Rob Truman

The Taken: Inside the ICE Detention Pipeline for US Citizens and Residents From Minnesota to Texas We document these patterns through the use of sworn declarations and court filings.

Inside the ICE Detention Pipeline for US Citizens and Residents: From Minnesota to Texas - @justsecurity.org @rgoodlaw.bsky.social and Sophia Khoroushi

Is this the most valid excuse in academic history?

Canadian figure skater Maddie Schizas posted her email to her professor, asking for an extension due to her participation in the Milano Cortina Olympics 🔥

I am not a Philadelphia sports fan and I can’t read Hebrew but I would still buy 10 prints of this

Wait these mini lecterns at Mayor Mamdani’s press conference are so cute.

(Video via Josie Stratman)

Two property lawyers secretly pine for each other.

Deeded Rivalry.

"a bizarre act of cultural vandalism"

"All over my neighborhood we keep finding empty cars, the glass shattered into diamonds on the snow, the people missing. Tiny private automotive kristallnachts, everywhere and ongoing."

Gallery of dust jacket art for the first four Nancy Drew Mystery Stories books, published in 1930.

Volunteer #librarians from around the world joined forces to build the Nancy Drew collection on Open Library—volunteering their time to organize series, verify editions, untangle authorship, and clean up metadata so anyone can discover these books.

Learn more ➡️ blog.openlibrary.org/2026/01/30/a...

U.S. citizen injured by federal agents in Salem who demanded to see “papers,” union says - Salem Reporter A home care worker and union worker was pulled from her car and injured by federal agents Thursday according to a statement by SEIU 503. To comment on this story, use the form at the end of the repor...

4 federal agents pull over an elderly US citizen for the suspected crime of being brown, break her car window, throw her to the ground, then drive off after they find her US Passport in her purse. The Salem Police, when called, say there’s nothing they can do. www.salemreporter.com/2026/01/31/u...

New 'Justice AI Tracker' watches how police, courts are using AI | StateScoop The Evidence for Justice Lab has launched new interactive tool aimed at bringing transparency to how AI is being used across the criminal justice system.

“The Evidence for Justice Lab, at the Washington, D.C., university’s McCourt School of Public Policy, published the Justice AI Tracker, or JAI-T, documenting where and how AI technologies are being piloted, tested or implemented in law enforcement, courts and corrections.”

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

A federal judge, in a published order, so very much on the record:

“ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

Grandpa the Cat: The Continuing Saga Continues Hello.

The story of Grandpa and her kittens and their adventures in the basement of @geneweingarten.bsky.social is just the morning read, these days more than ever. open.substack.com/pub/genewein...

There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets. Tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry.

OpenAI exec James Dyett calling out the cowardice

Amount of time network evening newscasts devoted to reporting on today’s protests and general strike in MN (not including coverage ICE actions or their attempts to spin)

ABC: 45 seconds
NBC: 20 seconds
CBS: 15 seconds
PBS: 2 minutes, 20 seconds

I am now up to $680 and as a reminder, I am personally pledging to match everything I raise through the weekend.

What is "your" Newbery book? The one you read when you were little (or not so little), and took into your soul?

Mine's The Perilous Gard.

So true 🥹

Johnny Tremaine 🩶

"At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'"

The Wingspan Americas and Viticulture: Bordeaux expansions are available now on our webstores! Shipping will proceed throughout February. This link goes to the US webstore, but we also have webstores for Europe, Australia/NZ/Asia, and Canada. store.stonemaiergames.com/collections/...

I Read Taylor Swift’s Texts to Blake Lively — And You Can Too I'm giving the people what they want: Links to the court exhibits containing Swift's texts to Lively.

Giving the people (and the Swifties) what they want: Direct links to the court exhibits containing Taylor Swift's texts to Blake Lively.

Read the texts -- and subscribe to my Substack!

open.substack.com/pub/annabowe...

Italian voice actor Carlo Bononi was the voice of all of the characters on Pingu. A trained clown by trade, he used a theater technique called grammelot, which consists of "speaking" in a mix of babbled gibberish noises. He improvised all the voices live and unscripted.

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Libraries can't afford e-books. D.C. lawmakers have a plan. The demand and price for e-books is up — and it’s busting the D.C. Public Library budget.

No surprise to librarians, but perhaps surprising to users, demands/prices for ebooks /audiobooks are killing public library budgets. David Szalay's book, Flesh,” costs DCPL:
$28.99 hardcopy
$59.99 ebook
$69.99 audiobook
DCPL owns hardcopy; rents & must repurchase ebook & audio book every 2 yrs.

A very cute but forlorn looking brown and white puppy with big eyes and floppy ears, sitting on a forest themed blanket. Facebook post message: “Central PA Humane Society: Susan from Accounting is a 4 month old female. We were told she is a Beagle/Australian shepherd mix”

BREAKING: This dog is named Susan From Accounting

I love this guy.

H.H.S. Reverses Decision to Cut $2 Billion for Mental Health and Addiction Services A day after funding termination notices went out to more than 2,000 programs nationwide, the administration reversed itself and reinstated the money.

Less than 24 hours after the Trump administration informed more than 2,000 addiction and mental health programs nationwide that it was immediately terminating almost $2 billion of their funding, the administration reversed course and reinstated the money. An administration official confirmed Wednesday night that the money was being restored, but declined to say why.

Well well well. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/h...

Sam Coffey’s Man City move is another blow for a hamstrung NWSL USWNT stars have a world of options as their domestic league struggles to match European teams’ ambition

“More than half of the USWNT’s starting lineup that secured the 2024 Olympic gold medal now play their professional soccer in Europe.“

Massive fail by NWSL.

#nwsl #woso #uswnt

@abigailsegel.bsky.social for @theguardian.com

"The substance use and mental health ecosystem is being decimated."