Mads Ducharme

Your annual reminder that US streets and vehicles are generally not designed to keep pedestrians, especially small ones, safe.

So wonderful Halloween is the most likely day you’ll kill a child with your car, and someone will kill a child you care about with theirs.

www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Our love for Gaza’s cats is a light that refuses to go out During the genocide, my mother and I walked the city’s streets in search of stray cats to feed, these small souls giving us a reason to keep going

"Even in the face of incredible horrors, Palestinians in Gaza never gave up on our cats."

From Lamar Alhuwaiti, a very brave 17 year old writer and photographer from Gaza.
prismreports.org/2025/10/16/g...

what a beautiful keffiyeh!

Multiple journalists killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza hospital A hospital strike in southern Gaza has killed at least eight people, including four journalists. The attack happened on Monday.

Four journalists were killed by an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital today, including Mariam Dagga, a freelancer with the @apnews.com. She has a 12-year-old son, who was evacuated from Gaza earlier in the war.

She was a true hero, like all of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza.
tinyurl.com/3cn5c9vb

Why Republicans Are Terrified of Nonexistent Crime They need an excuse to violently subjugate liberal cities.

"But fundamentally, crime of any kind is a minor risk for a white man in D.C., which classification applies to Mullin, Duffy, Scott, and Trump. Overwhelmingly, the largest source of danger for people who fit that description is vehicle traffic, which killed 110 people in the D.C. area in 2024..."

lots of people already said my big favorite things but one of my little specific fav things is biking past a group of daycare kids all walking in a line together behind their teacher, saying "good morning neighbors!" to them and then hearing all their little voices reply "GOOD MORNINNGGGGGG"

186 journalists killed in Palestine since Oct 2023, for daring to tell the real story.

Gutting Our National Parks Step 1: Ruin everyone’s national park experience.

Is the government planning to privatize our national parks like Yosemite? Are you going to have to pay a for-profit company to visit Yellowstone? Today on Slate's What Next podcast, I talked to Jon B Jarvis, former director of the National Parks Service. He's sounding the alarm about a sell-off.

Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.

My NYT op-ed this morning
I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

Here’s How the GOP Cuts Medicaid Peeling back Medicaid expansion, one annoying layer of bureaucracy at a time.

As Trump’s massive bill rolls ahead, it’s truly wild to me how little of the coverage of the GOP’s cuts to Medicaid/work requirements talks abt what happened when the GOP TRIED THIS BEFORE! They’ve tried in two states! It didn’t go well! Anyway we covered this back in May: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

The nonchalant tone and extremely vague content of the episode description is so gratinggggggg

Will Israel Starve Gaza Into Submission? Israel is starving Gaza, according to a famine scholar.

It's important to pay attention to the lack of food in Gaza - what it feels like for those on the ground, and why millions are feeling that way in the first place: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

Opinion | Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist Women, people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community are main targets.

When Trump encounters a demographic he doesn’t care for, he “disappears” them–in many cases, the very record of their existence.
Meet America’s new “missing persons," and the govt campaign to delete statistical evidence of anyone who doesn't fit Trump’s idea of our new golden age.
w/ @ashendruk.com

Week Eleven - This American Life Mohammed Mhawish, a reporter who left Gaza a year ago with his family, talks to a young woman in Gaza about how she manages her hunger. Israel blockaded all food from Gaza for more than two month...

This week on @ThisAmerLife: I reported on Gaza’s severe food shortages and what it means to live through starvation.

Features my own experience and voices from those surviving it now.

Can A “Morality Coalition” Succeed Against Trump? Can a progressive coalition be built on morality in 2025?

Reverend William Barber walks with two canes and is *still* showing up to the Capitol to pray (and getting arrested for it). Reason enough to listen to him about why: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

Here’s How the GOP Cuts Medicaid Peeling back Medicaid expansion, one annoying layer of bureaucracy at a time.

The GOP is *saying* "work requirements". What they really mean is deep, and probably cruel, cuts. We know because they've already done it: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction | Mahmoud Khalil Deen, the grief I feel being apart from you is one drop in a sea of sorrow Palestinian families have drowned in for generations

To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction | Mahmoud Khalil

got some good screenshots of the replies while this was still live

Are Public Schools the Supreme Court’s Next Target? Is teaching religious doctrine less “indoctrination” than a book with a gay character?

Spoke with @maryharris.bsky.social about the Supreme Court's assault on secular public education—simultaneously giving religious parents a veto over curricula AND demanding that states divert taxpayer money to parochial charter schools run by the Catholic Church. Insanity. slate.com/podcasts/wha...

Let’s Take a Look at the Children’s Books Sam Alito Is So Afraid Of Stories like "Uncle Bobby's Wedding" are only objectionable if you find the very existence of LGBTQ people to be objectionable.

I acutally looked at the books that Sam Alito thinks are pro-gay propaganda designed to "indoctrinate" children. I've read my kids a million stories like these. There's nothing objectionable about them, unless you find the *existence* of LGBTQ people objectionable ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/mahmo...

The Mass Grave in Gaza A plan once only discussed in the far-right fringe has become the Israeli government’s policy.

It is getting harder to stay alive in Gaza. That is the bottom line. And I'm glad that @ayaelb.bsky.social is relentlessly shining a light there: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

Free Speech? Not If You’re A Foreign Student. Podcast Episode · What Next | Daily News and Analysis · 04/01/2025 · 24m

“Certain people have rights in this country until they don’t.”

Please listen to my friends @maryharris.bsky.social and Aymann Ismail.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

saw soooooo many the other day on my bike ride :)

The Group Chat Heard ‘Round the World Per Kinzinger, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is probably going to take the fall for this.

I've been wanting to have @adamkinzinger.bsky.social on the show for a MINUTE and I'm real glad we had him on this week to talk about the Signal story: slate.com/podcasts/wha...

What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced Exclusive photos of the arrival of Venezuelan detainees deported from the U.S.

“One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. *** He “began to whimper,” as his head was roughly shaved, “folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell.” He “asked for his mother & cried as he was slapped again.”

Presenting the 1,2,3s of why we’re unionizing on Sesame Street 💚

Please help us by signing our public petition! Link in bio 🍪

Trump’s Animal-Spirit Economy How long will the business community tolerate constant uncertainty?

Thanks to my friend @stephruhle.bsky.social for teaching me all about the Keynesian vocab of "animal spirits" -- and also making me laugh, a lot slate.com/podcasts/wha...

At Slate, we care about bringing you critical reporting and analysis about the layoffs happening throughout the federal government. We’re offering six months of complimentary Slate Plus access to federal employees who have been affected by these layoffs.

Visit slate.com/fed-plus for more info.

DHS official defends Mahmoud Khalil arrest, but offers few details on why it happened Homeland Security deputy secretary Troy Edgar offered few details on the Trump administration's legal reasoning to deport Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.

Looks like the audio's up! www.npr.org/2025/03/13/n...

The Slate Union logo—the Slate S featuring upward fist and surrounded by pink and white stripes—is seen above a statement: We, the Slate Union, are united in our belief that management’s decision yesterday to lay off three editorial employees—along with three of our coworkers in other departments—was misguided, foolish, and cruel. The cuts are not these employees’ failures; they are the result of the failure of this company to follow its obligations to its workers. When you can’t find a way to make the most out of smart, talented journalists, that’s a failure of management—and Slate staffers are right to believe it’s incumbent upon management to find ways to solve that problem that don’t involve job losses. Otherwise, what are we investing in journalism for? What are we asking Slate Plus members to invest in us for? There are particular aspects of these layoffs that we in the union find particularly outrageous. Eliminating three editors with their hands on politics and business will put an unbearable strain on others in the department, at the precise moment when coverage of these two subjects is crucial to the magazine’s success. One of the laid-off editors had union-negotiated parental leave approaching—as did another union member who was laid off just months ago. Another one of the laid-off employees was about to go on a honeymoon, and yet another was about to meet the qualifications for their pension benefit. The affected worker will be paid out for their parental leave, but the timing of these departures appears to be designed to make other union members think twice before utilizing the leave they have the contractual right to take. Not to mention, that one of the laid-off editors was hired not even a year ago—after a protracted search—calls management’s strategy into question, to put it lightly.

Slate has had two consecutive years of profitability. The fact that management views employees as chits to be discarded at any hint of trouble, instead of valuable people whose work makes our shop successful and profitable, is an enormous mistake. We insist that, in the upcoming contract negotiations, Slate commits to policies that treat layoffs not as a hair-trigger response to adversity but as an absolute last resort, one that will not be undertaken without consulting with the union and the employees in question. Simply paying out extra severance to a laid-off employee should no longer be a substitute for warnings about the state of our business and, more importantly, real attempts to save our staffers’ jobs. Anything short of this will demonstrate that Slate values the jobs of its executives more than its rank-and-file workers, and that good journalism by good journalists is no longer the north star of the magazine.

On Monday morning, Slate was suddenly informed that six of its employees—including three editors, two of whom were members of the union—were being laid off, just months after four other staffers were also let go. The Slate Union's official statement reads as follows: