Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Notable Links
[Jessica Kutz at The 19th] USAID's defunding will lead directly to women's deaths: "As of 2023, 67 percent of contraceptives supplied through USAID went to Africa, where some of the leading causes of death for girls and women are related to pregnancy and sexually transmitted
Notable Links
[Mica Rosenberg, Perla Trevizo, and Zisiga Mukulu in ProPublica, co-published with The Texas Tribune] This is a beautifully-designed co-production between ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, illustrating the immigration policies that Donald Trump enacted on day one. These encompassed dozens of policies that were revived from his first term, as well
Notable Links
[Natalia Antelava in Coda Story] This is a useful framework for thinking about ongoing harm. "It was 2014, and I was standing in the ruins of Donetsk airport, when a Russian-backed rebel commander launched into what seemed like an oddly academic lecture. Between bursts of artillery fire, he explained
Notable Links
[Dan Hon in MIT Technology Review] The always-brilliant Dan Hon on DOGE: "We’re seeing in real time that there are no practical technical measures preventing someone from taking a spanner to the technology that keeps our government stable, that keeps society running every day—despite the very real
Notable Links
[Gil Duran in The Nerd Reich] Curtis Yarvin's influence is felt again: " In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc
Notable Links
[Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw at ProPublica] My colleagues at ProPublica have published the largest list yet of who is actually involved in DOGE: "While some have been public about their
Notable Links
[Caralee Adams at the Internet Archive] The Internet Archive is always a gem, but it's been particularly important this year. "With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages.
Notable Links
[Janus Rose at 404 Media] This is an important but hard pill to swallow: "“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix,
Technology
[Alex Heath at The Verge] And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America: "In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’
Technology
[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub] This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next: “By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed
AI
[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch] I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles: "Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company
Notable Links
[Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica] From my colleagues at ProPublica: "Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior." This