Today is Sitaday, 02 of Trogool 4118. [4118.03.02]
…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!
Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR China, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission, provided that you comply with the terms of the license. However, feel free to ask for help or otherwise reach out, too.
May’s Idle Thoughts
Welcome to the fifty-ninth issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.
People Search Antics, May 2025
This went fairly smoothly, this time through, at least in terms of attention. Three sites have dropped off the Internet, so let’s celebrate that. More sites, however, have deployed those cookie-cutter animated sites trying to give the impression of an overworked clerk manually sifting through paper, rather than the server saying SELECT * FROM person WHERE name = 'John Colagioia'…
On the last, Check People seemed like the worst offender, constantly finding some additional step in its process, and stopping to ask if you really want to find out all sorts of dirty secrets. I suppose that we should thank them, since I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to believe that anybody wants my address—if it has it right—badly enough to wait at least five minutes while the site pats itself on the back.
Upshot, though, no legitimate entries on me, unless I look fantastic for an octogenarian.
AI Failure As a Service
Not that I believe that generative AI can ever do a good job at anything—if it did, then as I’ve said many times before, we’d have a working mathematical model of intelligence that we could implement with pencil and paper, which feels highly unlikely—but I increasingly wonder if the companies deliberately make them do a lousy job at everything.
We now know, for example, that Google sabotaged search quality to increase engagement so that users would see more ads. Now, AI chatbots don’t get money from advertising (yet), but they definitely still want engagement, because in the absence of an infinite Internet of human-generated content for them to scrape, they probably can’t find a more significant source of training data for their systems than user inputs.
We’ve all seen the responses seemingly designed to infuriate us. I’ve recorded some of them in blog posts, I believe. In addition to blatantly wrong answers that don’t really matter, we see reports of these systems claiming that they’ll work on something and get back to you later, producing fabricated citations, repeating wrong answers when asking for better options, ignoring criteria, avoiding questions, and so forth. We write it off as “amplified auto-complete,” but these systems definitely have some semantic analysis and the ability to stay on topic.
It makes much more sense, analogous to companies use customer service to prevent you from voicing your frustrations, for these AI companies to add this frustration, whether in the training data, directives, or algorithmic oversight, so that users will either try to “explain” the problem or curse out the chatbot, keeping the user actively shoveling in novel natural language for processing instead of getting their work done.
Project Previews
The renewed job search (alas) soaks up a lot of time that might have previously gone to side-projects, but I can still occasionally dig into weird ideas that might become something down the road…
The Light’s Edge
As I’ve probably mentioned, I have needed to rethink some of what I’ve written on this, not least because Donald Trump’s policies make it unlikely for a Black woman to run a major military base, tasked with protecting democracy and international overreach, named for United States Army General Philip Sheridan during the Civil War. Between blackouts and Signal scandals, he’d have had Hegseth rooting around in there, to nobody’s benefit.
And I also finally got a microphone working to record the introduction, but also need to overhaul the opening of the story, meaning that I want the introduction to flow better when spoken, rather than thinking of it as text to read.
If you want to check out what I had before deciding to do this, I started moving my drafts to a git repository. You can find the introduction—think of the Star Wars “crawl”—and effectively the first chapter that introduces our interim protagonist and his context, parts of which you may have seen before. In fact, if you’d like to help with revisions or see errors, by all means go through it. I have it hosted off on the relatively obscure Disroot to minimize prying eyes, until the parts become ready for release.
Tests for toys may also start soon. I’ve made some progress on getting from Make Human to printable parts, and now that the weather has started getting warm enough to leave windows open, the 3D printer will also get some use.
Octavo Caboodle
Pardon the placeholder name that may or may not grow on me.
This may come to nothing, in the end, but the recent article on Forth from Wired reminded me of something: Every few years, people re-discover Forth and, probably because it doesn’t look like the programming languages that they use, they feel like they’ve discovered some suppressed knowledge that they’ll use to change the computer industry. And I say that as somebody who likes Forth…
Regardless of that, it did lead me to read up on Collapse OS and Dusk OS, and I find them interesting if backed by an almost stereotypical Forth ethos. And while I can play with the latter on my desktop with its inbuilt emulator, I don’t have a handy computer to try Collapse OS itself, and…maybe I need one. I took digital electronics classes in school, and I think that, with some research, I could work out how to build an all-in-one, portable 8-bit computer.
I don’t have any plan, at this point, not even a target CPU. Looking at the Collapse OS page, the most expedient route involves a 6809 or 6502 microprocessor, since they already have builds for those systems, which can assemble and disassemble code—making the system more extensible and debuggable—but that doesn’t necessarily restrict the search. If I could get something that fits into a shell as an all-in-one personal computer (keyboard and screen), runs Collapse OS, and costs less than twenty dollars to make, I’d call it a huge success, given how little hardware work I’ve gotten to work on since the 1980s. I don’t know if I even still own a breadboard…
Granting, I only gave this a superficial search, but it looks suspiciously like microcontrollers—a microprocessor with memory and some input and output features on the chip—might come significantly cheaper than the bare microprocessor, less than a dollar versus around ten dollars per chip, so again, I don’t know where I want to go with this, erring on the side of price or repairability, but I do want to mark it on the horizon, in case I start treating this more seriously, or if any readers have useful insight on how to do this cheaply.
Oh, the name? I picked octavo (8º) after the book size and reference to eighths, and caboodle as not-a-kit when providing everything. Silly name, but it does at least gesture at the likely size, the 8-bit microprocessor target, and the everything-included concept.
Media
In no particular order, I present a list of some things that I finished watching, listening to, or reading in May.
No, I don’t remember when I started them, unless they didn’t take long. You can probably estimate that I watched about an episode of any given “archived” television show per day, though, if that helps. If you’d like to know what I finish watching as I finish it—sometimes I catch something during the narrow window when people can watch it free—you might consider becoming a member at Buy Me a Coffee.
I bailed on Gannibal Vol. 1 about a quarter of the way through. The first couple of pages telegraph most of the story, and it tries to camouflage that with juvenile humor.
