The Future of Archives of Science: An Interview with Polina Ilieva

"Contemporary science is evolving at a breathtaking pace, but archival practice is struggling to keep up—especially when it comes to capturing not just the final products of research but the full, dynamic process by which science is made."

www.aip.org/library/ex-l...

New Documents Undermine Trump Administration’s Claims About Offshore Wind Deal There was no new investment required from TotalEnergies, according to newly disclosed terms.

The US government paid $1 billion to kill a wind farm just because. Just absolute idiocy in every direction heatmap.news/energy/total...

Federal judge unloads on ‘unserious’ RFK Jr., says anti-trans policy showed his ‘cruelty’ Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai vacated the “Kennedy Declaration,” finding it unlawfully attempted to override medical standards and restrict care for transgender youth.

Breaking: HHS’s ban on gender-affirming care is struck down. Rarely have I read a ruling this sharply worded.

“This case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

www.advocate.com/politics/nat...

Trump admin plans to detransition incarcerated trans people. Is that 'medical experimentation'? Factually, the proposal rejects medically accepted standards of care.

This is a really excellent explainer on the stakes of forcible detransition and how it violates bioethical standards.

This bit right here. This is John Roberts basically admitting, explicitly, that he is dreaming up a legal doctrine out of nothing because he does not like or approve of Obama's policy:

Don’t believe headlines saying that vaccine skepticism is widespread Despite some headlines, a new poll does not show that most Americans no longer trust vaccines.

A badly worded poll is making vaccine skepticism look more common than it is. www.statnews.com/2026/04/17/v...

"The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran"

That cash comes from all of us locked into reliance on dirty fossil fuels despite none of us asking for it

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

it is, among other things, incredibly striking to see that roberts was so solicitous of the burden the clean power plan might put on fossil fuel executives, when, a decade later, he is indifferent to the way trump’s moves have thrown hundreds of thousands of lives into turmoil.

Children ‘low-hanging fruit’ in fight to end trans care, official at pro-Trump thinktank says America First Policy Institute, which boasts close ties to president, discussed transgender policy ‘reform’ at DC event

NEW from me at @theguardian.com + @documented.net

An official at Trump-aligned AFPI said the quiet part out loud: They want to end medical transition for everyone, adults included. Children are the “low-hanging fruit” in their quest to do so. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Black-and-white photo of a Tacoma News Tribune exhibit at the Western Washington Fair, 1964. A large overhead sign reads “Tacoma News Tribune,” with an “Information” counter beneath it. At left, two men—one in glasses and a cardigan, the other in a hat and overcoat—stand beside an Associated Press machine displaying photos and news pages. At right, three women and a young boy gather at the counter, speaking with a staff member. A rack of newspapers and display boards with photos and diagrams are visible in the background. (Courtesy Tacoma News Tribune, Image TNT0122N, Tacoma Public Library Northwest Room)

🧵 Saving local news also means saving archives 🗞️

Not just physical photos, clips & recordings, but digital reporting too 💻

When archives disappear, communities lose memory, identity, and their only reliable record of change.

More 👇
www.poynter.org/reporting-ed...

@poynterinstitute.bsky.social

Tesla Cybertruck Sales Were Inflated by a SpaceX Buying Spree (Bloomberg) -- Sales of Tesla Inc.’s Cybertruck have been propped up in recent months by Elon Musk’s other companies, an unusual arrangement that further indicates the polarizing pickup is failing to ...

An "unusual arrangement"

"Sales of Tesla Inc.’s Cybertruck have been propped up in recent months by Elon Musk’s other companies, an unusual arrangement that further indicates the polarizing pickup is failing to appeal to everyday buyers."

finance.yahoo.com/markets/stoc...

OpenAI launches AI model GPT-Rosalind for life sciences research OpenAI on Thursday introduced an artificial intelligence model touting increased biology knowledge and scientific research capabilities, ​as the startup deepens its push into the ‌life sciences field.

A name that continues the exploitation of Rosalind Franklin’s life and work, James Watson couldn’t have done it any better himself.

Journalists champion Wayback Machine after news publishers limit article archiving In January, Hanaa’ Tameez and I broke the story that The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co. had begun limiting the Wayback Machine’s access to their news articles. Our reporting showed th...

“Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record."

How the AI oligarchy devoured America How the AI oligarchy devoured America.

1/ we have an incredible package out today on our AI overlords and how the entire world is being ravaged in their pursuit for domination www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The Burden of Bearing Witness: Digital Practices of Marginalized Social Media Users in High-Stakes Contexts | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

This morning at #CHI2026, @hibbythach.com will be presenting our paper "The Burden of Bearing Witness: Digital Practices of Marginalized Social Media Users in High-Stakes Contexts," led by Senami Kojah and co-authored with @michaelannephd.bsky.social.

paper link: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

This shouldn't come as a surprise since Allbirds are literally the textbook case for greenwashing (Dwyer v. Allbirds, Inc.) but it is notable shift nonetheless.

Sustainability is less and less a metric companies advertising over. Is this the death of the "green" company?

I think a big part of this story is less about AI-ificiation and more about how Allbirds first marketed themselves as sustainable and now are so ceremoniously dropping that facade.

Bombs and Porn Are Bad Reasons to Build More Data Centers Is this big AI push supposed to help the U.S. kill more Iranian kids? To help school shooters kill kids at home? Or just to fill the internet with rubbish? We need better answers to this question.

Very much appreciate @katearonoff.bsky.social questioning whether we actually need all these data centers. Too often taken for granted in energy policy circles that the only question is how to mitigate the impacts/extract benefits. newrepublic.com/article/2089...

Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination. Discrimination based on sex is expressly prohibited under Montana’s unique Nondiscrimination Clause––“[n]either the state nor any person, firm, corporation, or institution shall discriminate on account of . . . sex . . . .” Thus, Article II, Section 4 is unequivocal in its intolerance for discrimination based on sex. Because sex discrimination involves a fundamental right under Article II, the appropriate level of judicial review is strict scrutiny. Snetsinger, ¶ 17. ¶28 Being transgender is also a suspect class under the Equal Protection Clause of Article II, Section 4,––“[n]o person shall be denied equal protection of the law.”

MONTANA SUPREME COURT: “Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination,” and is subject to strict scrutiny under the Montana Constitution.

This is a good read.

"It seems obvious in retrospect that I was trying to subjugate my body to display a specific type of womanhood — that of an idealized whiteness."

"I still felt like a woman, but I didn’t always feel comfortable performing womanhood in the way the West had deemed appropriate."

We're barrelling pretty fast into annual report season, so worth catching up on this v good summary of everything tech-climate-accountability (which also mentions the latest work I led on greenwashing narratives!)

AI learns language from skewed sources. That could change how we humans speak – and think | Bruce Schneier Large language models aren’t trained on real-life conversations. As we encounter their language, it could affect our own

Oh:

A 2022 study found that children in households that used voice commands with tools like Siri and Alexa became curt when speaking with humans, often calling out “Hey, do X” and expecting obedience, especially from anyone whose voice resembled the default-female electronic voices.

The US Government to Ask Data Centers How Much Power They Use In a letter obtained by WIRED, the Energy Information Administration tells two senators that it plans to develop a mandatory assessment of data centers' energy use.

EXCLUSIVE: the US's energy information agency is planning to implement a nationwide survey of data centers to collect information on energy use, infrastructure, cooling techniques, and other info

would be the first such survey of data centers of its kind

Trump is about to drop a “nuclear weapon” on trans youth health care How a report led by a right-wing pundit laid the groundwork for upending gender-affirming treatment

The authors of the HHS report on trans youth health care were chosen by the Manhattan Institute's Leor Sapir.

Now, a rule based on the controversial report could wipe out this care at hospitals.

Parents are begging the administration not to go through with it.

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Surprised myself with this story. Went into the desert expecting to write about a terrible solar project that would harm bighorn sheep...and ended up writing why California should maybe approve it anyway.

In the Anthropocene, there are no easy choices: www.climatecoloredgoggles.com/p/soda-mount...

Trans health care "skeptics" lost a key ally—now they're having a meltdown The godfather of evidence-based medicine on rejecting anti-trans "misuse" of his work.

As I reported last fall, SEGM had quite the falling out numerous high profile researchers who they hired to conduct systematic reviews into trans healthcare.

Most notably, Gordon Guyatt, the "godfather" of evidence-based medicine blasted them as "not evidence-based" after working with them.

But among opponents of transgender health care, there’s also a new guard—neither overtly religious nor partisan. Helping lead it is the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, or SEGM, a controversial advocacy group of clinicians who are highly critical of gender-affirming treatments for minors. Several of the HHS report’s authors have ties to SEGM. Founded in 2019, the group “frames itself as a secular alternative to the major medical, mental health professional associations’ line on gender-affirming care,” says Joanna Wuest, a scholar researching the anti-trans movement at Stony Brook University.

One of SEGM’s cofounders, William Malone, was involved in early anti-trans legislation; he once suggested language for an Idaho bill forbidding trans people from changing their birth certificates. In 2019, Laidlaw wrote in a letter to Malone that one of his long term goals was to make sure that the Endocrine Society, which publishes clinical guidelines for transgender hormone treatments, was “publicly humiliated and sued mercilessly.” “It might take years, but we’re going to get them,” Malone replied.

On its website, SEGM says it “opposes all politicization of transgender care” and does not take a position on bans. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified SEGM as a hate group and described it as the “hub” of an anti-LGBTQ “pseudoscience network” (characterizations SEGM rejects.) According to an analysis by the watchdog group Documented, a trio of therapists who advised SEGM for years have collectively been affiliated with at least six other organizations whose main purpose is to criticize transgender medical care for minors or to promote non-affirming alternatives.

I also want to highlight this new reporting on the supposedly non-political SEGM, showing their continued involvement in policy and affiliation with other trans-skeptical groups.

But the Cass Review took four years; Trump wanted a report within months. “We basically had about eight weeks, nine weeks,” Sapir says on the podcast. “[The Trump administration] wanted to be able to cite it in their regulatory action,” he goes on to explain. “It’s obviously going to be central justification in the administration’s various actions on this issue.”

“The document is marked with the signature of politics, which is antithetical to the way that science is normally conducted,” Daniel Aaron, a physician and associate professor of law at University of Utah, wrote in an email.

Experts in transgender healthcare promptly slammed the report, whose authors have not been disclosed, as a political, not scientific, document. “It’s a post-hoc justification for a political agenda they wanted to pursue anyway,” says Kellan Baker, executive director of the Whitman-Walker Institute for Health Research and Policy. “You don’t do good science in 90 days with a ‘research question’ that’s determined by political fiat.”

I want to highlight this quote from HHS report author Leo Sapir where he makes it clear the purpose of the report was to be used politically -- which is what Kellan Baker and Daniel Aaron told Madison and I the day the report was published: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Trump is about to drop a “nuclear weapon” on trans youth health care How a report led by a right-wing pundit laid the groundwork for upending gender-affirming treatment

If you want to understand the last year and a half of Trump's attacks on trans people and the "science" behind it, read this excellent reporting by @msjpauly.bsky.social