Jesus Christ. All green card interviews worldwide are paused indefinitely
Reuters@reuters.com · 4d agoTrump administration issues pause on visa appointments for applicants worldwide reut.rs/45NtKHO
Seumalu Elora Lee Raymond
@eloralee.bsky.social
Housing, finance, land. Views are my own. 🇼🇸🇦🇸 she / her / ia
Reuters@reuters.com · 4d ago
RIP Dolly Parton. Thank you for funding a vaccine for infants and toddlers when we needed it most.
Ally Whelan@amwhelan.bsky.social · 4d agoDolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80
Remembering in 2020 that we drove from VT to GA with a baby and a 2 year old to hand deliver our ballots bc of that monkey business with the USPS and mail in ballots. That cycle, GA put Rev. Raphael Warnock & Jon Ossoff in the Senate and kept Trump out of the White House, so it was worth it.
The Associated Press@apnews.com · 5d agoBREAKING: The Supreme Court has cleared the way for President Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting ahead of midterms.
I can’t overstate how much the NDA thing has pissed off regular people. I even hear it at public hearings places where the local pols haven’t signed NDAs. What we are seeing is people workshop a new language about political obligation & corruption. “NDAs“ are shorthand and placeholder
Bill Leibenguth@bill-leibenguth.bsky.social · 5d agoIf Data Centers are so great, why are most of them constructed in secret and involve NDA agreements with government officials. www.politico.com/news/2026/08...
Both the Economist and others suggest this study demonstrates that AI can help students. So I contacted the lead researcher to figure out how many. Answer: Out of ~26,000 kids, a total of 20. And five months after starting to use AI, only four continued to spend 65 minutes on homework. Four.
Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley.bsky.social · last wk.I mean, c'mon. What this data shows is (a) there's a huge number of students using AI and not studying for very long compared to peers; and (b) negligible "benefits" for students who did study for comparable time periods and used AI.
apnews.com/article/us-s... sues over US push to auction areas of water around American Samoa for potential mining
Nonprofit sues over US push to auction areas of water around American Samoa for potential mining
A legal environmental group is suing the U.S. government after the Trump administration announced plans to auction off sections of water around American Samoa for potential deep-sea mining.
apnews.com
Squished in the middle of this story was this heartbreaking paragraph. Unconscionable.
Brian Lyman@brianlyman.bsky.social · last mo.A lot of what-the-hell moments in this story, but building a data center in a floodplain in Louisiana is inviting the wrath of Poseidon.
EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws reut.rs/3RzNU4A
EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws
Power sources providing electricity only to data centers and not the public grid may not be subject to federal pollution laws, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday.
reut.rs
Now @apnews.com has a deeply reported story confirming the recently-hired ICE officer who shot a man in Maine had serious mental health issues and a long history of violence against women. This comes after ICE slashed hiring standards and rushed some into the field before background checks cleared.
The Associated Press@apnews.com · last mo.ICE officer who shot Colombian man in Maine has history of threatening behavior and mental illness, family and court documents say.
tell her to buy an acre of land / parsley sage rosemary and thyme / between the salt water and the sea strands / then she'll be a true love of mine
Heartbreaking news: US announces proposal to lease the American Samoan ocean for deep seabed mining. This starts a countdown, we have just months left before they intend to sell. public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-14479.pdf
public-inspection.federalregister.gov
"The number of unpermitted turbines identified by Reuters is about double what xAI has publicly acknowledged."
Insight: Pollution from Musk’s unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has installed 59 natural gas turbines for its Colossus 2 data center project in Tennessee without securing federal clean air permits, according to commu...
reuters.com
An article by (former) Auckland’s one and only design champion Ludo Campbell-Reid. 👏👏 The city has changed so much in the last 20 years and in a really good way with amazing PT solutions, lots of public spaces and an increase in safe walking and cycling spaces! 🚶♀️🚲🚊 newsroom.co.nz/2026/07/16/a...