The Wedding Planners made for an amusing diversion. I’ve started to come to the conclusion that I respect Michael Seater’s acting, but he lands the most irritating characters available…
The Bionic Woman has an unfortunate split-personality. I didn’t watch it when it aired—I didn’t, and still don’t, care about The Six Million Dollar Man—so this makes my first exposure to it. And when it actually does what it says on the label, we actually get a pretty great show for the time. The main cast can act, and the writing mostly works. However, it spends about half its time doubting that. In early episodes, they look for any excuse to cram Steve Austin into the story, where he drains all the momentum out of everything while soaking up all the attention. Later in the series, they keep trying to set up backdoor-pilots for the bionic dog, so almost anybody or anything can sideline Jaime to give a German shepherd an excuse to star every time they adjust his supporting cast. And sometimes they try to give her a boyfriend other than Steve, who looks and acts like Steve, because we apparently can’t trust a woman to lead a TV series…
Superman For All Seasons forced me to remember how little I enjoyed comic books back then, with the constant obsession with explaining characters to us and how they fit into their precious (until the next reboot in a couple of years) reboot, while “paying tribute to” every single version of that continuity that still interested them. In this case, it spends a lot of time trying to resurrect the 1980s John Byrne comics almost verbatim, while including nods to Lex Luthor’s green armor from the early 1980s and the then-current animated series. But mostly, I object to portraying Clark Kent as a hulking monstrosity visible from space, because the creators at the time apparently couldn’t grasp the idea that a superpowered being might have abilities that defy conventional mechanics.
Like Propaganda last month, I’ve had Rules for Radicals on my shelf forever intending to read it, only to mostly regret finding it more of an extended commercial (a memoir, more generously) for why you should pay Saul Alinsky to teach your people about organization than actually teaching. In particular, it devotes something like half the book to the story of using shareholder proxy votes to curb Kodak’s bad behavior. For all the right-wing shrieking about Hillary Clinton, international cabals of Those People™, Marxism, and whatever else, it mostly comes off as anodyne anecdotes about planning rent strikes against slumlords and the like.
By Any Means went way too far down the fascist road for me to care about the characters. They live in a black-and-white world with no moral nuance, making it fine for—in effect—secret police to commit all manner of crime in the service of getting forced confessions out of “the worst” criminals. They want us to cheer the team on as they steal, abduct, seduce, and hurt people, because we shouldn’t care about things like civil liberties for their targets. They even have an episode where they have added pressure because the courts put “good cops” on leave…after they systematically harassed their suspect. Oh, and it doesn’t even bother to make the schemes fun.
Maybe I didn’t pay it enough attention, but I found Six Four entirely opaque, and other than the top-line plot of a possible link between two abductions, I couldn’t tell you anything about it, even after reading the Wikipedia page…
Honestly, I also had trouble following Incredible Hulk Vol. 1: Age of Monsters. Should I have studied for this? Maybe, but that shouldn’t matter too much. However, it didn’t give me a reason to care about the characters, the stakes, or even the presumed Easter eggs in their choice of characters and monsters.
Night Court, season 3—maybe because I started watching the original series not too long ago and can compare the two—feels like it went out of its way to highlight the show’s problems. It doesn’t care about people (while the original looks like a prototype for Ted Lasso, for contrast), but it definitely cares about seeing the protagonist as “fun.” John Larroquette and Wendie Malick have characters who seem to get it (why I still watch this slop), so maybe they have different writers, but the rest of the cast and writing thinks that we tune in to hang out with neurotic, self-absorbed characters trying to look “fun.” The season finale really draws this into focus, with the runaway teens (the main plot of the original’s second episode, by the way) relegated to a subplot about telling “funny” marriage jokes than actually helping them; everybody brought before them, in fact, exists as part of a joke, rather than somebody in distress. Anyway, I’ve thought about this problem from the characters not quite fitting together, but seeing the original now makes me want to ask why anybody would bother with a forgotten trademark at all, if they didn’t care about the politics of the predecessor? (And I’ll tell you, the “it’s funny” production card at the end feels like insult added to the injury…)
American Fever doesn’t seem to ever enjoy itself, but it talks a lot about what a Pakistani American “looks like” well enough that I suspect most people can see their own lives somewhere in it. I can’t say that I enjoyed it, precisely, but I definitely appreciate it.
August at Akiko’s has a similar “more satisfying than fun” angle, but I’d recommend it.
Gods of Want feels like it goes in the “not for me” category. Most stories feel like they only want to play with how the author believes that children mishear things, such as (actual example) disappointment that a carpool doesn’t mean that they filled the car with water to swim. Stories that don’t do that, such as the stories about queer relationships, seem to want to disgust us with—I usually associate this with mainstream erotica written by men—clinical descriptions of sexual activities.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries baffles me a bit, as if it has some sort of identity crisis. It has a few excellent episodes scattered around, showing what it can do. But many episodes feel like…do you remember that run of films based on comic books, where the directors all thought that they invented the idea of staging scenes to look like comic book panels? Think that, but 1920s illustrations, where star Essie Davis doesn’t so much act as pose. Either that, or the episode focuses on the mousy, wet blanket of a sidekick, as she constantly whines about not getting her way, people not seeing her as feminine enough, or that the world includes things that she believes Catholicism doesn’t allow. Also, why—in an Australian production set in Australia—do more people in their Australia have horrendous American accents than Australian?
Legion of Honor: Deserter kind of lost me in the first couple of scenes. An establishing title explains how the French colonists lived peacefully alongside the Algerians for decades until (paraphrasing) those darn Arabs started making trouble and agitating for independence, and…I’d bet that the native Algerians didn’t see it that way. Looking it up, it seems like they adapted the story from the protagonist’s autobiography, which probably explains a lot.
Next to Normal (Great Performances) does a fairly good job with its topic, I think, though focusing on the husband trying to manage his family annoys me, because it makes somebody else’s illness about him. But if you want a show with a lot of intense music about bipolar disorder and attendant problems, it should work. And if the songs sound familiar (they did for me, so I looked it up), Riverdale featured it at some point.
Saul at Night has a clever conceit, but feels maybe a bit too artsy for its own good. It keeps reminding us to feel sad about the situation, while acting like they’ve set up some impenetrable riddle that doesn’t seem at all mysterious. I didn’t dislike it, but it mostly felt like real people on the production side had about as much fun as the characters, even though I doubt that. Actually, in retrospect, let’s consider one critical point: If you lived in a functionally abandoned world with no responsibilities, and met a second person in your situation who didn’t speak your language, why would you not prioritize learning that language instead of your silly shadow-society projects?
The Partition both impressed and disappointed me. For the former, I enjoyed the writing, which moves fast and carries emotion along well. For the latter, though, it often feels more like a catalog of injustices that Asian Americans still face than a story. In that sense, it doesn’t feel like it contributes anything to the conversation, unless you’ve never had any friends with Asian ancestry…
Grosse Pointe Garden Society feels like the out-of-order retelling came from editing rather than writing, but it has a solid cast and some fun moments.
Go watch Yellow Face (Great Performances). It has enough truth in it that people my age and older will remember many of the referenced incidents, and…I can only really describe it as a tragedy woven from jokes. I can only really complain that they looped more polite terms into the audio, instead of presenting the show as written and acted, meaning that the video sometimes looks like something went wrong, and a few scenes don’t land the way that I imagine they would have in the theater. But given that you can no longer see the show at the Roundabout, you won’t get a better opportunity.
