Laura Conaway

I think more people should be aware of how much cool stuff Link does in real life. He’s not just a poster.

A purple notebook with two stickers: One with a drawing of four red tomatoes on the vine and three white flowers with red centers. The other shows the cover of a new book, “Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile.” Lifeaftercars.com

I am delighted and proud to have a sticker of my wife’s “Life After Cars” book on my new notebook. Book hits the stores Oct. 21, available for preorders now at lifeaftercars.com #lifeaftercars

Topsham hunter recalls scary rescue from quicksand-like mud Matthew Alexander became stuck in waist-high mud while duck hunting on Wharton Point Wednesday.

Metaphor alert. Also just the stuff of nightmares.

www.pressherald.com/2025/10/03/t...

Trump’s USAID pause stranded lifesaving drugs. Children died waiting. USAID antimalarial and HIV supplies valued at nearly $140 million were delayed in the first half of the year or not delivered at all due to the Trump administration’s foreign aid pause, The Post found...

www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

Trump administration pulls climate change signs from Acadia National Park The signs, installed in 2023 atop Cadillac Mountain and at the Great Meadow wetland, detailed steps being taken to combat rising temperatures and extreme weather.

Another one for the shadow collection of signs and plaques removed from national parks.

www.pressherald.com/2025/09/28/t...

Los Angeles man demands answers after wife was detained at scheduled green card meeting A man is speaking out and asking for help after his wife was detained by federal agents at the end of a scheduled green card hearing in downtown Los Angeles in early September.

"She put so much effort into looking nice, because she was excited to take a step toward becoming an American, and I had to go home, and I had to put away the shoes that they took off her feet and gave to me in a plastic bag."

www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/n...

Vaccines depend on getting everyone who can take one to do so. In this case, the baby was still too young for the shot. But if the vaccination rate stays high, the baby stays safer.

"The infant was less than two months old and was not old enough to receive the pertussis vaccine, the agency said."

Mississippi Baby Dies of Whooping Cough Amid Rising Cases A baby in Mississippi has died of whooping cough for the first time since 2012. The baby was less than two months old—too young for vaccination.

Mississippi health officer on death of baby (whooping cough)

“We do believe that declining vaccination rates are impacting this. . . . [O]ur concern is that adult Mississippians are not maintaining the pertussis immunity, which puts our babies at risk.”

www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-...

Minneapolis Police press release headlined: MAN DIES AFTER MEDICAL INCIDENT DURING POLICE INTERACTION May 25, 2020 (Minneapolis) On Monday evening, shortly after 8:00 pm, officers from the Minneapolis Police Department responded to the 3700 block of Chicago Avenue South on a report of a forgery in progress. Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence. Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later. At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has been called in to investigate this incident at the request of the Minneapolis Police Department. No officers were injured in the incident. Body worn cameras were on and activated during this incident. The GO number associated with this case is 20-140629.

Don't forget that it was because Darnella Frazier took out her phone and hit "record" that the racial justice moment of 2020 that emerged out of George Floyd's death took off the way it did.

This is what the press release looked like from Minneapolis police after Derek Chauvin murdered Floyd:

‘We’re not a disease’: Families push back on Trump’s autism rhetoric Parents fear that progress toward inclusion is under threat as political leaders call autism a “crisis.”

If you’re wondering how to cover autism, this is one excellent model — asking autistic parents about their autistic kids.

wapo.st/4gNUxZc

Front page of newspaper The Onion with a photo animals such as giraffe, bear, and zebra next to ICE agents. Headline reads: Homeland Security Relaxes Species Requirements to Join ICE

When my copy of The Onion arrived yesterday, I laughed so hard at this article. Everyone should buy a subscription.

Yesterday in London, President Obama described the autism spectrum and why there has been a big jump in the number of people who know they're autistic.

Worth seeing.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Aggressive squirrel seeking food has sent at least 2 people to the ER in CA Residents of a San Francisco Bay Area city are on the lookout for an aggressive squirrel that has sent at least two people to the emergency room.

Aggressive squirrel sending people to the ER was nowhere near my horoscope for today.

www.seattletimes.com/nation-world...

A black three wheeled vehicle with a small cab in front and bed in back

A blue three wheeled vehicle with a small cab in front and bed in back

A red three wheeled vehicle with a small cab in front and bed in back

A green three wheeled vehicle with a small cab in front and bed in back

A small gallery of ideal vehicles

Terrific debunking of the autism announcement by the (only apparently) tireless @ericmgarcia.bsky.social.

If you put a life-saving diagnosis behind a wall of stigma, fewer people will get the information they need.

Lowering stigma is a big part of why we have the concept of a spectrum. It is a big part of why more people have an autism diagnosis today, because kind people tried to remove stigma.

Something nice for today.

POV: Riding along the CTfastrak busway in Hartford and West Hartford! BRT!! 😎🚌

Telling the world that autism is so terrible that we must do anything, anything at all, no matter how life-threatening, to avoid having people like me and my lovely family, friends and colleagues in it? What on this earth? /

Solid work by @usatoday.com — it is great to reporters seeking out and including autistic perspectives.

Heaven only knows how many autistic people it took to invent acetaminophen.

Alaska Republicans push for federal study of ranked choice voting Republicans on a committee advising the U.S. Civil Rights Commission say Alaska’s voting system disenfranchises voters.

This Alaska story about ranked choice voting might be more important that it seems.

Alaska Republicans lost a House seat in 2022 under ranked choice voting, and now they want to make it a federal civil rights matter. (They won the same seat in a 2024 rematch.)

www.adn.com/politics/202...

US Justice Dept considers handing over voter roll data for criminal probes, documents show The U.S. Justice Department is in talks with Homeland Security Investigations about transferring the sensitive voter roll data it has collected from states for use in criminal and immigration-related investigations, according to government documents seen by Reuters.

"The request for such data 'is not normal and it's not lawful,' said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who previously worked in the Civil Rights Division's Voting Rights Section."

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Tech from Silicon Valley has enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously k...

Speechless. This is not one of those stories you can take in, really, in a single sitting.

www.adn.com/nation-world...

My Secret for Finding Peace in Traffic

I wrote about the way I drive now, which is slow, for the New York Times Mag: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/m...

Maine scientist skis Greenland to document climate change A Freeport climate scientist is enduring minus 40-degree temperatures while skiing across Greenland to document the fastest warming section of the Arctic and install sensors that can help predict the ...

The story about heroism and planting small sensors that I actually needed.

Susana Hancock, thank you.

www.pressherald.com?p=7492017&uu...

“If you build it, they will come” — this is a vicious circle when it comes to roads and traffic (induced demand means there’s little or no decrease in congestion) but a virtuous circle for public transportation (more users to support eg more frequent service or more extensive routes).

The thing about investing in public transit is that it *scales* — the more people use it, the better it gets. For everyone.

Whereas the more cars there are, the *worse* everything about driving gets. Traffic. Parking.

[Ever noticed that in just about every car ad it’s alone on the road? Yeah.]

That is why transit is so good for cities! When cities expand and densify, which is what cities do, transit becomes safer, more convenient, and nicer. City-dwellers oppose more people when they rely on cars, because that means more traffic. Fundamentally, the car is not a proper urban vehicle.

Reupping from April, the whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board:

"Berulis tracked sensitive data leaving the agency's NxGen case management system 'nucleus,' inside the NLRB system. Then, he saw a large spike in outbound traffic leaving the network itself."

www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...