So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

What we're watching: A new take on "Frankenstein," a lavish legal drama starring Kim Kardashian and a Tracy Morgan-led spinoff.

sometimes an Oxford comma can make all the difference

The future being pushed by both AI boosters and educational censors is one where access to information is tightly controlled. Children will not be allowed to read certain books or learn certain narratives. “Research” will be performed only through one of a select few artificial intelligence tools owned by AI giants which are uniformly aligned behind the Trump administration and which have gone to the ends of the earth to prevent their black box machines from spitting out “woke” answers lest they catch the ire of the administration. School boards and library boards, forced to comply with increasingly restrictive laws, funding cuts, and the threat of being defunded entirely, leap at the chance to be considered forward looking by embracing AI tools, or apply for grants from government groups like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which is increasingly giving out grants specifically to AI projects.

Once you start thinking of AI as a war on humanity, on human thought, on human inquiry, on human labor, on nuance and critical thinking, it slots in pretty seamlessly with the right wing ideological project, oligarchical political projects, big tech's political projects, etc

Holy, had no idea she passed. Truly horrific news - her work got me through some rough times

i want to repeat this: mamdani and spanberger have run similar campaigns tailored to their respective electorates and it is maddening to watch political journalists attempt to create some broad contrast where none exist

"X shouldn't be political." OK but it is. Now what?

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

???

Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same

Israel killed at least 104 people in Gaza, including 46 children, in overnight strikes on the Palestinian territory.

The attacks came after Israel claimed its soldiers came under attack by Hamas militants, though the group denied responsibility.

What are we even doing here?

People don't "just get MRIs" and even raising the prospect of a third term reveals an overt contempt for the Constitution.

"In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team"
Jean-Paul Sartre

Tear gassing random residential streets is just absolutely psychotic behavior.

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

Thinking about DJ Khaled and the time he got lost on a jet ski in the dark. Genuinely one of the greatest sagas ever posted on the internet and the only reason Snapchat was worth it

Also, sorry, but in a time when people are getting picked off the street for speaking Spanish, it is fucking I N S A N E to um actually your way into saying Latinos are white because you don't like that they broke for Bernie six years ago

The carceral state is generally brutal and evil in the way it treats the human beings it cages, but it’s fine to point out when there are bursts of unusually concentrated or vigorous evil and use it to get people to care.

Actually this is the first time I've heard of mixed race heritage -- 2025 truly is wild

This is just "no true scotsman-ing" what counts as a minority electorate group lmao

When do we get to the posterior

Three schematic diagrams. The first illustrates selective publishing of internal resection, the second selective causal focus, and the third selective access and funding for researchers.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv.

There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

An amazing story of this decade was the ADL turning all its fire on Israel critics while tech companies dismantled their censors and Hitler-lovers came roaring back.

Ain't no way anybody cares what Ross Douthat thinks about Tswift

Keynesianism is like Ozempic in that it's something that works but makes people mad because they want moral hazard to be involved

speaking of the ACA, I'm so old I can remember when Joe Lieberman killed the public option, and Ezra Klein accused him of being "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score," and the entire DC media fainted simultaneously

With alt text.

Executive summary: the US killed at least 3 Colombian fishermen who’d put up a distress flag. In Colombian waters

White words on a black background read: 50+ Immigration agents have the authority to detain whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino. ~130 Agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers. ~20 Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer.

Hi, I'm the ProPublica reporter who's been tracking an unusual stat: U.S. citizens grabbed by immigration agents.

I did it because the government isn’t.

This is what I found.