Asian Americans doesn’t have many surprises if you have a sense of American history as it relates to Asian Americans, and it might even pull its punches at strange times. But it covers the history in an engaging way, and includes footage that I’ve never seen before.
Tosca (Great Performances) looks and sounds great. To my chagrin, though, unlike the rest of the world, the United States persists in not translating opera, so either prepare yourself to split attention between the music and subtitles or skim the Wikipedia page before diving in.
I enjoyed Hunger, though as an anthology of short stories, I don’t know that I can say much of use about it.
Fate & Fabled takes a fairly engaging look at mythology, though I wish that it had some sort of agenda beyond enjoying the material. Zarka and McTier both do clearly love the material, though, and have solid chemistry with each other, so I can quickly forget the disjointed nature of the show.
Miss Austen makes me slightly uncomfortable in that portrays real people, the Austen family, for a highly speculative story to resolve the (real-world) mystery of why Cassandra Austen destroyed Jane’s letters. However, the cast and bringing Jane Austen to life—I gather extrapolated from what little of her correspondence remains, where she writes about how she would speak to Cassandra if the sat together—and a great cast makes it fun, even if probably not accurate.
Watson finally gets Sherlock Holmes out of the way—setting the show between the character’s intended death in The Final Problem and Doyle’s reluctant return to the character in The Adventure of the Empty House—to take the law enforcement angle out of the detective concept. And at least in the broad strokes, it works well. They saddled it, though, with “perpetual surly teen” Eve Harlow playing almost literally the same character she played in the final season of Star Trek: Discovery, and stereotypical “twins with opposite personalities” played by the same performer. (Also, apparently Pluto TV works as a way to keep up with shows on CBS.)
All Eyes bored me, frankly. Wet blanket characters hunt a monster by sitting out in a field saying banal things, and I already don’t enjoy horror. If they had produced this as a podcast, it might’ve gone better, where you can mine boredom for comedy by spoofing the NPR-style first-person narratives that feature knocking on doors while nobody answers. As-is, though, I couldn’t bring myself to care.
400 Days stars a surprisingly large fraction of the defunct Arrowverse cast. Dane Cook feels like a waste of time. It has a fairly clever idea, though, and I mostly enjoyed seeing the performers in different roles.
I lost track of Space Milkshake fairly quickly. It has a reasonably good cast, but somehow (incorrectly) thinks that we’ll absolutely love the captain’s clueless misogyny. A shame, because off in the background, though bobbing to the surface in the second half where they rush it, like the laziest Star Trek episodes, it has a B-plot that would’ve made for a much more interesting and funnier film.
I didn’t care for Girl from the North Country at all, but I’ve never cared much for “jukebox musicals” or—I know, heresy—Bob Dylan.
I mostly enjoyed Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries, though it relies on a surprising amount of romantic tension with characters who have no chemistry with anybody; the detective, in particular, has absolutely no discernible life in him. Also, for a show that wants to constantly remind us that the characters (and writers) accept gay folks, they go really far out of their ways to repeatedly show us every main character’s not-gay credentials. And how did we get through a dozen episodes of this without taking down the openly corrupt police chief?
A Walk in the Sun felt overly long and tedious. It already started “in the hole” as a war film, but it also didn’t do much to improve on that foundation. The characters all feel particularly flat, as they zoom in on members of the cast so somebody else can recite some pablum or an unseen crooner can sing something while everybody stares into the middle-distance.
Wrapping up the franchise at least for now, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears feels a lot like what we should have gotten for the two shows. The characters feel vibrant. They sideline the sidekicks so that we only endure a minute or so of Dot whining about the existence of abortions. The story actually makes use of the era. They take them out of Australia so that we don’t need to question the accents. And it actually has some fun. I suppose that everybody needs to move on after a decade (since the series ended), but they almost certainly could’ve brought the show back under this team.
A Quest for Heroes feels like the absolute laziest fantasy movie that I’ve seen, half an hour of mindless brutality, followed by a paint-by-numbers Dungeons & Dragons riff, where they “need” certain kinds of characters—as in, literally, a magic-user, fighter, thief, and cleric, often using those terms—to form their “party of adventurers.”
The Roundup: No Way Out entertained me more than I really expected. The goofy dubbed voices didn’t give me much confidence, but—ignoring that I find myself once again needing to watch cops—the story has a lot in it, and I found the cast charming.
We Two Alone, as expected from a collection of short stories, provides a mixed bag, but the stories entertain or provide some interesting insight more than they don’t.
New Tricks has its moments, largely due to Amanda Redman’s presence, but a lot of it also feels like filler, and it sometimes wants us to cheer on the combination of older “what civil liberties?” style of law enforcement with the modern surveillance state, and…no, thank you. In fact, it also doesn’t seem to know where its politics lie, other than the telling excessive whiteness of London—the show starts with a Black character in the supporting cast, but he vanishes fairly quickly—lurching from getting leverage over suspects through their involvement with “illegals” in one episode to not seeing why a lesbian couple would have fled town a few decades ago earlier in another.
The Irish Connection felt like a paint-by-numbers, with “surprises” like clowns falling flat because somebody definitely added the idea to the script later in hopes of fixing this mess. The lead character has potential, but who would do that when creating another female secret agent takes less effort…
American Songbook at NJPAC presented some good and some not-so-good, probably unavoidably. I’ve spent time on worse, at any rate, and can only really complain that a season only has six episodes to it…
All Aboard for Love has another paint-by-numbers story, but unlike (for example) The Irish Connection, I suppose that you go (or get pushed) to these sorts of films for the cast, not the innovative story, and I did enjoy most of the cast.
The Good Asian, volume 1 spends a bit too much time trying to shock and (maybe) exploit, but at heart, I can’t fault a historical thriller that has done careful research on its era.
System Error seems like a cute idea—think The Wild Robot, but in a post-apocalyptic London—but it takes its time to the point where I have no idea if continuing the series would lead anywhere.
Marie and Worrywart: Comics About Anxiety resonates in that it sounds like how other people who have anxiety describe it, but also doesn’t feel like much more than that.
Sammy J and Randy in Rickett’s Lane Felt like most American sitcoms based on the act of some comedian, having some occasional funny lines, but disjointed and more reliant on “getting way with” putting things into the script than trying to make the situations comedic. And having a puppet as one of the comedians—apparently a normal part of the Australian comedy circuit—doesn’t improve it much.
Torpedo 1972 #1 felt like every cynical cliché mixed with every mob cliché. It somehow doesn’t have anything like kindness or joy in the pages, and I know that some people love that, but I definitely don’t.
