sarah thankam mathews

@smathewss.bsky.social

writer, fun guy 🍄. ✍🏾 novel ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT, shortlisted for the national book award, and some other stuff. work in a bunch of places. organizes sometimes. newsletter: http://smathewss.substack.com

ICE agents threatened to beat up a Seattle small business owner, married to a citizen, with NO criminal record unless he signed a "voluntary" departure. I'm told there were cameras in the room. I'm demanding any video and that Eduardo be brought home immediately.

Senator Patty Murray@murray.senate.gov · last wk.

On Thursday, ICE needlessly detained Eduardo Aguirre Esparza, a local Seattle small business owner with no criminal history. This is a man who is married to an American citizen and with deep ties to our local community who was working hard to pursue a legal pathway to lawful permanent residence.

“The global average TikTok user watches over 100,000 videos annually, and the average American spends 50 hours a week on screens, 16 of those on social media platforms. An American born in 2025 is projected to spend 21 years of their lifetime looking at screens.” Grim stats. This needs to change.

Getting Off with the Luddites | Sarah Thankam Mathews

They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political pr...

nplusonemag.com

NYC! Join me at Books Are Magic (Montague St.) next Thurs 7/30 at 7pm for a convo about the BESTSELLING LIVING, TOGETHER & all things community building! Delighted to be talking with contributors Alex Alberto, @smathewss.bsky.social, & moderator Mia Arias Tsang! www.eventbrite.com/e/in-store-s...

In-Store: Samantha Paige Rosen presents Living, Together

Join us for a celebration of this new anthology, with a discussion featuring Alex Alberto, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Mia Arias Tsang!

eventbrite.com

THIS. Median voter theorists claim people are making "rational" choices arraying themselves on some clear left-right spectrum and picking the candidate(s) closest to them. In reality, we're primates seeking BELONGING - something MAGA offers (to the chosen) & left has neglected for long time.

Omar Wasow@owasow.bsky.social · 2w ago

Why has DSA grown? One argument from this research: not just ideology, but organization. Strong membership plus ongoing and continuous participation in social movements creates credibility, committed volunteers, political skills, and durable electoral capacity. www.niskanencenter.org/inside-the-d...

"I left feeling a pooling, connective happiness. I went home and realized that I hadn’t looked at my phone for six hours." Sarah Thankam Mathews hangs out with the Luddites, NYC's tech-critical cultural youth front: www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Getting Off With the Luddites

They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political pr...

nplusonemag.com

Good time to re-up this piece from last year about how it is entirely legally possible and I think necessary for local prosecutors to investigate, charge, and convict federal agents who violate state laws, and no insistence on supposed immunity changes that

Prosecuting ICE’s Goons Will Be Hard—but Not Impossible

To a growing number of Americans, the necessity of holding the fashy agency to account is becoming obvious. Better start planning how to do it now.

newrepublic.com

This story has the AI industry kind of scared! Boosters usually reach a cope consensus on this stuff within a few hours but nobody has a response to this other than to suggest Uber is bad at AI or something. The back channel conversations I’m hearing are suggesting Uber is far from alone here.

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · 2mo ago

Uber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly. www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-and...

"That link is not there yet, right?" he said. think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'Okay, now we're actually producing 25% more useful consumer features."
He said that the trade-off costs from Al are harder to justify because he can't draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.

A “former Palantir executive recently confirmed what many have long suspected. In a public stmt, the whistleblower said it plainly: Palantir intended to take over the US government, & many of his former colleagues are now installed inside the federal apparatus. He called it an occupied nation.” 1/

Bild

If you are outraged about what Kansas is doing to trans people— criminalizing their very right to exist, seizing drivers licenses overnight and saying if they drive thereafter it’s a crime, which puts them into the PIC under their gender assigned at birth where rape is routine—I BEG YOU

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous