Emily Grant

In addition to being a very uncomfortable dog whistle, this framing is completely the wrong lesson to take from the Epstein news. It’s about how widespread and pervasive misogyny and sexual abuse really are. This framing lets most of society off the hook too easily.

in the middle of this one, and last night read of the most impressive scenes i’ve read in a while - politically tense, devastating, propulsive, and somehow, very funny (in both a comedic and tragic sense).

For Tayari Jones, All Roads and All Novels Lead to Atlanta

Just the loveliest profile of a writer who deserves all of the hosannas.

Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From Major GOP Donor Island-hopping on a superyacht. Private jet rides around the world. The undisclosed gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the Supreme Court. “It’s incomprehensible to me tha...

Our Pulitzer-winning "Friends of the Court" series began with this story that revealed how SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas had, for 20+ years, been treated to undisclosed luxury vacations by real estate titan and GOP megadonor Harlan Crow.

(Published April 2023)

I'm asking that we all raise our political expectations. We deserve good things.

Survey: 1 in 3 Michigan residents align with Christian nationalist views • Michigan Advance One in three Michigan residents qualify as adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism, placing the battleground state squarely in the center of the national divide over the influence of religi...

"Christian nationalist views were also linked with... condoning political violence, belief in the racist and anti-immigrant “great replacement” theory and support for the deportation of undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without allowing court challenges."

Feb. 20, 1956 | Civil Rights Activists Arrested for Organizing Montgomery Bus Boycott Learn more about our history of racial injustice.

On this day in 1956, local officials issued arrest warrants for civil rights activists for leading a boycott to protest racial segregation on city buses. 89 would later be indicted.

this is an important call to action to reject DHS funding and compliance with ICE from R’ Ari Lev Fornari and Jon Argaman, asking jewish communal leaders to commit to the meaning of sanctuary:

“Sanctuary means something, or it means nothing. This is the moment to decide which it will be.”

Malcolm X looking past the camera

Today marks the day Malcolm X was assassinated and his words about Black women still rings true:

“The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman.”

Gray striped cat surrounded by toys with head on box.

Play hard, sleep harder #caturday

shabbat [re]reading, among others. shabbat shalom ✨

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

The Feds Targeted Charlotte. Now a Local Democrat Who Helped ICE Faces Voters. - Bolts North Carolina lawmaker Carla Cunningham voted to mandate compliance with ICE, and derided immigrants on the House floor. The Democrat faces an intense March primary.

Here are just 4 elections coming up in the next 10 days to know about.

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1️⃣ This Democratic lawmaker in North Carolina gave the GOP *the* decisive vote to pass a pro-ICE law last summer.

She faces a primary from a local progressive pastor, part of the Moral Monday movement.

in addition to alright, the kids are clear-eyed, excited, creative, engaged, smart, and dogged. i learned so much from them.

i also got to witness the amazing @farrahfazal.bsky.social and her co-facilitator, a wonderful student named alan, talk about the power of story-telling in an age of fear. 3/

Shabbat shalom to everyone (and especially to everyone who joined me in welcoming Rev. Jesse Jackson to the Occupy Wall Street sukkah in 2011) @jfrejnyc.bsky.social

swoon 🥹. bookstores as part of a civic institutional fabric forever. live events, real relationships forever, too.

yes they should be doing their own research! as a former district court clerk, the briefing often gets the law wrong.

Long overlooked, Soviet Jewish stories written after the Holocaust emerge in new translation - Jewish Telegraphic Agency The writer Sasha Vasilyuk interviews the translators behind "In The Shadow of the Holocaust."

Good interview with @returnstosender.bsky.social on translating Yiddish and Russian-language Soviet Holocaust literature into English, and the impossibility of escaping contemporary historical resonances. www.jta.org/2026/02/20/i...

shabbat [re]reading, among others. shabbat shalom ✨

bsky.app/profile/carl...

I described the study of citizenship in the US pre-Civil War period as like nailing jello to a wall. What are the rights and privileges included in formal citizenship? What was the relationship between US and state citizenship? What rights derived from social categories independent of citizenship?

on the topic of the kids are alright: this week, i had the honor of being a mentor with the western justice center in their peer mediation training where middle and high school students across LA learn peer mediation skills to address conflict in a peace-building and community framework. 1/

It's almost as if they aren't actually interested in fighting antisemitism, but rather in using Jews as a convenient cover to attack higher education, immigrants, and Muslims.

We all wish Jews and Palestinians in the land success. The land between the river and the sea remains the Jewish homeland and the Palestinian homeland. But the domination of one over the other will never yield the flourishing of either. Kant argued against the viability of domination in his essay “Perpetual Peace” and other writings (here see Omri Boehm’s Radical Universalism). It remains true today. Domination over another people is not only immoral, but also unsustainable, it subverts freedom and our understanding of Judaism and Jewishness. We pray for the land and its inhabitants, but we refuse to collapse our Judaism into the present state.

From the prolific Shaul Magid. You needn’t agree with all of his premises or conclusions to experience this as a moral tour de force + good-faith window into the arguments and truths so many young American Jews are grappling with.

“What Does the Jewish Left Want?”

open.substack.com/pub/shaulmag...

@farrahfazal.bsky.social and alan skillfully guided these students, and the room was filled of stories of solidarity and protest.

so, yes–the kids are the future. closing out this week very grateful for the western justice center, farrah & alan, and all these students. 4/4

in addition to alright, the kids are clear-eyed, excited, creative, engaged, smart, and dogged. i learned so much from them.

i also got to witness the amazing @farrahfazal.bsky.social and her co-facilitator, a wonderful student named alan, talk about the power of story-telling in an age of fear. 3/

these kids are amazing: they are coming from all walks of life–in their homes, schools, communities–and are nonetheless/therefore (both/and?) committed to the pursuit of peace-building and restorative and transformational justice instead of punishment, zero-sum fighting, and revenge. 2/

on the topic of the kids are alright: this week, i had the honor of being a mentor with the western justice center in their peer mediation training where middle and high school students across LA learn peer mediation skills to address conflict in a peace-building and community framework. 1/

“It is a remarkable document showing that Roberts — and a majority of the court — do, in fact, know how to do law. They do understand our constitutional structure and presidential limits — at least when the economic system is at issue.” 👇👇👇👇

here is buttons