Another Happy Day feels real, but never gets so bogged down in the stress that it turned me off.
I hated Offerings, bluntly. It has a surface-story that might have caught my interest, but it interleaves it with this inane story from a child’s perspective that combines the most racist stereotypes with random search results if you look for weird English phrases, producing rambling that seems designed to reinforce the myth of Asians as perpetual outsiders.
For Bouncer Vol.1: A Diamond for the Beyond, you could probably get away with grabbing whatever I said for Torpedo 1972, but exchange the mafia for ex-Confederate soldiers. But it somehow both capitalizes on making them vile and forgets that Black people exist, so that we don’t need to talk about icky things like slavery. I actually gave up about a third of the way through, and paged through the rest, not my favorite way of ending a month. Maybe we can squeeze something else in?
I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the full version of Kiss Me, Kate, weirdly. You can find the non-musical version of the play widely enough that I assume that everybody knows it—a former married couple needs to put on a production of The Taming of the Shrew—and I’ve heard some of the musical numbers, but never as one piece. And…I feel torn. I like every element of the show, but the music doesn’t feel like it goes together. I have that complaint with many more modern musicals, though, so maybe they blazed a trail…
You might (rightly) question my use of Tubi, given that the Fox Corporation owns it. However, I…didn’t watch any of it on Tubi, since those particular shows don’t have DRM on them, and I assume that they don’t get any ad revenue for people snagging the M3U8 streams.
Blog Posts for May 2025
In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.
Free Culture Book Club — Meteorite - Sat May 31 2025
Toots 🦣 from 05/26 to 05/30 - Fri May 30 2025
Real Life in Star Trek, Descent, part 2 - Thu May 29 2025
Developer Diary, Memorial Day - Mon May 26 2025
Free Culture Book Club — Sówka w świecie dnia - Sat May 24 2025
Toots 🦣 from 05/19 to 05/23 - Fri May 23 2025
Real Life in Star Trek, Season 6, TNG - Thu May 22 2025
Firefox’s Tabs - Wed May 21 2025
Developer Diary, Malcolm X Day - Mon May 19 2025
Copyright Thoughts - Sun May 18 2025
Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 4 - Sat May 17 2025
Toots 🦣 from 05/12 to 05/16 - Fri May 16 2025
Real Life in Star Trek, Descent, part 1 - Thu May 15 2025
Firefox’s Local Storage - Wed May 14 2025
Developer Diary, International Nurses Day - Mon May 12 2025
Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 3 - Sat May 10 2025
Toots 🦣 from 05/05 to 05/09 - Fri May 09 2025
Real Life in Star Trek, Timescape - Thu May 08 2025
Developer Diary, Day of the Midwife - Mon May 05 2025
$30M — Remixed Education - Sun May 04 2025
Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 2 - Sat May 03 2025
Toots 🦣 from 04/28 to 05/02 - Fri May 02 2025
Real Life in Star Trek, Second Chances - Thu May 01 2025
I also revisited and updated some older posts, for various reasons.
Free Culture Book Club — Ke’Aun Charles from Saturday, 2022 August 27, 72 words
Read Some (Other) Blogs from Sunday, 2024 November 17, 87 words
Significant changes to the text come with clear and dated markings. Changing the wording or correcting a typo is more routine, but it indicates that I’ve at least been looking at the post. Longer changes probably have a brief write-up in this very newsletter.
The most popular posts on the blog have been Copyright Searches, Recutils — Small Technology Notes, Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 3, and Asian Women in Fiction for the month.
Articles I’ve Been Reading
You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.
The fight for abortion rights in Sri Lanka from Global Voices
We Read the NYT’s Trump Voter Focus Group So You Don’t Have To from The Index.
An undignified democracy from Africa Is a Country
Trump’s Quest for Crypto Riches Is a Constitutional Scandal Waiting to Happen from WIRED
What We Talk About When We Talk About Authoritarianism from JSTOR Daily
Terrorists weigh risks to their reputation when deciding which crises to exploit − new research from The Conversation – Articles (US)
What makes people flourish? A new survey of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries looks for global patterns and local differences from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Michigan governor cozies up to Trump—and kills her credibility from Daily Kos
Researchers Say the Most Popular Tool for Grading AIs Unfairly Favors Meta, Google, OpenAI from 404 Media
Trump 2.0 at 100 Days: An Onslaught Against Workers from OtherWords
The Real-World Costs of Eliminating Head Start from OtherWords
The Louisville Art Workshop was never just about art. It stood for community. from Scalawag
Trump orders a dystopian makeover for law enforcement agencies from Daily Kos
Wikimedia Iraq: The Mesopotamian Spark—From Clay to Code from Diff
Silk Road Wikimedians: The first Central Asian WikiCon 2025 in Tashkent from Diff
Pan Africanism under elite capture from Africa Is a Country
A Gutted Education Department’s New Agenda: Roll Back Civil Rights Cases, Target Transgender Students from ProPublica
Creating a Bengali Cuisine from JSTOR Daily
“Don’t Blink”: Protecting the Wikimedia model, its people, and its values in March 2025 from Diff
Brendan Carr Is Turning the FCC Into MAGA’s Censoring Machine from WIRED
Of course we deserve to know the true cost of tariffs from Fast Company
Your Children’s Children Will Die in Our Factories from 404 Media
Pluralistic: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Thousands of Baltimore marchers say ‘No’ to billionaire rule from The Real News Network
The Courts Are Not Having Trump’s Immigration Nonsense from Rewire News Group
Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads from Futurism
Turkish court sentences journalist to prison for “insulting Erdoğan” from English Wikinews Atom feed.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation case is more about individual rights than the Trump administration’s foreign policy from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Ready for stagflation? Here’s how the Trump tariffs could take us back to the not-so-groovy 70s from Fast Company
El Salvador’s diaspora in the US ‘needs to wake up’ from Bukele’s propaganda, Salvadoran–American journalist says from Global Voices
Trump restores Title X funding for two anti-abortion states—while wiping it out elsewhere from Daily Kos
Trump’s nominee to head customs and border protection could be implicated in alleged cover-up from Daily Kos
Rebuke. from The Index.
