Public schools in Utah banned a best-selling Jodi Picoult novel and ordered all copies destroyed. So ... Picoult arrived at a Salt Lake City high school this weekend with 600 copies of the book. And she gave them all away, for free. "Applause and cheers erupted." www.sltrib.com/news/educati...

Author Jodi Picoult came to Utah with a surprise: 600 free copies of her bestselling novel banned from public schools

Picoult encouraged Salt Lake Book Festival attendees to give their copy to a teen who might “need to read it.”

sltrib.com

a norwegian on Threads posted this and i just don’t know how much more clearly we can emphasize how much Americans are being ripped off by our system which is built to concentrate wealth at the top

Absolutely terrifying.

Timothy McBride@mcbridetd.bsky.social · 14h ago

The Increasingly Long Drive to Give Birth in Rural America | The New Republic newrepublic.com/article/2166...

Ah, but getting a senior to move out of the house they’ve occupied for 30-50 years is a very emotional thing. Downsizing is often the rational financial, logistical & safety decision, but it requires people to confront realities & decisions they don’t want to face.

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 15h ago

Older people who want to pay lower property taxes should be able to downsize into an age-appropriate home that requires less upkeep without having to leave the communities where they raised their families; but they oppose that because they feel entitled to a fixed, unchanging neighborhood character.

For three + years, teachers, writers, artists, humanities professors and so many others have been arguing exactly this--that this technology only produces an endless ouroboros of bland, sad, grey slop. But we were told that we were/are luddites, reactionary, old-fashioned, angry, etc etc.

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 22h ago

I am sorry, which company is this? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Go to your camera roll, search “boat” and post one that you like. A fishing boat with a Mohawk name (Adirondack) in Seattle @ Fisherman’s Terminal.

Frankenstein's Monster@kenjimallon.bsky.social · 15h ago

Go to your camera roll, search “boat” and post one that you like

“The culmination of my life’s work may have been targeted by an AI-assisted censorship tool & terminated by a politically-motivated AI hallucination” If you care in any way about science, you need to read this thread from my friend Kelton Minor.

Kelton Minor@keltonminor.bsky.social · 18h ago

Together with other scientists I’m suing the 🇺🇸 US National Institutes of Health for violating our 1st Amendment rights & censoring our health science. I’m ready to shine a light on the darkest days. Buckle up, read on. This gets pretty wild… THREAD

Willfully causing great suffering War crime, right? www.icrc.org/sites/defaul...

Simon Marks@simonmarksfsn.bsky.social · 3d ago

Oh.

"The moment [the ad] is rendered, their device can be hacked, so there's really no defence against this, short of not using a smart phone or [not] connecting to the internet"... " "They can turn on the camera, the microphone, and track someone's location, so it's kind of like God-like capabilities"

'Recipe for disaster': Israeli firm used ads to enable espionage, report says | CBC News

An Israeli advertising agency has placed ads seen by millions of internet users that have left them open to spyware attacks, according to a new report from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.

cbc.ca

The Roads Have Eyes! 👁️ Turn on the Surveillance Layer in Map Options to see known license plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other outdoor surveillance cameras.

These ads with older people chatting with their AI phone bots as if it's a personal assistant just makes clear the appeal -- people want servants. Servants who won't talk back. It's gross.

I love being Black so so much 😂😭🙏🏽

Johnathan Perkins@johnathanperk.bsky.social · 2w ago

Folgers Coffee needs to send this young lady her bag

If they can do it to her, they will do it to anyone. Fuck this b

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 4d ago

WSJ: 'The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe'

can't take "LLMs are people" discourse seriously when we haven't even convinced everyone that all people are people.

One student found a handwritten note above “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter—a transcription from the book review in the London *Leader*: this “chapter…should be read at midnight, alone, with nothing heard but the sounds of the wind moaning without, and the embers falling into the grate within”

Just so you understand the scale of betrayal: first, our "partners" didn't warn Ukraine about the incoming ballistic missiles, so the air raid alert wasn't activated before impact, robbing people of their chance to survive. ​Then, Starlink was restricted to stop working at speeds above 100 mph.

Between this and his work to “throw USAID into the woodchipper,” which has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, Musk is on track to be one of the worst mass killers of the 21st century. So anyway: saying “don’t buy Teslas or use X” seems like a real bare minimum ask, you know?

BTW this isn’t the first time Elon Musk has personally intervened to help the Russian military kill Ukrainian civilians. Starlink denies this, but Reuters presents compelling evidence that he ordered engineers to shut off access during a counteroffensive in 2022.

Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia

Soldiers panicked and drones surveilling Russian forces went dark.

reuters.com

Joshua Foust 🪖🎮@joshuafoust.com · 5d ago

I’d suggest considering that these two actions (apparently large scale oil corruption linked to the Trump regime, and Elon Musk arbitrarily limiting product access to help Russia and harm Ukraine) are related.

This is really depressing news and says a lot about what companies think they can get away with right now in tech; we're back in the 90s in many ways

Esther Schindler@estherschindler.bsky.social · 5d ago

“The Grace Hopper Celebration, a massive conference in Anaheim that promotes diversity and brings together thousands of women in tech each year, has been canceled just two weeks before the event due to lack of funding.” I am sad but not surprised. www.sfgate.com/bayar...

I remember attending the Grace Hopper Conference in 2016. He was the keynote speaker and kept talking about how we were going to elect Hillary Clinton, and the changes the country was going to have. 🙄

Conor Sen@conorsen.bsky.social · last wk.

25 days until the midterms:

The Grace Hopper conference--the largest gathering of women in tech--was abruptly cancelled due to insufficient funding. Women are underrepresented in tech and AI globally. Truly, society is losing out by not investing in women in tech. www.forbes.com/sites/sandyc...

For Women In AI, What The Grace Hopper Celebration Cancellation Means

AnitaB.org canceled the 2026 Grace Hopper Celebration weeks before it opened. Here is what the loss means for women in AI and the companies hiring them.

forbes.com

Ver sad. I enjoyed her posts here, on Twitter, and in LinkedIn.

J. Emory Parker 🏳️‍🌈@jaspar.bsky.social · 6d ago

I’m afraid I have terrible news to share 💔 www.statnews.com/2026/10/13/h...

It wouldn’t be a Bills game if you didn’t get to experience ALL of the emotions.

Cancer is only one of the horrible things smoking can do to you. Guess these guys are too young to remember elderly relatives permanently tethered to oxygen hoses from COPD.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 6d ago

"AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer, says Palantir CTO"

Art

David C Bell@moviehooligan.bsky.social · last wk.

If you’re wondering what the vibe is going into the midterms the New England fall fair I went to today had a crochet guillotine for sale.

🧵🧵🧵 I was going to write a simple sentence about the madness of the moment, but I got distracted by the U.S. president’s complaint that he was screwed out of the Nobel Peace Prize after bombing multiple countries, and then he bolstered his case with a plan to execute a guy in a wheelchair and ...

Made a modification to my seat assignment for a flight I’m taking in a week. The Outlook AI summary got the date of the flight wrong and added an automatic calendar invite for the wrong dates.

We are soon going to have to come to grips with the fact that this shit is asbestos for the mind

Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News

A UC Berkeley researcher co-authored a study that raises profound questions about how we interact with artificial intelligence in education — and daily life.

news.berkeley.edu

Trying to pay attention to paying attention, to things that take longer to read, to protect against a world of eroding focus. This essay ranges and ranges, so much here. Anne Carson, published last March "Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind" www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Anne Carson · Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like...

lrb.co.uk

It’s dark & gloomy. Rain is lashing the windows. Seattle is Seattle-ing again, and I am so happy.