Auckland, the city that taught me to believe in cities again
Reflections on Auckland's transformation, the opening of the City Rail Link, and what one remarkable mid-sized city can teach the world about changing its trajectory.
newsroom.co.nz
Tech billionaires didn’t misread science fiction. They performed an edit: keeping the frontier, the visionary, the chrome; cutting the public institution, the collective, and the warning. Every. Single. Time. My new piece is now up in Aeon.
Aeon Magazine@aeon.co · 2mo agoTech billionaires like to claim their work is inspired by science fiction, but in truth, they are using its ‘chrome-plated aesthetic’ as a fig leaf to further what the social theorist Ali Rıza Taşkale labels ‘reactionary futurism’
once again saying: Nuremburg trials is the moderate position
Reuters@reuters.com · 2mo agoSecurity camera footage obtained from local businesses showed individuals who are believed to be U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers surrounding a car and pulling the driver onto the street, in events connected to the fatal shooting of a man in a coastal town in Maine on July 13.
There is a proposal in the Federal register to end the International Education Programs regulations and the Fulbright-Hays Program regulations. Unbelievable. Click the link below to make a comment. #AcademicSky #EpiSky 🧪
International Education Programs and Fulbright-Hays Program; Recission of Regulations
The Secretary of Education proposes to rescind the International Education Programs regulations and the Fulbright-Hays Program Regulations to provide the Department of Education (ED) with greater flex...
federalregister.gov
Tim Longman 🏳️🌈@timlongman.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe Department of Education has now officially submitted proposals to eliminate International Education and Fulbright Hays programs, which have funded thousands of students and scholars to study languages and conduct research abroad. I encourage you to make public comments and contact your reps.
Scoop: NIH is on a mission to enlist one million Americans to share their genetic data to help with health research through a precision medicine program called “All of Us.” What participants don’t know is that at one research site, Palantir stores the data. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Palantir has a hand in NIH's most ambitious health initiative
The defense tech firm's work with public health data has largely flown under the radar.
motherjones.com
‘Polarization’ has become the master concept for diagnosing our current democratic crisis. But this is not polarization. It is the radicalization of the political right. By misdiagnosing it, we risk becoming complicit in the crisis. 🧵 Just out in Perspectives on Politics doi.org/10.1017/S153...
#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky #PrejudiceResearch A Social Dominance Theory analysis of PragerU's reinforcement of hierarchy (moving to top of my reading pile) www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
“Being taken as a slave is better than being killed”: How PragerU’s curriculum reinforces hierarchy and hegemony
This study is a critical discourse analysis that examines how Leo and Layla’s History Adventures (a children’s video series produced by PragerU) constructs ideological representations of U.S. histo...
tandfonline.com
Dear students, I love that you called me the GOAT in course evals, but I don't think my dean knows what that means, so *please* spell things out.
NEW BLOG FOR YOU Google's energy consumption numbers in their new climate report are mind-blowing. 2 years ago they flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...
🚨 HUGE ongoing surge of ICE arrests, with ICE directing 80% of all officers to go out into the field and round people up, aiming to hit 2,000 arrests a day; which would be more than during the Minneapolis surge. This may be why the nun in Texas got briefly picked up. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/u...
Immigrant Arrests Surge to 10,000 in 5 Days as ICE Clamps Down
nytimes.com
Oof. Captures the zeitgeist, but is also an old story of how the perrennial destruction of the American left leads to a certain kind mental anguish/prison of the mind. Reminds me of EL Doctorows Book of Daniel.
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2mo agoMy dear lord. lareviewofbooks.org/article/dang...
Meanwhile, in the US. It just takes your breath away. *50 years* in prison for protesting. Don't imagine for one moment that we are immune to this. Already, the legislative framework is in place in the UK to enable such convictions - before we get a Trumplike PM. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Alarm over ‘extreme’ sentences for anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism
First amendment groups call 50-to-100-year prison terms chilling as legal experts say sentences unusually long
theguardian.com
In the 4 years since Roe v Wade was overturned there have been over 400 pregnancy related prosecutions. Maternal mortality is up 33% nationwide and 50% in some states. We are being criminalized and murdered. That’s the legacy of Dobbs