Justine Larbalestier

The Supreme Court doesn't care if you want to copyright your AI-generated art The highest court in the US declined to review a case about copyrighting artwork created with the help of AI.

And BOOM goes the dynamite. To all the AI Bros who have slid into my mentions to tell me that you CAN in fact copyright AI materials, the Supreme Court has told you to go suck rocks. A prompt is not authorship. And if there is no author, there is no valid copyright.

www.engadget.com/ai/the-supre...

Difficult women are the best.

Flying electric ferries, people!

For us ferry lovers--and I get to travel on them in NYC & Sydney--this is extraordinary news:

archive.is/2026.02.10-0...

My ears still hurt.

A Century After Vanishing, a Gentle Giant Returns Wild European bison are roaming the Carpathian Mountains for the first time in 100 years — and bringing the land back to life.

The last wild European bison was shot in 1927. At the time there were fewer than 60 such bison alive in zoos & private parks. Now, the great, shaggy beasts are once again roaming the Carpathian Mountains.

And they're helping bring wild lands back to life.

Good news story! No pay wall.

An underrated good the next Democratic administration could do with virtually zero actual political blowback from voters would be to come in with anti-trust laws like a wrecking ball and break up media and tech companies. It would fuck up The Other Side, too.

There is no compromising with this regime, because regimes don't compromise. These people are fascists. Fight fascists always. No playing to their language or moved goalposts. No taking their statements as legitimate and reporting them. And then PROSECUTE THEM. Every last one of them.

Dear Ms. Wolfe, Petitioner-Appellee Rümeysa Öztürk submits this Rule 28(j) letter to advise the Court that on January 29, 2026, the immigration court held that the Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving removability, and the immigration court thereby terminated removal proceedings against Ms. Öztürk.' This development underscores the dangers of the government's interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under the government's view, it could punitively detain any noncitizen in retaliation for her speech for many months, so long as it simultaneously institutes removal proceedings—no matter how unmeritorious—all without any federal court review of the lawfulness of detention at any time. To be clear, the termination of Ms. Öztürk's removal proceedings does not moot her habeas case. (By contrast, as Ms. Öztürk has argued, this appeal is moot. Br. 18-20.) Without habeas jurisdiction and the bail order that is currently in place, any government appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals would again subject Ms. Öztürk to re-detention. See 8 C.F.R. § 1003.6(a). For that reason, she continues to suffer the threat of continuing "now-or-never" First and Fifth Amendment harms. Br. in Opp. 55-57.

NEW: An immigration court has terminated removal proceedings against Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, finding that DHS did not meet its burden of establishing that she was removable, her lawyers tell the Second Circuit. live-awp-vermont.pantheonsite.io/app/uploads/...

Democratizing the arts looks like universal income, low-barrier grants for both emerging and working artists, well-funded municipal arts & recreation programs, vibrant third spaces, and a well-funded public school system with progressive curriculum.

Not a free pass for corporate-owned slop engines.

My most radical basketball take is that the NBA never wanted the WNBA to be profitable so they designed it as a write off for tax purposes… so they can give large contracts to NBA players…that is my conspiracy take of the day…

I think often of the women in the Louis CK story—how they all left comedy and never went back, but he’s still going. It’s everywhere and it’s such a loss for them and for us—for things they’ll never make that we’ll never see.

If you've ever seen anything w/ multiple sources making serious allegations against anyone rich or famous or both, know the smartest lawyers in the land kicked the shit out of that story for upwards of 4-6 months, or in the case of my book, A YEAR. But sure, A Guy on the Internet is more credible 🤡

Device allegedly thrown into Invasion Day crowd designed to 'explode on impact', say police A 31-year-old man is charged with making explosives in suspicious circumstances after a device was allegedly thrown into a crowd of hundreds of people attending an Invasion Day rally in central Perth ...

A white guy threw a homemade bomb into a crowd protesting colonialism in Australia and the media have broadly reframed it in more gentle terms, eg this describing it as a "device" that was 'designed to explode'.

Being irksome should be an instant personal foul!

And you'd know better than most! Having actually worked in govt.

DHS has shot 12 people during immigration enforcement operations since September:

everything is so horrible, and i've called my senators, i've donated, but now i need my brain to uhhh brain better --

so please tell me about your favorite romance manga/anime -- anything rly, josei, shoujo, bl, gl, whatever, go to town. tell me about it!

Agreed. Risen Empire is amazing because immortality truly is a terrible idea! But tiny quibble: it isn't YA. It was written and published for adults.

Look, it's fine to love art by shitty people. It's not fine to defend their shittiness.

And if they're writers, buy their books secondhand. Authors make zero money from resale of our books.

Reminder: Scammers Are Out There Pretending to Be Me (and Other Authors as Well) Three times in the last week I’ve gotten inquiries from authors, about email from an account purporting to be me. This account praised their book in a very “AI” fashion and tried …

I wrote up a longer piece about scammers pretending to be me, how you can tell it's not me, and why neither I nor any other "big name" author is likely to be emailing you at all, and certainly not with obviously "AI"-generated verbiage. Please feel free to share.

whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/20/r...

I cannot be party to silencing writers, which is why I am resigning as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week | Louise Adler Cancelling the Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation

The folks who campaigned against Randa Abdel-Fattah being part of the Adelaide Writers Festival don't care there likely won't be a writers festival this year. They don't care if there are no such festivals ever again. I suspect that might even be the goal. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If you are angered by the Adelaide Writers Festival disinviting Randa Abdel-Fattah buy her books! Borrow them from the library!

Write to the Adelaide Festival & tell them what you think of their censorship: adelaidefestival.com.au/contact

If you can't afford to buy books right now, borrow Randa Abdel-Fattah's Discipline from the library. In Australia we authors get an annual payment based on how many times our books are taken out from the library.

It's bloody brilliant.

www.arts.gov.au/funding-and-...

Discipline Silence is complicity, but how do we confront the cost of speaking up? Sydney, May 2021. Ashraf is an academic whose career and personal life are in freefall. Hannah is…

Randa Abdel-Fattah's Discipline is about the constant negotiations, compromises & betrayals that arise from being a Muslim Australian in academia & mainstream media. Especially for Palestinian Australians. It's an absolutely compelling novel. www.readings.com.au/product/9780...

‘A nation of rich cowards’: Australia needs its dreamers but the arts are underfunded, undervalued and despised | Ben Quilty We need a society that values its visionaries, those who go against the grain to create new dreams that reveal other ways of being

Agreed! And it isn't just the USA. It's part of a wider contempt for the arts more generally. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Indeed one of my aims for 2026 is to reclaim scrolling time with book reading time. Here is the current novel I'm reclaiming time with. It starts off rather dramatically.

Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World Uruguay built a power grid that runs 99% on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. Here’s how its bold energy overhaul became a global model.

“Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.”

Discipline Silence is complicity, but how do we confront the cost of speaking up? Sydney, May 2021. Ashraf is an academic whose career and personal life are in freefall. Hannah is…

Why not start with Randa Abdel-Fattah's latest novel? Discipline, which is pretty bloody relevant to Randa's being disinvited from the Adelaide Writers Festival: www.readings.com.au/product/9780...

Now would be a fantastic time to buy Randa Abdel-Fattah's books. They're really good! Also varied. She writes non-fiction, romance, YA. Pretty much everything.