Lily Raff McCaulou

Screenshot of the Wall Street Journal homepage. The top headlines read “Amazon to Lay Off Up to 30,000 Corporate Workers” and “The Good Vibes Are Back on Wall Street.”

🤷‍♀️

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I looked it up once. SNAP takes 2% of the US budget and 93% of the money goes to the actual poor people instead of to the bureaucracy. So it's kind of like if you paid $1000 in taxes, you spent $20 on the poor of which they got to keep $18.60, and you spent $166.66 on the military.

The U.S. Is Preparing for War in Venezuela More U.S.-military firepower is headed to the Caribbean as Trump escalates his anti-Maduro rhetoric.

The U.S. hasn’t sent this many ships to the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. W/ Ford's arrival, will be about as many as were used to defend Israel from Iran missile strikes. www.theatlantic.com/national-sec... by @nancyayoussef.bsky.social, Gisela Salim-Peyer, and @jonlemire.bsky.social

At a certain point in Turkey, virtually every non-public person I interviewed refused to give their last name. Eventually I stopped even writing "______ declined to give his/her last name for fear of government reprisal," because it became redundant, and editors understood. But here's the thing...

Just set up a reoccurring monthly donation to my local food bank. I know they can do so much more with my cash than if I tried to donate food instead. I’m worried it’s about to get very bleak, especially after the holidays - use the link provided below to find a local food bank near you

Tomorrow. D.C. The National Mall. Sunup to sundown.

What happened to all the art, furniture and priceless historical treasures that were in the East Wing?

Did Trump just give it away to his buddies? Is it at Mar-a-Lago? Did Jared and Ivana just help themselves to it?

No one knows

“U.S. Strikes 2nd Boat in Pacific as Antidrug Operation Expands” New York Times headline, October 23, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/politics/trump-drug-boat-strike-colombia.html

Did the New York Times have an editorial meeting where they said something like “these are trustworthy people, we should take their word, put it headlines, that’s good journalism.”

Did they go so far as to say “we should help the Trump administration sell this action”?

Or do they just sorta do it?

The National Trust for Historic Preservation warned that President Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom would “overwhelm the White House itself,” which spans just 55,000 square feet. https://wapo.st/4hmL8rC

I find it amazing too that Republicans’ boycott of Washington isn’t the biggest story of them all.

The shutdown can’t end if they refuse to show up for work.

The State of Local News 2025 The latest insights and trends on the local news landscape across the country. Through data and graphics, explore the state of local news outlets and learn about news deserts, network sites and pathwa...

One in seven Americans, or about 50 million people, live in a news desert, with weak or no local news source.

localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/sta...

"Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here." Anna Bower Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM Share On: f X inK My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification.

I glanced down at the message.

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began.

So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

Opinion | Chris Hayes: The Democrats’ Main Problem Isn’t Their Message

"If you had enough money to buy ads, you could reach the voters you wanted to reach, and the problem was simply getting enough money. That world no loner exists."

It's hard to express how right @chrislhayes.bsky.social is in this one point. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/o...

The president of the United States posted a video of him defecating on the American people. Many in my profession normalized it. This is a big reason why we are where we are.

A FIGHTER JET RAINING SHIT

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

To catch you up, Indiana University’s student newspaper reported:
• It was told to print no news in its homecoming edition, set to come out Thursday.
• It refused.
• The director of student media was fired.
• Hours later, IU cut all print editions of the paper, including Thursday’s issue.

Contact Me! — Claire Willett

Extremely specific ask!

in search of leads for OREGON ONLY artists, crafters, creative practitioners for ArtsWatch story about protest art / art as protest. poets, knitters, muralists, anything. happy to anonymize you for safety if preferred!

ping me here: www.clairewillettwrites.com/contact-me

Self-censorship and the ‘spiral of silence’: Why Americans are less likely to publicly voice their opinions on political issues Nearly half of Americans say they feel less free to speak their minds.

More Americans are biting their tongues, not because they don’t care, but because they’re afraid to speak.

From DEI to the war in Gaza, people are more afraid to speak their minds now than during the Red Scare, according to a political scientist who has been conducting surveys.

buff.ly/Ls2m7mv

Hard to find a more obvious example of the journalism adage “If someone says it’s raining outside and someone else says it isn’t, your job is not to quote them both, your job is to go outside.”

During a government shutdown, the Trump administration is bailing out Argentina, whose president is fond of saying, “The state isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.”

Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes. Days later, neighbors are still searching for the missing.

Good reporting on the South Shore raid from South Side weekly here.

Confirms one thing I was told but didn't put in my own piece because I didn't have a second source and it seemed too insane: border agents segregated arrested residents by race

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

I will shout until I’m blue in the face: reporting is intelligence work in the public interest. Reporting is finding out stuff someone else is trying to keep from the public.

You can do reporting without a hard pass (press badge) or building access. You cannot do reporting having agreed to this.

Jones, 27, is among the residents left at 7500 S. South Shore Drive who are trying to piece together what remains after an early morning, high-powered federal immigration raid led to the arrests of dozens of their neighbors at their South Shore apartment building. Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours. When he got home from work, Jones said he entered his unit to find all of his electronics and furniture missing, and all of his clothes and shoes thrown on the floor. Jones said he had no idea who took his belongings and hadn’t received answers from Chicago police. “I’m pissed off,” Jones said. “I feel defeated because the authorities aren’t doing anything.” On Wednesday, toys, shoes and food were still in piles in the building’s hallways. Property managers were seen throwing mattresses and broken doors into dumpsters.

"Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said."

www.wbez.org/immigration/...

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador.

Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

Hey authors, the official list of Anthropic works is available for searching.

secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup

COVID vaccines may have averted thousands of hospital stays in infants, pregnant women over 18 months

Study in JAMA Pediatrics estimates that vaccinating pregnant women against COVID-19 prevented 7,000 hospitalizations in infants and 3,000 in pregnant women from January 2024 to May 2025. 
#Medsky
www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/cov...

Trump: "The ones that are run by radical left Democrats -- what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places & we're gonna straighten them out one by one. This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That's a war too. It's war from within"

Hundreds apply for prestigious program. 20 get in. This COCC student is one of them COCC student Ray Randall has been accepted into the highly selective New York Times Corps, earning a national journalism mentor for his college career. He's one of only 20 students nationwide to be picked.

COCC student Ray Randall has been accepted into the highly selective New York Times Corps, earning a national journalism mentor for his college career. He's one of only 20 students nationwide to be picked.