Over here checking sources

I’m just saying if Sauron *made* the ring who are some dweeb-ass hobbits to decide it’s gotta go. Are we pro-creator and pro-artisan or not.

Welcome to the anti-trans outrage factory — Jessica Kant When I first wrote Anatomy of a moral panic in February 2024, I had only a faint glimmer of what was to come.The astronomical rise in stories about trans people that I’d collected over the previous ye...

Part 3: "The astronomical rise in stories about trans people that I’d collected over the previous year told a different story. This massive, messy dataset was brimming with increasingly vile headlines that only seemed to metastasize with time. ... two years later we know how the story turns out."

Love in a cold climate: Winter Olympic village runs out of condoms after three days Free condoms for competitors at the Winter Olympics have run out within a record-breaking three days

Love in a cold climate: Winter Olympic village runs out of condoms after three days

Full disclosure: I follow one social media account where a woman wears Meta glasses to capture intense video of cross-country horseback rides. But no facial recognition tech, to my knowledge.

Sounds like the justification is that people are so busy with trying to fight a thousand dystopian things, they won't even notice if we launch this one extra dystopian thing.

From Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's book, You Can Be the Last Leaf Poem. Translated by Fady Joudah.

#poem #books #writing

it is about to be the first valentine's day since thousands of people fell in love with a predictive text generator and i fear the content will be tremendous

Opinion | Why dating apps just got worse What happens when you remove the humans from human connection?

So gross. (Gift link.)

wapo.st/3OdJGxo

"It" being AI.

Pretty much the most important thing happening in the world right now.
www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chi...

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(To make a single donation, you can subscribe, make a payment, and then cancel.)

If you're a book creator and people in your life don't understand why book bans are such a sore point for you then by god show them this film. It really gets people fired up.

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.”

hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

Georgia librarians could face criminal charges for ‘harmful materials’  • Georgia Recorder Librarians and education advocates are warning that a bill moving through the state Legislature could cause Georgia’s librarians to self-censor controversial materials and lead to more challenges on b...

Under a new Georgia bill, librarians could be arrested for allowing a minor to read a book with LGBTQ+ characters or storylines.

georgiarecorder.com/2026/02/03/g...

Big Deal Cancellation Tracking - SPARC

If you've walked away from a so-called "big deal," let us know. We keep a record of institutions that have canceled contracts with publishers, along with strategic considerations, outcomes & money saved. Click for a list & resources. sparcopen.org/our-work/big...

In light of Ring Cameras allegedly helping you find your dog:

Russians are trying to rewrite history on Wikipedia. Because it's the #1 source of training data for AI systems, it can also be used to "poison" platforms like ChatGPT and Claude AI.

The disappearing art gallery in your post office The U.S. Postal Service is home to thousands of historic works of art in post offices nationwide. Hundreds have been lost, sold or destroyed.

👀 What if I told you there was a hidden art gallery scattered across the country?

What if I told you some of its treasures had vanished?

What if I told you that I found them?

A project three years in the making (🎁 gift link):

There were still some journalists there doing work I appreciated :(

A sickening moral slum of an administration: 
Regarding Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply incompetent. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.

Got this by email. Interesting that the WaPo knows what might convince me to subscribe again, while also making it extremely unlikely that they will be doing more of this.

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Such an amazing image! (And please give Kate Beaton the credit 🖤)

I went to Germany in my 20's. My Canadian friend didn't want me to ask but when I met his Germany friend I did: "What do you think about the Holocaust?" He replied that in school they were taught that it was not their fault, but it was their shame. That was one generation after the ones at fault.

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in the midst of the absolute tidal wave of reposts of that awful truth social post it seems we need a reminder of this post from @clancyny.bsky.social

please stop uncritically sharing propaganda

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What? Oh no. This is bad. No advance warning.

Opinion | Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? (Published 2022)

Did you know air pollution is the top preventable cause of premature death + ill-health in the world today: killing nearly 10 million people per year? And 2/3 of air pollution comes from burning fossil fuels?

For more surprising & powerful facts on health and climate, follow @maibached.bsky.social