Is my love queer enough for you? from Minority Africa
Israel’s Blockade Sparks Outrage As ‘Forced Starvation’ Grips Gaza from All Stories
Australia’s Labor Secures Second Term As Voters Reject Trump-Style Conservatism from All Stories
Women have served in combat roles for a decade. The Pentagon is reopening the debate from Daily Kos
DOGE aide dismantling CFPB owns stock in companies that could benefit from cuts from Daily Kos
The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked from 404 Media
The British Airways position on various border disputes from Drew DeVault’s blog
Hurricane forecasts are more accurate than ever – NOAA funding cuts could change that, with a busy storm season coming from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Homemade Naan from Budget Bytes
The rich turn on Trump’s trade war from Daily Kos
Making Ignorance Sacred Again: Keeping ScOR #7 from Keeping ScOR
Refining Fascism: Fetal Personhood, Transphobia, & AntiBlackness from Scalawag
Supreme Court justices sure are quiet about attacks on their power from Daily Kos
Kids can do with a lot less, says billionaire wrecking the economy from Daily Kos
ICE wants to reopen a notoriously abusive prison; this community is trying to stop them from The Real News Network
Convicted felon Trump is obsessed with putting other people in prison from Daily Kos
Midwives under attack: Justice for Ric & Neusa Jones from The Real News Network
So much for law and order: Trump kills anti-crime task force from Daily Kos
Getting along with grizzly bears from Knowable Magazine
The Abortion Pill Is Medicine, Not Poison from The Index.
The IC (with an Assist from Journalism) Liberates the IC’s Debunking of Trump’s Alien Enemies Act from emptywheel
Predictive policing AI is on the rise − making it accountable to the public could curb its harmful effects from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Being honest about using AI at work makes people trust you less, research finds from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Peace Corps isn’t just about helping others − it’s a key part of US public diplomacy from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Trump targets NPR and PBS as public and nonprofit media account for a growing share of local news coverage from The Conversation – Articles (US)
GOP loses best chance to take down Georgia Democrat from Daily Kos
Judge shreds GOP attempt to undo North Carolina Supreme Court race from Daily Kos
Trump’s federal layoffs are disproportionately impacting women and people of color from Fast Company
Phthalate exposure in pregnancy can affect brain development from Futurity
Cori Bush: ‘AIPAC didn’t make me, so AIPAC can’t break me’ from The Real News Network
Donald Trump Is a Man in Decline from The Index.
on the palantir alumni open letter: a rant from an entity in wiring
Re-writing the rules of Tunisian rap from Africa Is a Country
Travelers beware: Trump’s REAL ID rollout is a real mess from Daily Kos
Dora the Explorer Teaches About ‘Sigma,’ an Extremely Toxic Male Aspiration from 404 Media
America First? No, Corporations First. from OtherWords
Medical Bills Don’t Belong on Your Credit Report from OtherWords
NOAA Cuts Put Coastal Communities at Risk from OtherWords
The ‘free speech’ org silent as Trump disappears dissenters over Gaza from The Real News Network
Black college faces threats after Crockett commencement speech slams Trump from Daily Kos
Fed chair takes another swipe at Trump amid rising tensions from Daily Kos
House Republicans push to sell public lands to fund Trump tax cuts from Fast Company
Scott Bessent Is Selling You a Lie from The Index.
Democrat rips GOP colleagues for hijacking hearing to be horrible people from Daily Kos
The FCC Must Reject Efforts to Lock Up Public Airwaves from Deeplinks
2025 ‘stimulus checks’ from New York state are coming: Am I getting an inflation refund from the government? from Fast Company
Meet Trump’s memecoin dinner guests from Citation Needed
Exiled Vietnamese blogger ‘Mother Mushroom’ calls for transnational solidarity from Global Voices
The Diminishable Returns of MAGAt Mobs from emptywheel
Recycling asphalt pavement can help the environment − now scientists are putting the safety of recycled pavement to the test from The Conversation – Articles (US)
‘Grit’ and relentless perseverance can take a toll on brain health − particularly for people facing social stresses like racism from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Basic research advances science, and can also have broader impacts on modern society from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Indigenous communities near Panama Canal have a bigger problem than Trump from openDemocracy RSS
North Carolina election director ousted after Republican power play from Daily Kos
The real-life risks of predictive policing—and what one city is doing differently from Fast Company
A Look into Houston’s “Safeguard the Flame” for Political Prisoners from Scalawag
Official White House social media accounts repost AI image of US President Donald Trump dressed like Pope from English Wikinews Atom feed.
International Roma Day Edit-a-thon 2025 from Diff
Pope Leo XIV faces limits on changing the Catholic Church − but Francis made reforms that set the stage for larger changes from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Nit-picks: The White House’s Stealth April 8 Archive of “Parts” of the Houthi Signal Chat from emptywheel
Robert Francis Prevost elected as Pope Leo XIV from English Wikinews Atom feed.
Why Do Americans Pay More for Prescription Drugs? from ProPublica
When Singing Was a Crime from JSTOR Daily
Well, Well, Well: Meta to Add Facial Recognition To Glasses After All from 404 Media
Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter dies from Daily Kos
Librarian of Congress is latest casualty in Trump’s racist war on workers from Daily Kos
Conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism makes Jews less safe, not more from The Real News Network
Where Does Pope Leo Stand on Reproductive Rights, LGBTQ+ Equality, and More? from Rewire News Group
House Committee Leader to Investigate Agency for Preferential Treatment of Politically Connected Startup from ProPublica
Stephen Miller Threatens to Suspend Habeas Corpus because He Got Caught Lying from emptywheel
Don’t let the news overwhelm you — use this tool to stay engaged from Waging Nonviolence
Courts are sick of Trump’s crap, and goodbye to jackass Ed Martin from Daily Kos
Why conservatives hate college from Daily Kos
Story Seed Library from alxd - solarpunk hacker
Jamieson Greer Says Trump’s Trade Deficit Emergency Wasn’t as Serious an Emergency “as Maybe Thought” from emptywheel
In death penalty cases, the quest for justice is not America’s highest value from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Republicans Try to Cram Ban on AI Regulation Into Budget Reconciliation Bill from 404 Media
New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S. from 404 Media
The EPA Will Likely Gut Team That Studies Health Risks From Chemicals from WIRED
Trump is very proud of himself for selling access to the White House from Daily Kos
Danish anthropologist denied entry to Kazakhstan for criticizing China’s repression of Uyghurs from Global Voices
Trump caves on his Chinese tariffs, but it’s too little too late from Daily Kos
Issue 83 – Trump’s crypto-backed plan to auction off access to the White House from Citation Needed
Trump’s Medicaid cuts in revealed ‘big beautiful bill’ could leave millions without medical care from Fast Company
The Sanctuary Movement: Sheltering migrants against deportation from The Real News Network
Pluralistic: Trump can’t do ANYTHING for his base (12 May 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A Hopkins professor says America’s descent into authoritarianism may have started with policing in blue cities. If that’s true, we’re in big trouble. from The Real News Network
Mastodon: Giving Journalists Options Away From Big Tech from We Distribute
EPA chief wants you to waste gas from Daily Kos
Even a Broken Clock Can Lower Drug Prices from The Index.
