Joe Germuska

"this is an ideological project to remove local news access from rural communities, which only have one or two news sources. It eliminates access to information within one’s own community. This is about changing the information ecosystem that eliminates local news and replaces it with national news"

Little Simz- much more than just a great British rapper. A detailed look at her career (PSF article) www.furious.com/perfect/litt... #rap #hiphop @littlesimzfans.bsky.social

The Sydney Sweeney Jeans Ad "Backlash" Is Mostly Fake How a handful of TikTok comments became a national controversy about eugenics, Democrats, and denim.

“You don't need an actual controversy anymore. You just need the idea of one.”

www.readtpa.com/p/the-sydney...

AI is creating a divide between teachers and students When teachers know their students are gaming the system and students know their teachers know, the relationship frays

Today in The Important Work, a piece written by a high school student and a high school teacher about the ways AI is fraying the relationship between teacher and student. theimportantwork.substack.com/p/ai-is-crea...

chart: capital expenditures, quarterly shows hockey-stick like growth in the capex expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and meta, almost entirely on data centers in the most recent quarter it was nearly $100 billion, collectively

The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/

The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone*

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...

Original post: social.freedom.press/@freedomofpr...

Missouri’s oldest Black bookstore just closed. The Kansas City Defender plans to reopen it as a newsroom and public archive. “The thought of losing that history, particularly in this political moment, was devastating.”

"This month, Robinson retired, + Willa’s Books + Vinyl" — the oldest Black-owned bookstore in MO — "closed its doors. But [The Kansas City Defender, a local news nonprofit,] is fundraising to purchase the collection + turn it into a public archive [+] its first-ever public headquarters."

How Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency

The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you've never heard of. These…

Medicaid’s “Able-Bodied” Adults — Unbreaking In building out our Medicaid explainer, we uncovered a lot of actual complexity *and* plenty of plainly inaccurate information about who’s enrolled in Medicaid—and what it means to take away their hea...

Some officials and commentators have claimed that millions of “able-bodied” young men in the US are sitting around collecting Medicaid because they don’t want to work. The Medicaid research we’ve compiled says otherwise. unbreaking.org/blog/medicai...

Interesting to see two major news outlets — The Verge and Wired — both announce major newsletter strategies nearly simultaneously. I suspect both are motivated by the hope that email will be "stickier" than the (declining) direct traffic to news websites.

the one thing i genuinely did not anticipate from this administration was its vicious, know nothing hostility to any and everything that might even be adjacent to science and scientific research. they genuinely one to destroy the entirety of the nation’s research capacity. and for what, exactly?

I've long been interested in something for local music scenes. Show listings/ticketing, gear shares, Bandcamp-like music and merch sales, etc.

Tiny News Collective looks awesome, check it out if you wanna start a local journalism project!

And for your more general ~let's leave Substack~ needs, @leaflet.pub is making good progress, great for blogs now & newsletters soon :)

I wonder if we should do a similar "tiny ___ collective" (blog?)

Alden Global Capital fails in its attempt to get its tentacles on The Dallas Morning News A late bid to disrupt its sale to Hearst is foiled by a fourth-generation newspaper owner turning down more money.

New by me —>

The vulturous hedge fund Alden Global Capital has been prevented from taking over @dallasnews.com — thanks to one final act of stewardship by the family that has run the paper for more than a century.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/alde...

The commissars are literally using government power to attack and suppress political speech. Whatever you think about "cancel culture," this is 100x worse. Deeply authoritarian.

Original post: ecoevo.social/@sarahdalgul...

Lollapalooza asks: Do you love music enough to deal with this crap? - Chicago Reader This year's Lolla lineup is one of the worst in recent memory.

I wrote about some of the problems with Lollapalooza

July 27, 1919: Red Summer in Chicago Sparked by a white police officer’s refusal to make an arrest in the murder of a Black teenager, violence in Chicago lasted almost a week. At least 38 people were killed and thousands of Black homes w...

#tdih 1919 Red Summer in Chicago.

Began when white police refused to arrest white man who had stoned Black teen, leading teen to drown.

Massacres across country.

Read ⬇️ with teaching resources, incl. "1919" by @eveewing.bsky.social via @haymarketbooks.org & critique of U.S. history textbooks. 🧵

Original post: flipboard.com/@theatlantic...

‘Has it occurred to you that music might be made to bring more than pleasure? That its mysterious compelling power might be utilized to do you much practical good?”’

adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/re...

Reading Liz Pelly's Spotify book and intrigued to learn about the Edison Recording Company's 1921 "mood music," informed by customer-completed "mood change charts"

‘the company also promoted “Mood Change Parties,” where the charts could be distributed’

This super short interview is packed with great insights. It also mentions a book from 1972 (!) called Databanks in Free Society, which I wasn't familiar with and which is now blowing my mind a little. What it describes sounds incredibly familiar!

Stil from the infamous AI video released on National Resistance Day by the French government. It shows a German soldier in a scene supposedly representing Parisians celebrating the end of Nazi occupation.

Counterfactual pseudo-history is the default mode of AI slop. The latent spaces of #genAI are free of chronology, causality, or historical time. All visual patterns exist here simultaneously as equally accessible & exploitable resources, organized by similarity & ready to be endlessly recombined
4/

US economic data quality a worry, authorities not acting urgently enough, experts say Risks to the quality of official U.S. economic data - long seen as the gold standard - are worrying 89 of 100 top policy experts polled by Reuters, with most also concerned that the authorities are not addressing the issue urgently enough.

We ❤️ statistical agencies. We know you care about #DataRescue, but more needs to be done! Speak out!

"People take statistical agencies for granted. So they're easy to cut because there's no lobby or special interest group that's powerful enough to protect them."

www.reuters.com/business/us-...

Developing our position on AI Comments

God bless the Recurse Center for this very sensible (current) take on LLMs and coding: https://www.recurse.com/blog/191-developing-our-position-on-ai

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models rep… The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour

Read this by @baldurbjarnason.com

This is a delightful thread

Most commercially valuable copyrights are held by multinational corporations who have shown since time immemorial that they are not interested in human art. They are in the IP business, maximizing the return on investment for their IP assets. They will be thrilled to take a fat check from AI cos.

Lessons from a Chimp: AI "Scheming" and the Quest for Ape Language We examine recent research that asks whether current AI systems may be developing a capacity for "scheming" (covertly and strategically pursuing misaligned goals). We compare current research practice...

I am so grateful that this paper is out!

It so eloquently describes so many of the issues I've seen with a lot of AGI experimentation that concludes that LLMs are scheming, ill-intentioned, or malicious, and the chimp language metaphor is the cherry on the cake 🍰

arxiv.org/abs/2507.03409