Ash Ponders needs work

YouTube video by The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Anil Dash on The Web We Lost

This talk I gave at Harvard twelve years ago discusses Apple removing apps from the App Store for doing journalism by covering American drone strikes, and what a threat that posed to accountability. The answer then is the same as the answer now: the open web. youtu.be/9KKMnoTTHJk

Tawny owl

Six weeks ago, I picked up a year-old tawny owl with a broken leg off the main road near our home and dropped him off at our nearest vet.

After a few days, I received one of the most bizarre phone calls I’ve ever had, asking “So when are you coming to pick up your owl?” 🧵

Immortal

I wrote a longish article about Richard Avedon and what his photographs of his old, dying father might tell us.

Awful

jfc

It also _seems_ to vary based on which shipping vendors used.

A big inconvenience for end consumers; an actual nightmare for businesses.

Just got them. Did boat shipping so… like two months ago?

I bought tea.

It was 100% plus some kinda of handling fee.

"Cringe culture was much more nefarious than we thought. It had people afraid of showing that they care, and that does not translate into any kind of action.

But it’s OK to care. We have to try to make that cool."

- Chef Jon Kung, Detroit-based chef, content creator, and cookbook author

Erasing the “Black Spot”: How a Virginia College Expanded by Uprooting a Black Neighborhood Sixty-plus years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, Virginia, seized the core of a thriving Black community to build a college. The school has been gobbling up the remaining houses ever since.

60+ years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, VA, seized the core of a thriving Black community to build a college.

The campus location “was almost entirely a racial issue,” said one professor. “I believe they wanted to remove the Black community from here.”

(Pub. 2023 w/ @vcij.bsky.social)

Acquired bellows. What small things should I make photos of?

Interior of a WMATA train. Near the exit doors, above the blue accessible seats is a ProPublica ad that reads "Someone on this train has the next big story. Is it you? Signal: 917-512-0201. propublica.org/tips." The poster's illustration features a Black woman wearing business attire, standing while holding on to a guardrail. Next to her is a seated white man in a button-down shirt. He wears his backpack and is looking down intently at his phone.

Close-up of a D.C. metro ad. Tagline reads: "There are thousands of federal staffers with stories to tell. Share yours. Signal: 917-512-0201. propublica.org/tips." Background illustration shows a man in a dark suit standing on an escalator that's heading out of the metro station, holding his phone out as he looks back.

Red line. Orange line. Tips line.

#ICYMI, you can now catch ProPublica’s tips line on the DC metro 🚆

Federal workers and contractors: We want to hear from you. You can reach us at https://propublica.org/tips or 917-512-0201 on Signal.

“please don’t be mean to the politician!” is something i will truly never understand

Money?

Why is this dog doing CrossFit?

I’m the one who told Robert about Olaf. Haha.

It’s a wonder to me that birding is having a small moment right now, it’s a nominally free activity. Such things rarely catch on.

Solar panels & windmills do not explode.

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."

🕵️‍♀️🦬 Mystery solved! Our missing 650-pound Museum bison has returned after 50 years. Learn about its journey back to the Museum in #Catalyst. https://dmns.mobi/47bCc43

soft streaks of sun slide through the fog in a primeval redwood forest. one spindly little young tree stands alone. emerald undergrowth in the shadows.

feels like a good time for redwoods posting

Companies shouldn’t store government IDs. Too much of a liability.

this is like half of r/ups now

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Took Money Directly From Chinese Investors, Company Insider Testifies The newly unsealed testimony marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the company has been disclosed, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of America’s most importan...

Experts said federal officials would likely be deeply interested in understanding direct Chinese investment in SpaceX.

The U.S. government has asserted China has a systematic strategy of using investments in sensitive industries to conduct espionage.

The dedication to visually representing each of the 4,304 deliveries in the background scroll is admirable and conveys the loss to food banks.

The personal interviews and portraits are concise but powerfully relate these cuts’ impact on peoples' lives.

Everyone’s’ “must read” today.

Indonesia is so strict about this that when you’re going through customs, it has a death penalty warning about drugs on all the documents you’re given and have to present. I remember seeing it in all red letters and being like, DAMN.

To be fair the mods should hate the users and vice versa, in any but the smallest and most tight knit online groups.

USC sold dead bodies to U.S. military to train IDF medical personnel A review of seven years’ worth of contracts unveiled more than $860,000 to use cadavers in surgical trainings involving the Israeli Defense Forces.

Amazing work from USC student journalists: www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/10/01/u...

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

what the actual fuck