Trump is doing a terrific job pissing off religious groups from Daily Kos
“Incalculable” Damage: How a “We Buy Ugly Houses” Franchise Left a Trail of Financial Wreckage Across Texas from ProPublica
Green hydrogen, old colonialism from Africa Is a Country
The Department of Education Forced Idaho to Stop Denying Disabled Students an Education. Then Trump Gutted Its Staff. from ProPublica
NYT’s Storytime on Trump’s Houthi Capitulation from emptywheel
Stephen Miller Invites John Roberts to be the Instrument of His Own Destruction from emptywheel
How Asian American became a racial grouping – and why many with Asian roots don’t identify with the term these days from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Trump moves to gut low-income energy assistance as summer heat descends and electricity prices rise from The Conversation – Articles (US)
New Law Would Ban All AI Regulation for a Decade from Futurism
Chaos in House GOP threatens Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ from Daily Kos
How redefining just one word could strip the Endangered Species Act’s ability to protect vital habitat from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Viruses that roam the fungal kingdom from Knowable Magazine
A decade of digital rights: Where has Big Tech’s progress gone? from Global Voices
20 US States Sue over Trump Administration Linking Grants, Immigration Enforcement from All Stories
The politics of class from above from Africa Is a Country
An Agency Tasked With Protecting Immigrant Children Is Becoming an Enforcement Arm, Current and Former Staffers Say from ProPublica
Meet the experts working to pull the curtain on DOGE from Muckrock News
Detroit’s next mayor can do these 3 things to support neighborhoods beyond downtown from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Taking intermittent quizzes reduces achievement gaps and enhances online learning, even in highly distracting environments from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Trump’s Mob Understands “Skeezy” Better than the Corruption Beat Journalists from emptywheel
Pope Leo XIV’s link to Haiti is part of a broader American story of race, citizenship and migration from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Russian Court Sentences Prominent Election Watchdog To 5 Years In Prison from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
Queer People Nearly Twice as Likely To Terminate Pregnancy—New Study from Rewire News Group
License Plate Reader Company Flock Is Building a Massive People Lookup Tool, Leak Shows from 404 Media
Interior secretary blasted for ‘really troubling’ scheme to mine Utah from Daily Kos
Trump and his goons want to keep you in the dark from Daily Kos
Trump opens borders to cartel families while locking up students from Daily Kos
CFPB Quietly Kills Rule to Shield Americans From Data Brokers from WIRED
A $1,000 Taxi? That’s What Consumer Protections Are For from OtherWords
Pluralistic: Are the means of computation even seizable? (14 May 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Immigration Can Help Save Social Security from OtherWords
This annual government report proves that DOGE is useless from Daily Kos
GOP tax bill would make the rich even richer—at poor people’s expense from Daily Kos
Your private data is up for grabs thanks to Trump from Daily Kos
AI-Generated Law from Schneier on Security
An America of Tanks and Taxes from The Index.
The Trump Administration Leaned on African Countries. The Goal: Get Business for Elon Musk. from ProPublica
How the Trump Administration Is Weakening the Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws from ProPublica
Pluralistic: Trump’s CFPB kills data broker rule (15 May 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
US safety net helps protect children from abuse and neglect, and some of those programs are threatened by proposed budget cuts from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Unprecedented cuts to the National Science Foundation endanger research that improves economic growth, national security and your life from The Conversation – Articles (US)
New anti-NGO law pushes Peru’s democracy deeper into ‘invisible crisis’ from openDemocracy RSS
Eswatini on edge over multiple health threats from Global
Kristi Noem also wants a fancy new jet from Daily Kos
This new model for worker organizing could supercharge today’s labor movement from The Real News Network
Republicans finally find some people to raise taxes on from Daily Kos
Women, life, freedom: resistance and protest in Iran from openDemocracy RSS
MAGA loyalist eyes consolation prize after Trump dumped her from Daily Kos
Birthright citizenship case at Supreme Court reveals deeper questions about judicial authority to halt unlawful policies from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Why building inspiring alternatives is necessary to counter authoritarianism from Waging Nonviolence
Missouri GOP rewrites the rules after democracy doesn’t go their way from Daily Kos
Quote Origin: Language Is the Mother, Not the Handmaiden of Thought from Quote Investigator®
Supreme Court argument on birthright citizenship shouldn’t be happening from Daily Kos
No, Donald Trump Is Not America’s Most Left-Wing President. from The Index.
Wastewater helps monitor cancer-causing HPV from Global
Governments continue losing efforts to gain backdoor access to secure communications from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Placenta bandages have far more health benefits than risky placenta pills − a bioengineer explains from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Cultivating obedience: Using the Justice Department to attack former officials consolidates power and deters dissent from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Tax bill shows House GOP isn’t serious about federal deficit from Daily Kos
Federal Grants to Assist Domestic Violence Survivors Are Back—With More Strings Attached from Rewire News Group
DeSantis makes Florida the 2nd state to ban fluoride from its water from Daily Kos
Military ‘VIP experience’ with Trump for sale to biggest donors from Daily Kos
Will Pam Bondi hold herself to the standard she has for Trump’s enemies? from Daily Kos
Thai officials seize 238 tons of illegal e-waste at Bangkok port from English Wikinews Atom feed.
Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful, Bill’ has its first big beautiful failure from Daily Kos
Standing Up for LGBTQ+ Digital Safety this International Day Against Homophobia from Deeplinks
Guyana’s ‘Ol’ Higue’ meets her match in tale that is the regional winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize from Global Voices
Journalists’ Persistent Willingness to Chase Trump’s Squirrels, Biden Recording Edition from emptywheel
Nelly Gesare turns trash into treasure, highlighting the potential of sustainability-driven businesses in Africa from Global Voices
“We don’t rent to people like you”: A trans woman’s search for a home in Lagos from Minority Africa
Why Republicans are fixated on fake ‘white genocide’ from Daily Kos
Deadly Tornado Toll Raises Questions about Trump’s Weather Service Cuts from All Stories
Papua New Guinea radio host loses job after interviewing opposition leader from Global Voices
Trainmen and engineers go on statewide strike in New Jersey, first time in 42 years from English Wikinews Atom feed.
