Laura Wagner

Bari Weiss Signs Huge Deal To Usher CBS News Into Its Vichy Era | Defector On Monday, newly appointed Paramount CEO David Ellison announced that his company had acquired the Free Press, the smirking blood-and-soil blog founded and run by former New York Times hall monitor Ba...

Media criticism lives: defector.com/bari-weiss-s...

Trump administration illegally targeted pro-Palestinian protesters, judge rules The efforts to detain and deport noncitizen activists earlier this year represented an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment, the ruling says.

wapo.st/4pPUT5I

Can Liberalism Be Saved? The legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues for a more expansive definition of an ideology under threat.

Really good. Ezra Klein next www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

EXCLUSIVE: US Bill to Block Arms Sales to Israel Endorsed by Progressive Caucus The endorsement of the Block the Bombs Act by one of the largest caucuses in Congress gives a significant boost to efforts to hold Israel accountable for its genocidal war in Gaza.

NEWS: The Congressional Progressive Caucus — which represents nearly 100 members in Congress — has just voted to endorse the Block the Bombs Act, to block weapon sales to Israel.

First time any major congressional caucus has backed legislation to end US aid for Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

NBA Reporter Fired After Accurately Describing Charlie Kirk's Beliefs | Defector Arizona-based outlet PHNX Sports has fired its lead Phoenix Suns reporter Gerald Bourguet after he posted tweets critical of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, in the aftermath of Kirk’s fatal…

NBA reporter fired after accurately describing Charlie Kirk's beliefs: defector.com/nba-reporter...

Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer scratched bullets with a Helldivers combo and a furry sex meme The suspected shooter left a hodgepodge of extremely online taunts.

New from @tinanguyen.bsky.social and me: Charlie Kirk's shooter left behind bullet casings with a furry sex meme and a bunch of Helldivers video game references. Subreddits for Helldivers immediately picked up on it.

www.theverge.com/politics/777...

If you can track the boat on camera to slaughter everyone aboard then you can track the boat on camera to intercept the boat and arrest them

“I hate to say it, but the American settlers are the most harsh, the most racist towards us,” Abu Diab, the activist from Al Bustan, told me. “For example, so many of the settlers who took over houses in Sheikh Jarrah, in Silwan, in Batn al Halwa: you can immediately tell they are American from their accent,” Abu Diab said in a later interview in August 2025, “and some of them who commit violence against the Palestinian citizens also proudly say, ‘I am from New York, I am from California.”

www.thenation.com/article/worl...

Giri Nathan DISHES On Jannik Sinner And Carlos Alcaraz In This EXCLUSIVE Interview | Defector Defector’s own Giri Nathan is the father of an insanely great new baby and the author of an insanely great new book. Just as babies transform and master skills at alarming speed, so too have the young...

Not surprisingly, @girinathan.bsky.social's new book about Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz is so rich, observant, and filled with pitch-perfect sentences. I love interviewing my coworkers when their books come out 🥲 and loved this chat about sportswriting with the best in the biz

I’m a Teenager In Gaza. And I Am Starving. What hits you first is the exhaustion carved into every face. The sickly pallor. The terrifying weight loss ravaging everyone—yes, including me.

Every time @thenation.com publishes the writing of Lujayn, a teen in the Gaza Strip, I hold my breath while reading. If you read one thing today, make it this: "Don’t you dare preach “child protection” to our children while they are bombed and starved in front of the whole world."

Page says “good night Yankee stadium, the crowds have gone away, turn out the lights, close up the gates, until it’s time to play.” With a drawing of soccer field

Baffling page in Night-Night New York

How Climate Change Is Transforming The Soundtrack Of The Natural World | Defector It is easy enough to read about the climate crisis through the dozens of devastating stories that run each week, warning us of the people who will be displaced or otherwise harmed by the planet’s…

Can we hear the climate crisis? defector.com/how-climate-...

We could have had cancer vaccines, and instead the United States will contribute nothing whatsoever to mRNA research, condemning millions of people worldwide to unnecessary illness and death

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

Cory Booker (D-NJ) voted against Bernie’s resolution to block sales of assault rifles to Israel.

