Emily Williams
@emilyw00.bsky.social
Book lover. Rights & publishing geek. Director, IP & content services at EL Education. All views expressed are my own. Vivo en inglés y español. pronoun.is/she
This is such an great feature (Rebecca is great!), and I've been thinking about it for a few days. IMO, "Influencer" in the ten-years-ago sense was really a LOT of jobs (spokesmodel/copywriter/etc.) but now it's morphing, at least in part, into "intentionally annoying person" which feels worse.
The Influencer Recession
Once upon a time, lifestyle influencers could post cute photos and make millions. Now they are forced to pivot.
vulture.com
This is a wildly prescient story about Chicago's proto-RFK Jr., in charge of public health during the Spanish Flu. He thought beer killed malaria and that bathing could kill you. He had a feud with an actual TB doctor, who insisted bathing is good. He bullied the TB doctor until he killed himself.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Trump administration has detained more than 50 spouses, parents of US troops in immigration crackdown, AP review finds. @apnews.com apnews.com/article/mili...
AP Exclusive: Trump's immigration crackdown has detained more than 50 military spouses and parents
An Associated Press investigation reveals that President Donald Trump’s administration has detained dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops.
apnews.com
Waking up to Sharia Law in NYC is crazy. Knicks won, crime is down, 2,000 toddlers are going to school for free, parents got “date night” with nyc babysitters, they’re building housing on city land, small businesses are saving money and selling ice cream. Its sunny out i should go get one.
For some reason I am watching "The Glittering Prizes" a 1976 British tv drama about a group of 1950's Cambridge graduates and their subsequent adult lives. To say it's "aged badly" isn't quite right. It's like an artifact from an almost unimaginably distant time ...
"By creating this explosion of misery, they're not only making millions of Americans much, much poorer than they were, they're also making the country as a whole substantially poorer in the long run. It's an anti-growth policy. But of course, the cruelty is the point."
An Explosion of Misery
Making American hungry and uninsured again
paulkrugman.substack.com
“The proposed award comes after legal service providers across the country have said that the administration has withheld $65 million in overdue fees from the previous contract, alleging it is an attempt to force them to turn over confidential information about the migrant children they represent.”
Gabe Ortíz@tusk81.bsky.social · 3h ago“The Trump administration is set to award a multimillion-dollar contract to a small Texas law firm without immigration expertise to provide legal representation for thousands of unaccompanied migrant children in government custody during immigration proceedings.” abcnews.com/US/small-tex...
'You'll choke too' - an aerial embroidery landscape inspired by all the wildfires happening right now... I'm upset every time I smell smoke outside and somehow we have people starting them maliciously too! But we all breathe the same air so they'll choke too (1/2 - see thread for close-ups)
Anyone who has participated in U.S. science knows we cannot do our work without immigrants. If we are going to limit opportunities, the least we can do is be transparent about it so our fellow scientists can plan their lives and as we upend their careers.
Visa holders are a vital part of the U.S. biomedical research enterprise — for example, at NIH, 60% of postdocs are visiting. These scientists contribute incredible, indispensable talent and expertise.
Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.
honestly can't stress enough, as a former family law attorney, how depressingly common Max Miller's behavior and words are, right down to the petty fixation on custody procedure and rules when faced with allegations of shocking violence.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 19h agoRep. Max Miller: "When I was reported for child abuse of my daughter for a broken collarbone, my daughter was in my ex-wife's care 9 out of the last 11 days and she took her to the emergency room, which is a contempt violation from our shared parenting plan."
Peter Parker might be a science prodigy, but he's a hacktivist, not a corporate scientist. He's got a video channel that's all about Easy Helpful Devices You Can Make At Home For Pennies. Anything he invents (that isn't for Spider-Man, he's not an idiot) is open-source as all get out.
⚡️ Russia hits another Ukrainian publisher warehouse as attacks on book industry mount.
