Joseph Henderson
@josephenderson.bsky.social
I study the politics of climate change and environmental education: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_Fm_bMEAAAAJ&hl=en
I'm calling it: "Start smoking" is going to be mainstream MAHA / Republican health advice by 2028. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
My similarly anodyne opinion is that competitive elections are good for democracies
My ice-cold boring take that will definitely not go viral is that a primary result with a margin of victory of roughly 1 percent tells you precisely nothing about The Future Of The Party.
The populism will continue until morale improves.
Democratic socialists want to “stack the deck” toward working people: make unions easier to organize, protect workers during economic transitions and give labor more power over the conditions under which people work. inthesetimes.com/article/demo...
What a Democratic Socialist Economic Agenda Looks Like
As democratic socialism returns to the U.S. public eye, socialists need to make clear how their vision differs from the liberalism most Americans are familiar with. Here are five crucial distinctive…
inthesetimes.com
for months, ive been trying to map out the ways the right and the left were uniting against data centers and AI both here's my story on my efforts, featuring steve bannon's anti-tech prophet, my girlfriend's high school english class, and the unabomber:
How Data Centers Broke American Politics
What the Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders taught me about the great data center backlash of 2026.
wired.com
This is 💯 not true. It is never a choice between ‘taking big tech’s money and doing nothing’. A stronger moral imperative is NOT to take the money and the strings attached to it - particularly if you do not and cannot yet understand the implications
“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”
They could always sign up to give comment at a public meeting.
New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders. That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
We can't reduce heat-related mortality without addressing social vulnerability. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
Abdul El-Sayed has won Michigan’s slugfest of a Democratic Senate primary, NBC News projects, clinching the nomination over Rep. Haley Stevens and establishing a Midwest beachhead for a progressive left on the march this midterm cycle.
a lot of healthcare workers just dissociate whenever covid comes up today. you can see it in their eyes
I had to code and pronounce a time of death on a respiratory therapist colleague. There's a memorial plaque for her outside the emergency department to this day. I wrote and re-wrote my will. I will never forgive these ghouls trying to rewrite history and deny our experience.
If you read one piece today make it @mollytaft.com's excellent new piece out on the politics of data centers
How Data Centers Broke American Politics
What the Unabomber, Steve Bannon’s tech guy, and Bernie Sanders taught me about the great data center backlash of 2026.
wired.com
They turned the friggin' frogs gay. Buy one now at store.theonion.com.
Our average of polls at FiftyPlusOne gives Trump a roughly 36% approval rating and 61% disapproval rating — a net -25 — among all adults, and he’s rapidly losing ground. The president set a new record low six days in a row just in the last week: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-08-04...
New in PN: Moderate Democrats have a choice to make "They can spend the next three months reinforcing Republican messaging about their party & making it less likely Dems take power. Or they can put the 'battle for the soul of the party' off for a while and do what they can to help their party win."
Moderate Democrats have a choice to make
Do they want to help their party win, or do they want to whine about the left?
publicnotice.co
Absolutely unbelievable how solar power has taken off worldwide during the Hormuz oil crisis. You don't have to hand it to him, but Trump may have done more to finally kick off a global civilization of effete librul solar users than anyone else in the West
"Platner’s first deployment, in early 2005, began at the Abu Ghraib prison complex, part of which the military had rechristened Camp Redemption." missed that detail the first time around!
A watershed piece. America will have have a very hard time becoming less imperialist as long as combat service is sentimentalized and fetishized, when it actually tends to turn men into broken, hateful people, and helps make things like like Trumpism happen. www.newyorker.com/news/the-pol...
i’m never gonna be able to fire a cruise missile yet the question of using my tax dollars for them has never been up for debate
Opinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.
New Yorkers had to subsidize the $117 million that the NYPD paid out for misconduct lawsuits in 2025 alone, even though most of them were never personally abused by a cop. Where's your worried op-ed on that one?
Opinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.
If you are an expert on air quality and have 10-15 minutes to talk to me today or tomorrow about important things journalists should know while reporting on wildfires and smoke, my DMs are open, or you can email me at karen at OpenNews dot org.
The diarrhea lettuce company, Taylor Farms, uses slave labor contracted from the Arizona Dept. of Corrections. The backbreaking labor is often performed by imprisoned Mexican nationals who would be otherwise ineligble to work in the US. They are paid $1.50 an hour.
The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor
The lettuce-producing Taylor Farms was linked to the widespread use of prison labor before its involvement in a cyclospora outbreak.
futurism.com
Is a socialist candidate electable in a purple state? A modestly interesting question. A more interesting question: what if socialist candidates, despite facing opposition from their own party, not only win, but overperform? What if the moderate assumption of themselves as “electable” is exposed?
i think the party of sick freaks who want to inspect kid's private parts should be branded as such
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
The devastation is unimaginable. I moved here 3 years ago knowing Spokane would be my home. I can’t explain how horrific this is. “It’s like a war zone,” people told me.
It will depress you! Sorry about that but it’s kind of my jam. I selected well-written books, some of them are even wryly funny at times — if you come from a culture with macabre humor. Still, the issue is big, complex, and scary. All the more reason for us to face it together.
A reading list that I know will depress me, but one that also seems vital to understand (and fight this version of) the future. From the brilliant @tressiemcphd.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...
Is everyone aware of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy? In the mid-20th century, auto and oil interests bought up electric streetcar systems across the US and systematically replaced them with bus routes and paved roads, funneling commuters toward private cars.
General Motors streetcar conspiracy - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Detroit auto executives, as well as Michigan voters, have decided to kill off the U.S. automobile industry. If everyone agrees EVs are the future (and are increasingly the present) and if Detroit continues to insist on not building EVs...well you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.
The American E.V. Has Been Crushed. Will It Take the U.S. Auto Industry With It?
The largest U.S. automakers have backed away from electric vehicles, even as global sales are booming. The decision may make them obsolete.
nytimes.com