Kelly Smith

U.S. Department of Education Receives Recommendations to Reform the Institute of Education Sciences Today, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon received a report from U.S. Department of Education Senior Advisor Dr. Amber Northern with suggestions on how to reform the Institute for Education Sci...

The Department of Education has released recommendations to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which is the research and statistics arm of the Department.

Controversial citizenship question added to upcoming census test Researchers worry question plus other changes will reduce accuracy and boost costs of 2030 count

How the Trump administration blew up the upcoming one-and-only field test of the 2030 census www.science.org/content/arti...

President Trump just said, “We lifted 2.4 million Americans off of food stamps.”

A reminder of what happened to those 2.4 million Americans:

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

Tired of dystopian sci-fi? You might like Solarpunk. A recent literary genre imagines what happens when our climate changes—and so do we.

hey yo

i wrote a reported culture essay for @motherjones.com about solarpunk

it was incredibly fun talking to a bunch of solarpunk thinkers and artists!

the magazine commissioned some lovely art for it too

le voila: www.motherjones.com/environment/...

Web page showing categories of civil rights enforcement being tracked

New project led by former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys tracks and analyzes reversals in civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration. Covers education, disability, housing, LGBTQI+, and more. redlinecivilrights.org

The Trump Administration Is Intentionally Erasing the Black History Told by Public Lands and Waters Public lands tell America’s full and true story, yet new Trump administration policies threaten to erase Black history, undermine access, and distort the national memory.

Public lands tell America’s full and true story, yet new Trump administration policies threaten to erase Black history, undermine access, and distort the national memory. https://ampr.gs/4aFBHkf

there should be a microsoft office setting to warn people when your level of irritation is already dangerously high that day

Exclusive: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere The U.S. State Department is developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propagan...

Exclusive: The US State Department is developing an online portal to enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda, sources told Reuters reut.rs/4cySsA6

Obama is right about aliens But is math on the side of *humanity*?

President Obama said something that anyone who studies extraterrestrial life understands: The math is on the side of the aliens — but what most people don't realize is HOW MUCH the math is tipping toward the aliens. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/obama-is-r...

Preserving The Web Is Not The Problem. Losing It Is.

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the…

"Using primarily government sources, we identified the removal of at least one SOGI measure from approximately 360 different federal data collections. We consider this a conservative estimate and expect upward revisions as ongoing data reconciliation and discovery of additional removals continue."

They're Coming for Our Daughters The conservative plan to shrink girls’ futures

The Heritage Foundation has released a 250-year roadmap to “save America.”

The document is a how-to guide for subjugating girls & young women: a detailed plan to push them out of college, funnel them into early marriage and motherhood, and then trap them there.
jessica.substack.com/p/theyre-com...

Universe, take the worries we carried today, quiet the overthinking, hold what feels heavy so we can rest; we release what didn’t go right, forgive what we didn’t finish, and wake up tomorrow to a clean page.

Goodnight 🌙

The House just passed the "SAVE America" voter suppression bill on party lines; Cuellar was the lone cross. This is going nowhere in the Senate.

A photo of gallup

Gallup will no longer measure presidential approval after 88 years thehill.com/homenews/med...

Trump administration removes Rainbow Flag from Stonewall National Monument The Trump administration removed a large Rainbow Flag from a flagpole at the Stonewall National Monument, the National Park Service confirmed to Gay City News

When a headline says it all:

IDK who needs to hear this (Ok, I do, but I'm being diplomatic) but you cannot simply report what DHS says as fact in 2026 without looking into it

The withdrawn chapter is available in the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org/web/20260203...

Brandi Carlile's accompaniment for "America the Beautiful" before the game last night was SistaStrings. The duo, Chauntee and Monique Ross, played another American anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," on the Library's Stradivarius instruments in 2024.
Here's a clip of that impromptu performance. ⬇️

Billie Eilish, stolen land, and the climate cost of America’s dispossession Returning Indigenous land won't destroy civilization, it could save it.

Billie Eilish, stolen land, and the climate cost of America’s dispossession

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office The policy change orders the removal of any post made by official State Department accounts on X before President Trump returned to office in 2025.

The policy change orders the removal of any post made by official State Department accounts on X before President Trump returned to office in 2025.

GM: Charisma check.

Mamdani: [rolls natural 20]

GM: that’s a d6 how did you

Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

Grant Guidelines for Libraries and Museums Take “Chilling” Political Turn Under Trump Former Institute of Museum and Library Services leaders from both political parties expressed concern that the new funding guidelines could encourage a more constrained or distorted view of American h...

NEW: The Institute of Museum and Library Services is now accepting applications for its 2026 grant cycle.

But this time, it has unusually specific criteria: It “particularly welcomes” projects that align with President Donald Trump’s vision for America.

How Metric Media filed more than nine thousand public records requests last year. It used the data to target Democratic politicians and private citizens.

In the past year, Metric Media filed more than 9,000 FOIA requests across all 50 states, according to an investigation by Miranda Green and the @towcenter.bsky.social. www.cjr.org/tow_center/p...

Trump officials propose testing a citizenship question amid a push to alter the census The Trump administration proposes to include a question about U.S. citizenship status in this year's field test of the 2030 census, as Republicans push to alter the counts behind voting maps.

Adding a citizenship question serves no purpose except to discourage census participation.

The 14th Amendment says to count everyone. Allowing the ruling party in a census year to change who gets counted would be yet another assault on democracy.

www.npr.org/2026/02/05/n...

Thanks...already listed there under the litigation header, but I appreciate you sending it. Always looking for more to add!

I *love* that this is back!

“Dial-a-Poem is at (718) 957-2379.”

The announcement that the CIA has killed its long running World Factbook rightfully glows about its usefulness. So why kill it?

Unrelated to everything — but relevant to everything — this map is worth spending some time examining and thinking about. We know so little of our own history — and this wasn't that long ago.

Your grandparents' grandparents' grandparents were likely born around the time of this map.