Russia hits another Ukrainian publisher warehouse as attacks on book industry mount
The strike sparked a fire at the publishing house’s warehouse, engulfing around 10,000 square meters (108,000 square feet), Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram. One man was report...
kyivindependent.com
"Sometimes, as we see in today’s poem, it’s difficult not to wonder if life will go on as expected, and if traditions will continue, or if we’re experiencing the end of an era," @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social shares in episode 1572. Read "Summer Strawberries" by Cat Wei: bit.ly/4xa81FE 🍓
"The histories that trees hold ... are at the heart of today’s poem," @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social shares in episode 1573. Read “Dialogue with the Oldest Tree in the U.S., whose Location is a Closely-Guarded Forest Service Secret” by @ninasudhakar.bsky.social: bit.ly/4gbFNo9
DOJ is now 0-20 in cases to obtain state voter files. Here is the list: Arizona California Colorado Connecticut Illinois Kentucky Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island Virginia West Virginia Wisconsin
weird how he didn’t find jesus on this until he saw miller’s latest polling numbers
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterdayMoreno on Max Miller: "My daughter lives in constant fear of this man ... you can't fathom what that makes me feel like when the dad's number one job is to protect your kids... if there's any minimum standard for being an elected official, he feels to meet it. I don't care about the politics at all"
The US military’s strikes on alleged drug boats have likely illegally killed “individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking,” Sen. Tim Kaine told the White House, following “a careful review” of classified information he has seen so far.
‘They are murder victims’: Senator suggests US strikes have killed people who weren’t involved in drug trafficking | CNN Politics
The US military’s strikes on alleged drug boats have likely illegally killed “individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking,” Sen. Tim Kaine told the White House on Monday, following “a careful...
cnn.com
Copyright and legality are one set of questions, but I think "LLM authors" underestimate how likely they are to plagiarize. Last semester I had a narrow writing assignment and 11 (!) students turned in work that was flagged as plagiarized from another student. In reality, they'd all used same LLM.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz was a very fine poet as well as a fiction writer. I love his "To the Desert" so much that it's one of the few poems I know by heart: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46563/...
In recent years we've had TV/movies covering Odyssey, Macbeth, a new Shakespeare biopic, a 14th C. Middle English poem, plus reskinned Wars of the Roses, Tokugawa shogunate, Gibbon via Asimov, and Murdoch as Lear. Meanwhile much-bemoaned reality TV is a dying genre. Pop culture isn't getting dumber!
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be… The tragic truth is that, as some of us warned a decade ago, mainstream climate science has turned out to be the opposite of alarmist. It has turned out to be complacent and over-optimistic. Truthfulness - and strategic adaptation - are urgent. (Pse repost.)
Dr. Aaron Thierry@thierryaaron.bsky.social · 2d agoA first year above 2C in the mid-2030s now looks plausible. 0.5C was first passed in 1980, 1.0C in 2010 and 1.5C in 2024. The 15-year trend runs at 0.42C per decade. The 2026 and 2027 points for the current El Nino are estimates. We're not remotely ready!
Probably not the most corrupt thing Trump has done, but very possibly the most brazenly, undisguisedly corrupt thing he’s done.
Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 2d ago
This is one of the main reasons for sanctuary cities. If undocumented people are afraid to call police, it’s open season for criminals and everyone is worse off. Republicans want to make you feel less safe in the hope some will turn reactionary and vote for them. It’s also red meat for Fox News.
Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 3d agoThis paper shows that immigration enforcement can _increase_ crime. Undocumented immigrants already have the lowest crime rate, but tough-on-immigration policy makes immigrants less likely to report crime. So immigration enforcement worsens the problem it was ostensibly meant to solve
“Trump could have owed the IRS as much as $100 million in back taxes from an audit that had been ongoing for years.”
Gabe Ortíz@tusk81.bsky.social · 2d ago“The ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ might be dead, but President Donald Trump still gets out of paying any back taxes he might have owed.” Trump “will get to keep the sweeping grant of tax immunity Blanche announced alongside the fund.” www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
An initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play