This year, Israeli soldiers killed a 14-year-old from New Jersey.

Lol

Screenshot of text: [Highlighting begins] But the shooting may put concerns over gun violence back on voters’ minds, and may lead some to further scrutinize Mr. Mamdani, [Highlighting ends] who has relatively limited experience in government and has not handled a high-profile crisis while in office.

One fascinating thing about the most self-serious newspaper in America with its staff of the winning journalistic meritocrats is that it routinely, institutionally publishes completely made-up bullshit speculation about pure abstractions, based on zero reporting, written as if it were plain facts

Hedge Funder Who Voted for Trump Pledges $500K to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor Ricky Sandler, the head of Eminence Capital, wants to kickstart a super PAC to take down the Democratic nominee and "improve the image of Eric Adams."

According to an email obtained by Hell Gate, Ricky Sandler, the head of Eminence Capital, wants to kickstart a super PAC to take down the Democratic nominee and "improve the image of Eric Adams."

hellgatenyc.com/anti-mamdani...

Mass starvation stalks Gaza as deaths from hunger rise Aid agencies warned for months that Israel’s harsh limits on food aid would bring acute malnutrition and widespread suffering to Gaza’s 2.1 million people.

Gaza faces a severe humanitarian crisis as Israeli restrictions on aid lead to widespread malnutrition and starvation, with hospitals overwhelmed by malnourished children.

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Reddit's relationship with Al is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into Al-generated search "Answers," and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit's vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person - or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They're getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real - and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere - are drifting into mutual suspicion. Huffman suggests that, just as Reddit was rewarded for offering an alternative to more baldly growth-and-ad-driven social media, it could serve a similar role in the post-ChatGPT world as a refuge for actual human interaction in a sea of generated text. "Social media made Reddit make more sense, and I think now that the web is kind of dying, sadly, that evolution helps Reddit make more sense," he says. "Reddit in that era is, Reddit is not social media. And now, we're entering this new era where Reddit is not AI."

It's a powerful pitch, to the extent it remains true. But it doesn't quite capture just how strange and risky Reddit's position is in 2025. Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing. Reddit is an alternative to a web that's harvested, polluted, and depleted by tech firms in a race to dominate Al. It's also an increasingly valuable data source for tech firms in a race to dominate AI. How long can it be both?

on reddit, the website at the end of the internet nymag.com/intelligence...

haven’t seen much coverage of this new, unprecedented statement in western media (Politico had an item about France urging Israel to let international media in). Do the news orgs around the world who are relying on & profiting from the work of Palestinian journalists think this is newsworthy?

www.middleeasteye.net/news/afp-war...

AFP, following the lead of its journalists’ union, warns its journalists in Gaza are dying of starvation

William F. Buckley's Bill Never Came Due | Defector Perhaps the highest praise I can offer a book that took 27 years to complete and runs over 1,000 pages is that I can see why, and that it doesn’t feel like it. Sam Tanenhaus’s extremely long and…

Brandy Jensen read a 1,000 page book about William F. Buckley Jr. defector.com/william-f-bu...

New York Times Turns Arizona Special Election Into Defeat for Mamdani The Gray Lady’s apparent obsession with stopping Zohran Mamdani has generated a mirage in the desert.

nymag.com/intelligence...

The shocking rise of one of the tech-right’s favorite posters After he leaked Zohran Mamdani's Columbia application data to the New York Times, critics called Jordan Lasker a "eugenicist." A Mother Jones report shows there's much more to his backstory.

New: After he leaked Zohran Mamdani’s Columbia application data to the New York Times, critics called Jordan Lasker a “eugenicist.” A Mother Jones report shows there’s much more to his backstory.

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

YouTube video by Zeteo Mehdi Breaks Down the Trump-Epstein Friendship, With All the Receipts

Trump and Epstein were BFFs. Their relationship goes way back. So why aren't we talking about it? In detail?

Here's my deep-dive into Trump and Epstein, with all the receipts!

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