Carla Murphy

Mischief Toy Store in St. Paul has until Wednesday to turn over employment records to the Department of Homeland Security as part of a surprise audit launched Friday, just hours after one of the shop's owners criticized ICE agents during a television interview. bit.ly/4r5AFol

Same. Even now the cleaner jokes when she arrives: "Did you clean before I got here?" She just laughs at me. I do love coming home to a clean place.

Trump’s Fight With Minnesota Is About More Than Immigration

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/m...

"Truthiness is an interesting puzzle for immigrants and the native-born Americans who love to love immigrants. I think they love each other’s forgetting."

Cue Marcus Aurelius to Maximus in the movie, Gladiator: “Commodus is not a moral man. You have known that since you were young. Commodus cannot rule. He *must* not rule."

Once you understand that you're dealing with murderous liars, you stop entertaining what they say as possibly credible and legitimate. The fight against them is about stopping them from terrorizing and killing by any means, not winning debates about your reality versus theirs.

There seems to be a sense that movements operate "efficiently" or "inefficiently" and that sense never seems to account for state violence and repression. lol.

Can elite culture produce democratic journalism? How a pluralist nation listens in

"Listening in" is not part of the cultural common sense of our steward-elite.

open.substack.com/pub/carlamur...

YouTube video by Jimmy Carr Less debate, more deliberation. #jimmycarr #hecklers #crowdwork #standup #heckles

Comedian Jimmy Carr with a great insight. Debate vs deliberation.

www.youtube.com/shorts/c7Kwg...

Students plugging local news gaps isn’t sustainable for students, communities, or journalism Carla Murphy on how expecting college students to “fill the gap” in local news without addressing institutional power may reify inequities.

Expecting students to plug local news gaps isn’t sustainable for students, communities, or journalism objectivejournalism.org/2025/12/stud...

PITTSBURGH'S Public Source Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh journalists return to their jobs at the Post-Gazette after three years on strike After a court ruling in their favor, long-striking journalists declared victory and returned to a pivotal Southwestern Pennsylvania newsroom. They return as union organizing continues throughout the region. Stephanie Strasburg November 24, 2025

Natalie Duleba, local secretary of the guild, hugs Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild Communications of America, as she hands him the mic. "The first day of this strike, our folks went over across the street and they sat down at a table, and they started talking about that they were going to take care of each other," said Schleuss, acknowledging the guild could not have known how long the path back to work would be. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh's Public Source)

This is so incredible. You have to see the photos. These workers held the line for THREE YEARS www.publicsource.org/post-gazette...

YouTube video by Tiera Tanksley Howard University AI Panel

I need everyone, esp anyone working in education or tech (but really everyone) to WATCH THIS CLIP of @drtanksley.bsky.social discussing the technologies infiltrating our schools & psyches and how she is addressing it with our young people. youtu.be/5mtcSL4S3HQ

New York millionaires: threatening to flee the city since 2009

Who Is Russell Vought? How a Little-Known D.C. Insider Became Trump’s Dismantler-in-Chief Reporter Andy Kroll explains Vought’s rise from a congressional staffer to the man piloting everything from Trump's layoffs and agency closings to his shutdown strategy, controlling the fate of trilli...

ProPublica spent almost a year chronicling Vought’s rise from the mailroom of the U.S. Senate to his perch as one of the two or three most influential players in the current administration behind only Trump and, arguably, Stephen Miller.
www.propublica.org/article/vide...

Column: Information is the most human thing you can study "This detective work, this human ability to read between the lines and see what’s missing as well as what’s there, is the real work of information and library science. The information is all the littl...

www.dailytarheel.com/article/opin...

How I talk About the American Mainstream Why "place" matters for truth-telling about our nation

"I also aim to help move the discourse around media, pluralism and democracy beyond interventions at the level of content. Our media infrastructure now disappears “place” in storytelling, at scale."
open.substack.com/pub/carlamur...

I know people on here are scandalized that someone might classify a public school teacher as "working class" because she might have a masters or even PhD in education but can we agree it's at least as weird to call the guy who owns the local Wendy's franchise "working class" because he has a GED?

Love this.

Why I gave the world wide web away for free My vision was based on sharing, not exploitation – and here’s why it’s still worth fighting for

Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee

Cover of The City of Our Dreaming by Laleh Khalili, V. Mitch McEwen, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. With an introduction by Christina Sharpe. The title and authors are in a black capsule shape that is slightly offset in the middle, surrounded by a red background. On the left side the words The Alchemy Lecture appear vertically.

In "The City of Our Dreaming," the 3rd Alchemy Lecture, @lalehkhalili.bsky.social, V. Mitch McEwen, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, and @biidaasamose.bsky.social imagine ways to organize city life. Read the intro by @hystericalblkns.bsky.social, for free on our website now! buff.ly/zjH8Y4w

Exactly this

Amid billionaires taking over the whole society, Democratic pundits & operatives have launched a billionaire-funded Abundance movement, a billionaire-funded Substack & a billionaire-funded think tank.

We have to understand this as all part of the oligarch takeover of whatever remained of democracy.

It's unjust to group academics @CarlaMurphy.bsky.social, @jnelz.bsky.social, @suerobinsonuw.bsky.social, @taliastroud.bskysocial, & @andreawenzel.bsky.social, as each has their specialties and projects, but their collective rigor provides the framing and evidence that all our work desperately needs.

Saw these new (to me) teethy turnstiles to stop fare beating -- and thought about this era's quiet disappearance of, say, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or a Lina Khan.

This.

The only thing I can say about this paragraph is read it. Sit with it. Read it again. @michaelharriot.bsky.social

Listening to this press conference it seems clear that Trump is mentally gone and that his team is consolidating power for President J.D. Vance.

Journalism, democracy and “pluralist sight” The challenge for journalism in a new century

open.substack.com/pub/carlamur...

One of my deeply held beliefs is that if we could condition people to accept how chance affects their lives, they’d be much better equipped to recognize how systemic things impact them.