out how we first came to know this. In populations affected by measles, deaths from other infections are elevated for YEARS afterward. So scientists started comparing blood samples and looking for antibodies.

!!!!!! nymag.com/intelligence...

This reaction from a guide at @auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social offers a profound and urgent insight. From iandunt.substack.com/p/thank-god-... HT @mgcroadster.bsky.social

Any theory about a way out of Trumpism must contend with the fact that parents of both children who have died of measles maintain they were right not to vaccinate. You will not convince people they’ve done harm. You can only present them with new choices.

This really was one of the most heartbreaking articles I’ve read in a while. I don’t think people comprehend the scale of destruction wrought by this administration already, not even close nymag.com/intelligence...

some great sentences in this one

As so much reporting about RFK Jr. fails to meet the moment or worse, this piece about what it's like with people with actual expertise and the goal of saving lives rather than culling them to work for his HHS from @kerryhowley.bsky.social is should-win-major-awards good: nymag.com/intelligence...

impeccable and harrowing, by @kerryhowley.bsky.social: nymag.com/intelligence...

How RFK Jr. destroyed the CDC. Another banger from Kerry Howley @kerryhowley.bsky.social nymag.com/intelligence...

I wrote about the private, intimate, often ridiculous agonies of working for a man who think you’re a monster nymag.com/intelligence...

Every day is a good day, but today is an ESPECIALLY good day, to re-share @kerryhowley.bsky.social's profile of Pete Hegseth. nymag.com/intelligence...

Radical jihadist communism actually began in Iowa City. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/c...

Tonight! 11/17 at 7 p.m. in Prairie Lights bookstore, Jen Percy will read from 'Girls Play Dead', joined in conversation by Kerry Howley events.uiowa.edu/event/35042

🦆 Bird flu in WA: This is the first-ever human case of H5N5 avian influenza. It's been seen in animals before, but never before in people. It was confirmed in a Grays Harbor County resident that had backyard poultry which may have mingled with wild birds. doh.wa.gov/newsroom/h5n...

tariff level with china should be set at zero except for literally anything my parents want to buy my kids off amazon, in which case it should be 10000000 percent