d.e.i., claudius

"Despite the three disasters, dedicated queer and trans Ugandans — many who could flee to exile to secure their own personal safety — refuse to give up trying to protect the health of their community, even as they’re being crushed."

Former WaPo staff: I’m sorry for the bloodbath. Question Everything is taking pitches for stories about the state of journalism, attacks on the press, our information ecosystem, and accountability for big tech. Pitch us/send tips: Brian@placementtheory.com Signal: brihreed.45

A fifteenth century illustration showing a man (probably a monk) seated at a desktop lectern that has another lectern on top of it, connected with some kind of metal arm. There are books scattered on the floor and on a bench. Notably, there's no fire in the room's grate, just ashes.

using multiple screens in the 15th century

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

Resident Jon Mannella challenged the lie that immigration agents target the “worst of the worse” and questioned why DHS and the City of Surprise would place them next to multiple schools if this smear was true. “I imagine if this was a homeless shelter or a mental health center, you would find a way to stop it. You would pull out all the stops. You would pull out the tomes of English common law, dust them off, and try to find some appendix in there to make sure you didn’t have to build this building. Well just pretend that it’s that and put a stop to it.”

“I imagine if this was a homeless shelter or a mental health center, you would find a way to stop it. You would pull out all the stops."

www.welcometohellworld.com/a-surprise-z...

Kind of amazed she had it turned on? I only turn it on when I'm crossing borders or am visiting a country controlled by a repressive regime ahhh shit

this is brilliant. congratulations rahawa!!

Listless Liberalism | The Point Magazine Where is liberalism’s “Fascinating Fascism”? Who is its Riefenstahl?

"Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity." || via @thepointmag.bsky.social

Hello, looks like independent publishers should beef up our books coverage.

If you're into the idea of joining the @flaminghydra.com collective and writing a book review each month (800-2000 word range), please send us your ideas and some clips to hello@flamingydra.com

predatory billionaires are doing a speedrun, trashing what remains of any halfway decent institution, any semifunctional public service, any enterprise bent on discovering and disseminating truth.

bezos' vandalism of wapo + bari weiss' defilement of cbs + trump's desecration of everything from civic architecture to the constitution are fundamentally the same political project. america's most enterprising billionaires are working night and day to make this country a stupider, uglier place.

Melania’s Movie Shows Signs of Bulk Buying to Boost Box Office: Guru How the $75 million “documentary” defied box office expectations is becoming clearer.

Who’s ready to talk about conservative book publishing

www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/box...

I Guess We're All Just Supposed To Be OK With Bombing Iran Again Watching the buildup for regime change in Iran happily echo the buildup for regime change in Iraq. PLUS: The ghost of NSEERS returns to DHS

The problem with @attackerman.bsky.social being cursed by Apollo with the power of prophecy is that we keep having to add things he’s predicted to his pieces as I edit them

they should make a movie series about how it’s irresponsible to use technology to mess with the natural order of things for profit

Welcome to the Jade Helm Presidency Conservatives once panicked about a supposed federal plot to invade their communities and quash dissent. Now they’re cheering it.

Trump has finally delivered the Jade Helm presidency the far right warned of in 2015: a techno-authoritarian assault on the White House’s enemies. Only now instead of raising an alarm over a hoax, they’re cheering the real thing.

theintercept.com/2026/02/02/t...

“People don’t understand what this job is,” he said, adding, “You cannot pick and choose, because among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people. Capitalism is a rough system.” In defending his pursuit of Mr. Epstein and candidly describing the burden of raising money, Dr. Botstein gave insight into how the need to attract dollars can appear to run headlong into an academic institution’s stated values. Mr. Epstein gave prolifically to many charities and universities, including Harvard and M.I.T., and the Wall Street Journal report showed that his network of contacts was wider than had been thought, including prominent figures like the linguist Noam Chomsky and Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and president of Harvard. Dr. Summers sought money for a poetry foundation, led by his wife, Elisa New, a Harvard literature professor. Mr. Summers declined to comment. “Would we accept money from Jeffrey Epstein today? No,” Dr. Botstein said, describing the former donor as a “monster” and “truly evil man.” “We had no idea, the public record had no indication, that he was anything more than an ordinary — if you could say such a thing — sex offender who had been convicted and went to jail.”

As more academic names keep coming up in the Epstein files, I keep thinking about this NYT interview with the Bard president from a few years ago, and wondering how many people were rationalizing in similar ways.

www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/u...

What We Saw in Minneapolis Our visual journalists documented the days surrounding Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis.

MUST READ this powerful, intimate dispatch from Minneapolis by @propublica.org visual journalists @peterdicampo.bsky.social (who lives there) & @cengizyar.com

This is America.

What Bari Weiss Doesn’t Get About CBS News Her plan to focus on “scoops of ideas” will only make the news network’s offerings more like (pretty much) everything else in media.

I wrote about Bari Weiss and CBS’s pivot to “scoops of ideas” newrepublic.com/article/2059...

new alex pareene and ta-nehisi coates articles on the same day. the long 2016 finally throws us a bone

If you're a health provider or health worker in Minneapolis, especially at a hospital, I'd love to talk for a story! melody.schreiber@theguardian.com or Signal in bio

Letter From Minnesota: Can You Hear Us, America? Since early December of last year, thousands of ICE officers have streamed into Minnesota to carry out a violent and grossly unconstitutional campaign of state intimidation upon the people of Minne…

Over the next few weeks @literaryhub.bsky.social will be publishing letters from Minnesotans about ICE’s authoritarian occupation of their home. First up today is poet Dobby Gibson. lithub.com/letter-from-...

Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics

"ICE 101" — How Trump changed ICE and CBP into a fascist secret police ICE and CBP are fatally flawed products of the post-9/11 War on Terror — now Trump has weaponized those very flaws to occupy America.

I found this bit, by a journalist who has written about CBP and ICE for many years, to be really instructive on how shockingly and persistently lawless those agencies, and especially CBP, have been for their entire existence, for more or less the same reason. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/ice-101-ho...

some tame gazelle by barbara pym + humphrey clinker by smollett. english irony + poignancy + escapism all at once! a good formula these days at least for me 😇

List and Shout | Lydia Kiesling The labor involved in making lists was as close to the opposite of a transcendent reading experience as a disillusioned culture worker could get.

When the AI slop summer reading list dropped last year I knew I had to write about making book lists. Thanks to @thebaffler.com for letting me go long with bewildered nostalgia & regret on 20 years of Internet book culture & how we made the slop book list inevitable. thebaffler.com/after-the-fa...

We must love one another or die A Hell World reader in Minneapolis sent me the drawing above. "Here's a drawing by an unknown artist at my kid's school. Among many other sweet gestures going in all directions, kids at the school ha...

"Can you imagine being made to wash the dishes used to feed the men who are waiting to kidnap you or worse?" @lukeoneil47.bsky.social:

There's a similar thread here to the whole "everyone must return to office full time or else there will be a commercial real estate crisis" meltdown circa 2022, where major companies seem to have decided they should get to invest billions of dollars risk free

Column: When this is over, we will need another Nuremberg "Regardless, we need to establish a few fundamental values: no grace for fascism, no tolerance for state terror and no illusions that compromise will beget accountability."

student journalists continue to step up. from yesterday's daily tar heel:

Once again I find myself asking the invigorating question “Is it 1933 or 1938?”