No proof of work could mean no Medicaid—and women stand to lose the most from Daily Kos
The Mekong Delta’s climate defenses are failing from Mekong Eye
Ten years on, have we moved Beyond Trafficking and Slavery? from openDemocracy RSS
Believe it or not, there was a time when the US government built beautiful homes for working-class Americans to deal with a housing crisis from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Trump’s lifting of Syria sanctions is a win for Turkey, too – pointing to outsized role middle powers can play in regional affairs from The Conversation – Articles (US)
‘Prisons are akin to chattel slavery’: Inside the big business of prison farms and ‘agricarceral’ slave labor from The Real News Network
DOGE Loses Battle to Take Over USIP—and Its $500 Million Headquarters from WIRED
Telegram Gave Authorities Data on More than 20,000 Users from 404 Media
SCOTUS vs. Trump on Immigration and Birthright Citizenship from Rewire News Group
Trump takes another step to further neuter Congress from Daily Kos
23andMe, including sensitive genetic data, sold to biotech company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals from Fast Company
Another world leader who embraced Trump gets burned from Daily Kos
Malcolm X and the fight for liberation—by any means necessary from The Real News Network
Flint water council chair troubled by EPA’s all-clear declaration from Daily Kos
What libraries are getting rid of after Trump’s order to dismantle the IMLS from Fast Company
How farmers can help rescue water-loving birds from Knowable Magazine
Trump’s Selective Antisemitism from The Index.
When History is a Matter of “National Security” from JSTOR Daily
Ancient pollen reveals stories about Earth’s history, from the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs to the Mayan collapse from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Historic Bladder Transplant Led by Iranian-Born Surgeon in California from All Stories
An 18th-century rebellion for liberty, equality and freedom − not in France or the United States, but Ireland from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Nonprofit news media leaders are struggling to stop leaning on the foundations that say they should branch out more from The Conversation – Articles (US)
House Panel Advances Measure to Cut Off Planned Parenthood From Medicaid Funds from Rewire News Group
Amid waning room for advocacy, Hong Kong LGBTQ+ groups cherish rare chance to raise awareness from Global Voices
After the digging, who remembers? from Africa Is a Country
DOJ slammed for charging Democratic congresswoman in ‘political stunt’ from Daily Kos
Pluralistic: The meritocracy to eugenics pipeline (20 May 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Another insurrectionist pardoned by Trump has been rearrested from Daily Kos
Pepe Mujica: From political prisoner to Uruguayan president from The Real News Network
We’re tracking anti-trans federal action. Here’s how you can help. from Muckrock News
Trump says Medicaid-slashing tax bill doesn’t cut ‘anything meaningful’ from Daily Kos
The Unlearning of America from The Index.
‘Meta must be held liable for Facebook abuse that killed my father’ from openDemocracy RSS
“Too Easy LoL”: messages written on cell wall as ten inmates escape from Orleans Parish Prison in Louisiana, United States from English Wikinews Atom feed.
COVID boosters are latest casualty of Trump’s anti-science administration from Daily Kos
Making eye contact and small talk with strangers is more than just being polite − the social benefits of psychological generosity from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Why your electricity bill is so high and what Pennsylvania is doing about it from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly dies at 75 from Daily Kos
Six Ways Trump’s Budget Will Hurt Rural America from OtherWords
The Country Trump Seems Dead Set on Imitating from OtherWords
The Senate Shouldn’t Confirm a Single Trump Judge from OtherWords
25th journalist arrested in Azerbaijan in continuing government campaign from Global Voices
Adriana Smith Died 3 Months Ago. Georgia Could Make Smith’s Family Pay to Use Her as a Human Incubator. from Rewire News Group
Public Transit Is In Crisis. Congress Can Fix It. from OtherWords
Prescient Warnings About Helene Didn’t Reach People in Harm’s Way. Here Are 5 Lessons for the Next Hurricane. from ProPublica
FEMA Has Canceled Its 4-Year Strategic Plan Ahead of Hurricane Season from WIRED
Justice Department smothers Biden-era police reform deals from Daily Kos
Empathy can take a toll – but 2 philosophers explain why we should see it as a strength from The Conversation – Articles (US)
How Much Electricity It Actually Takes to Use AI May Surprise You from Futurism
Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales from 404 Media
1 region of the brain links all your senses from Futurity
‘We can echo the emptiness of their stomachs’: Why Oregon students are hunger striking for Gaza from The Real News Network
SCOTUS Effectively Blocks Nation’s First Publicly Funded Religious Charter School from Rewire News Group
The Soft Sell of Hard Power from The Index.
Senate Republicans killed the filibuster. Good from Daily Kos
Low turnout is worsening inequality. The solution is compulsory voting from openDemocracy RSS
Kentucky’s Bitcoin Boom Has Gone Bust from WIRED
‘Car Brain’ is killing us—literally from Fast Company
How abortion laws focusing on fetal viability miss the mark on women’s experiences from The Conversation – Articles (US)
US solar manufacturers lag skyrocketing market demand from The Conversation – Articles (US)
In 2025, Tornado Alley has become almost everything east of the Rockies − and it’s been a violent year from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels from 404 Media
Mifepristone, Misoprostol, and Abortion Medications: Experts Explain How These Drugs Can Be Used to Terminate a Pregnancy from Rewire News Group
Supreme Court delivers shocking victory for separation of church and state from Daily Kos
Trump’s budget would slash 830,000 jobs and raise energy costs by more than $16 billion from Fast Company
Oaxaca, Mexico: Fighting for Teachers from The Real News Network
Here’s some crazy sh-t Trump says that the White House is now hiding from Daily Kos
Supreme Court’s one-sentence order closes the door to Catholic charter school – but leaves it open for future challenges from The Conversation – Articles (US)
5 years after George Floyd’s murder: How the media narrative has changed around the killing and the protests that followed from The Conversation – Articles (US)
What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ teaches about resisting authoritarianism from Waging Nonviolence
RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz scold poor parents who can’t afford healthy food from Daily Kos
Elon Musk Responds to News of How He Was Humiliated from Futurism
This might be the worst—and shadiest—Supreme Court decision yet from Daily Kos
Trump’s crypto dinner was just as corrupt as you thought it would be from Daily Kos
The US Is Building a One-Stop Shop for Buying Your Data from WIRED
What Republicans really mean when they say ‘woke’ from Daily Kos
South Asian migrants are dying in Saudi FIFA worksites from Global Voices
by our own hand or none from the vaudeville ghost house
South Korean youth are continuing to pursue social justice after the president’s impeachment from Global Voices
After Disastrous Experiments Into AI, Target Pledges to Pile on Even More AI from Futurism
AI Is Replacing Women’s Jobs Specifically from Futurism
Why the Black pope matters—from New Orleans’ 7th Ward to South Los Angeles and beyond from Daily Kos
The Memorial Day history forgot: The martyrs of the race course from Daily Kos
A migrant’s tale from Africa Is a Country
Settlement cash and a Qatari jet: Trump’s library stinks of corruption from Daily Kos
4 upcoming SCOTUS decisions that may destroy our rights from Daily Kos
The Law, Conspiracism, and Gravity from emptywheel
Land dispute escalates between palm oil company and Cameroon’s Apouh community from Global Voices
How to unmake the world from Africa Is a Country
Why some towns lose local news − and others don’t from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Christianity has long revered saints who would be called ‘transgender’ today from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Queer country: LGBTQ+ musicians are outside the spotlight as Grand Ole Opry turns 100 from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Could a bold anti-poverty experiment from the 1960s inspire a new era in housing justice? from The Conversation – Articles (US)
ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows from 404 Media
The FTC is being weaponized for Elon Musk—and it won’t stop there from Daily Kos
NPR sues Trump for violating the First Amendment from Daily Kos
New report shows how Trump is breaking the law, and nope, he doesn’t care from Daily Kos
Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The Women of Calama: Searching in the desert from The Real News Network
Nearly a quarter of the U.S. is ‘functionally unemployed.’ Here’s what that means from Fast Company
RFK Jr. says no more COVID vaccines for kids and pregnant women from Daily Kos
The Most Privileged Lie in America from The Index.
