Arthur Bright

One of the most dangerous tropes in political media is how the only Jewish voices that matter are the most right-wing ones, hence the ease with which reporters assumed Jews are scared of Mamdani. (This is also how Jewish protestors were erased from the discourse about antisemitism on campuses.)

Feels like the combo of "one week it calls itself mechahitler / next week it runs DoD" is something historians will see a lot more clearly than we do right now

Let's be clear: Jordan Lasker's scandal is MUCH worse than that of Harvard's Claudine Gay, which the NYT covered for days. Gay wasn't fired. Bryan Pesta was. Jordan Lasker could never be hired. If the NYT cares about academic misconduct, they must now cover Lasker's sins. They made him the story. 6/

A Doctor Challenged the Opinion of a Powerful Child Abuse Specialist. Then He Lost His Job. A Minneapolis pediatrician said he felt pressured to “fall in line” with child abuse specialist Dr. Nancy Harper and her team. Then he was given a choice: resign or be fired.

Almost exactly a year ago, a source told me that I should look into the work of an influential child abuse pediatrician in Minneapolis and the questions being raised about her judgment. After speaking to a half dozen families, that line of inquiry led me here: www.propublica.org/article/chil...

Probably my favorite tifo ever and hearing Allianz roar as it went up got me choked up.

Why London’s hot ticket is a sing-along of school assembly hymns

Why London’s hot ticket is a sing-along of school assembly hymns

The meritocracy at work. Only the best lawyers.

Robert Smalls’ Civil War bravery jumps off the page. A new comic captures his legacy.

Robert Smalls’ Civil War bravery jumps off the page. A new comic captures his legacy.

In South Park, San Diego, US citizens stigmergically rose up against Trump’s Gestapo. The revolt erupted midday when ICE began rounding up people at a restaurant; patrons and passersby alike dropped everything to confront the regime storm troopers. #3E #EndImpunity #StopICE

Call me old fashioned, but I don't think firebombing the elderly is an effective strategy

A second term Dem who was getting polling numbers like this would be having his political obituary written and LAME DUCK in headlines every day, not "third term?" speculation.

That's the only one that makes any sense (if any of this makes sense).

Trump’s racist trolling of South Africa’s president today is perhaps the most racist WH moment since Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation there in 1915.

Why are ICE agents such cowardly wusses? | Will Bunch Newsletter Plus, how the Trump-Leo divide was born in the ‘80s.

They hide behind ski masks or balaclavas, wearing no badge, sloppy clothes. They threaten anyone who asks for ID or warrant with arrest, leave little kids alone in cars and push around 80-year-old congresswomen

Why are ICE agents such cowardly wusses? My new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

Over the weekend, I emailed DHS' McLaughlin to see if she could answer some of my questions, or at least explain why so many of their agents hide from the American people behind masks. She responded, "When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, "hey clearly identify themselves as police while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected gang members, murders (sic), and rapists. Attacks and demonization of our brave law enforcement is wrong. ICE officers are now facing a 413% increase in assaults." It's not clear what backs up that statistic, and whether DHS' number includes incidents like Newark or Charlottesville, where no one assaulted ICE agents but regular citizens simply wanted to know, who are these masked men? You won't be

Cops don’t usually wear masks. Nor do FBI or DEA agents.

So @willbunch.bsky.social asked a DHS flak why immigration enforcers are wearing them, often while out of uniform.

Her response is … unconvincing. www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

Hasan Piker detained at the border and questioned for hours over politics + TikTok clout loop, Kai Cenat's next chapter, the "safest white boy", Minecraft marriages, group chat trauma, a MAHA-friendly food app, Altman's kitchen fails, and Silicon Valley's existential crisis

No U.S. citizen should be detained by law enforcement, at the border or anywhere, because of their protected speech.

ICE and CBP are the "enemies domestic" that federal officials swear an oath to defend against.

www.usermag.co/p/hasan-pike...

They’ve watched democracies fail. They see it happening under Trump.

They’ve watched democracies fail. They see it happening under Trump.

I’m still trying to take it all in!  The election of Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV was an extraordinary and delightful surprise.  I was one of the many commentators who said that the choice of an American as Pope was an impossibility (or at least extreme improbability).  I took my cue from the late Cardinal George who said that there would never be an American Pope until our country went into political decline. But the Cardinal electors obviously felt otherwise. I am very intrigued by the new Pope’s choice of regnal name.  Leo XIII has long been one of my papal heroes.  He not only inaugurated the modern social teaching tradition of the Church, but he also gave rise to the revival of Thomistic thought as a means of creative engagement with the contemporary world.  There is actually much in Leo’s teaching that would appeal to both liberals and conservatives today, and this might signal how this new Leo will function as a bridge.   And he’s a Chicagoan!  Ad multos annos, Pope Leo.

Nobody tell him

After Russia and Qatar, the World Cup in the US was supposed to be a break from forcing fans to visit authoritarian countries

Elon Musk's Grok AI Will 'Remove Her Clothes' In Public, On X Elon Musk’s AI bot is undressing women on X.

the state of Twitter: you can reply to any image of a woman with a request to Grok to undress her to her underwear and it will comply and post the reply in thread: www.404media.co/elon-musks-g...

Judge In Apple / Epic Case Is Spitting Mad At Apple’s Willful Contempt Back in 2021, Apple mostly won the antitrust case that Epic brought against it, and the Ninth Circuit largely agreed. The court rejected most claims about Apple’s App Store being an illegal m…

@mmasnick.bsky.social 's take on the Apple injunction is topshelf!

www.techdirt.com/2025/05/01/j...

Tweet from Charlie Spiering @charliespiering: "Photos show Mike Waltz literally checking Signal during the cabinet meeting (via Reuters)" UNderneath is a zoomed in picture of a phone with the chats open. You can see chats with Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, someone whose last name ends with "cheidt," and a group chat labeled "NSC Scheduling." You can see You can see that JD Vance's chat has a text saying "I have confirmation from my counterpart it's turned off. He is going to be here..."

Honestly this is just incredible content.

If we had not instituted my policy recommendations, things would be looking great. So the policies are working

If you factor out the fact that I'm stabbing you in the face right now, you're actually pretty healthy.

we need to think of 'abolishing ICE' as like 'abolishing the Wehrmacht.' Germany still needed an army. Americans will still want some kind of immigration and border authorities. But abolishing the culture, structures, and power-holders of a utterly corrupted and brutal system is important.

The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something t…

Wrote about how, for all of the "fears" about LLMs "hallucinating," the Trump administration (and Trump specifically) is way worse in hallucinating answers every single time.

www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/t...

In Poland, we know all about fighting illiberal regimes. Here are our lessons for the Trump age | Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura Our political history is one of catastrophe, communism, and developing powerful antibodies against oppression, say Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura

An interesting view from Poland about what lessons Americans should be taking for anti-Trump protests.

Gotta give Bondi credit here.

It’s clear she knows the DOJ Manual’s principles of federal prosecution inside-out and backwards, because she’s obviously trying to violate every single section and subsection of them.