The history of the ocean, as told by tiny beautiful fossils from Knowable Magazine
Sam George’s ministry presents a major threat to media freedom and LGBTQ+ rights in Ghana from Global Voices
Federal Census policy harms Louisiana’s democracy — but state lawmakers can fix it from Prisoners of the Census
Anti-trans measures don’t just target transgender men and women – a sociologist explains how ‘male’ or ‘female’ categories miss the mark for nonbinary Americans from The Conversation – Articles (US)
When Elvis and Ella were pressed onto X-rays – the subversive legacy of Soviet ‘bone music’ from The Conversation – Articles (US)
The hidden power of cultural exchanges in countering propaganda and fostering international goodwill from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Science in War, Science in Peace: The Origins of the NSF from JSTOR Daily
You’ll Spit Take When You Hear How Little Time Workers Are Saving With AI, According to This Huge New Study from Futurism
FBI whack job reopens investigations in bid to placate far right from Daily Kos
Sleazy ‘border czar’ seems to have one heck of a conflict of interest from Daily Kos
Media groups call for repeal of Samoa’s defamation law from Global Voices
When Religious Employers Get a Pass, Workers Pay the Price from OtherWords
This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers from OtherWords
House Republican suffers fresh voter rage over Trump’s tax bill from Daily Kos
How one Peruvian community fought a mine and won from The Real News Network
Death, Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking: Fallout From U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the World’s Most Fragile Locations from ProPublica
New York Post accused of censoring report that made Trump look bad from Daily Kos
Hiding Exploitation Behind an App from OtherWords
Texas gleefully ramps up the GOP war on trans people from Daily Kos
FediForum is Back! from We Distribute
Spicy AI-generated TACO memes are taking over social media because ‘Trump always chickens out’ from Fast Company
Illinois Lawmakers Ban Police From Ticketing and Fining Students for Minor Infractions in School from ProPublica
This campaign against deportation flights shows how to target companies enabling Trump from Waging Nonviolence
A living, multimedia dictionary in the Nam Trik language: Lucy Tunubalá’s project in Colombia from Global Voices
There’s no evidence work requirements for Medicaid recipients will boost employment, but they are a key piece of Republican spending bill from The Conversation – Articles (US)
What Peru’s Virgen de la Puerta represents about unity and inclusion from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Beyond the backlash: What evidence shows about the economic impact of DEI from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Trump’s white genocide claims about South Africa have deep roots in American history from The Conversation – Articles (US)
The DOJ is working to suppress your vote—starting in North Carolina from Daily Kos
A Texas Cop Searched License Plate Cameras Nationwide for a Woman Who Got an Abortion from 404 Media
Impact: Senators Call on DOJ to Investigate Potential DOGE Conflicts of Interest After ProPublica Report from ProPublica
People around the world agree on which senses tell us who’s sick from Futurity
This House Republican just can’t quit investigating Joe Biden from Daily Kos
Different kinds of mindfulness may fight different kinds of anxiety from Futurity
You probably know why Marco Rubio is attacking foreign students from Daily Kos
GOP congressman wants to create a literal Trump train from Daily Kos
Memory Belongs to Everyone: Archives, History, and the Struggle for Water from Diff
Red State Voters Approved Progressive Measures. GOP Lawmakers Are Trying to Undermine Them. from ProPublica
Trump Administration Knew Vast Majority of Venezuelans Sent to Salvadoran Prison Had Not Been Convicted of U.S. Crimes from ProPublica
Afropolitans and the fantasy of a digital nation from Africa Is a Country
Waking the dead from Wellcome Collection stories
Hope after liberation from Africa Is a Country
Solar panels’ shade helps boost Colorado grassland productivity in dry years from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Hurricane season is here, but FEMA’s policy change could leave low-income areas less protected from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Millions of US children have parents with substance use disorder, and the consequences are staggering − new research from The Conversation – Articles (US)
LGBTQIA+ Pride Month from JSTOR Daily
How the Loudest Voices in AI Went From ‘Regulate Us’ to ‘Unleash Us’ from WIRED
The Justice Department has turned into a raging dumpster fire under Trump from Daily Kos
‘We all are going to die’: GOP senator harshly dismisses voters’ fears from Daily Kos
Veterans’ protests planned for D-Day latest in nearly 250 years of fighting for their benefits from The Conversation – Articles (US)
Silencing Voice of America has global consequences from The Latest
Veterans launch 40-day fast to protest Israel’s starvation of Gaza from The Real News Network
Trump wants to punish drug users—but Musk gets a pass from Daily Kos
She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down. from Deeplinks
Trump and Leonard Leo: The biggest ‘let them fight’ ever from Daily Kos
Vance is delusional about scholars fleeing US as Trump attacks colleges from Daily Kos
Analysts Say Trump Trade Wars Would Harm the Entire US Energy Sector, From Oil to Solar from WIRED
Autocratic Capitalism: An Introduction from JSTOR Daily
Elon Musk’s New Company Town Tells Residents Their Rights Are Now Optional from Futurism
The government they hated isn’t coming from Daily Kos
New Jersey’s movement against ICE detention is not going away from Waging Nonviolence
OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men from Citation Needed
The computational power of a human society: a new model of social evolution from Recent cliodynamics items
Web Pages That Caught My Attention
These are pages I bookmarked, basically. They might be old articles, non-articles, fiction, or any number of other possibilities. You’ve seen the web. You know what it’s like out there. And you also know that half the titles are probably bogus, because people are terrible at setting their page titles to something useful.
That’s it for this month. Stop by the blog and leave comments or contact me however else you see fit.
—John