I'm sorry Dave, I really need you to agree to these new terms and conditions.

Infowars’ endless afterlife The Onion may finally boot Alex Jones from his studio, but years of damage have already been done.

NEW: How exactly has Alex Jones avoided paying the Sandy Hook families a single dime of what he owes? I wrote about it here, and spoke to Chris Mattei, an attorney for some of the families, and Lenny Pozner, the father of the youngest child who died at Sandy Hook: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Wow! *Very* bloom!

Storycrafting Sessions: Disability in Writing FULL SCHEDULE - Weeknight Writers We are pleased to announce our full schedule for Storycrafting Sessions: Disability in Writing, happening on May 30th! This will be a full day of FREE virtual panels discussing various aspects of effe...

Folks, I am BEYOND excited to be one of the panelists on the "Avoiding Cure Narratives and Other Harmful Disability Tropes" panel at Storycrafting Sessions: Disability in Writing online event of @weeknightwriters.bsky.social and to be in such phenomenal company! weeknightwriters.com/2026/04/18/s...

We’re getting ready for a massive day of economic disruption on May Day. There are many ways you can take action, from refusing to shop, to walking out of work, to attending a demonstration: survey.alchemer.com/s3/8705046/i...

I read someone describe ChatGPT as playing Two Truths and a Lie with an expert liar and also there are actually an undetermined number of lies.

‘It’s a Nightmare’: The Human Toll of the Catholic Church’s Trans Healthcare Ban Missing hormones. Canceled surgeries. Bureaucratic denials. Late last year the Catholic Church banned all trans healthcare across its sprawling networks. The impact on trans people's lives is devastat...

Crossing state borders for HRT. Insurance denials. Missed surgeries.

U.S. Catholic bishops imposed a ban on all trans healthcare throughout the church's massive networks. That's left working class trans people struggling even more.

Our latest, by @davidforbes.bsky.social are some of their stories:

How many continents are there? YouTube video by Jay and Mark

Coincidentally, a friend of mine just linked to this video from a few years ago about the number-of-continents question. (I have some issues with it, but overall found it fairly interesting.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrsx...

See also (em-dash-appreciation.org).

Dunno, but is this new behavior? If so, I wonder if it’s a bug related to today’s Bsky semi-outage—for example, I wonder if it’s somehow combining your Following and Discover tabs.

(For me, when I look at my Following tab, it still shows me only people I’m explicitly following.)

Thank you for posting this! This is the first time that I’ve seen a graph of this race showing Undecided; all of the other graphs of it that I’ve seen have left that out, which gives a wildly inaccurate view of the state of the race.

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit

Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here

Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse

Media and universities: AI is here to stay

The Presidential Records Act is Constitutional Former U.S. Assistant AG for the Office of Legal Counsel, Christopher Fonzone rebuts DOJ's claim that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional.

The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel said the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, contradicting decades of Supreme Court precedent.

Why they got it wrong, from former OLC Assistant Attorney General Chris Fonzone:

Text on a blurred purple background. Text reads: ISSUE 2 POETRY WISHLIST: your most visceral poems, queer joy and euphoria, ghosts monsters Goosebumps vibes, surreal and lyrical poems, the interplace of form and content, weird/unpexpected over warm/fuzzy

Our submissions for Issue 2 close in a week! Poets, here is a wishlist of poetry vibes from our poetry editors Jess Cho and Angel Leal 👀

Read our full guidelines here, then send us your poems and make all their dreams come true: othersidespec.com/guidelines?u...

Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.

For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”

Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”

A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)

This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):

Cover for Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills, featuring the title in big bold white and pink font, inset with silhouettes of a rabbit and a pregnancy test

There are TWO book giveaways starting today for Rabbit Test and Other Stories! Clickity click to enter ;D

Goodreads April 14-21: www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

Storygraph April 14-28: app.thestorygraph.com/giveaways/87...

The article links to a survey results spreadsheet that says: “Which of the following comes closest to your view?: The science on vaccines is clear and it is damaging to question it | The facts on vaccines are still up for debate and it is damaging to enforce their uptake”

Possibly of interest: em-dash-appreciation.org

Media outlets have infrastructure to support such investigations — experienced reporters and editors, newsroom lawyers, resources to fend off lawsuits. The content creators had none of that. Both women said they independently took out umbrella insurance policies to protect their houses and other assets in case they got sued. At one point Fodor, feeling increasingly overwhelmed, sent a message to Hunt: “I think we have bitten off more than we can chew here.” The influencers agreed that specific allegations needed to be broken in a news story. While reporters dug into the allegations, they kept up a public drumbeat, insisting that Swalwell was a shady character and promising the details would come out soon. The tease infuriated many on social media, who accused the influencers of being irresponsible by lobbing accusations without backing them up. But the threat of a soon-to-drop news story was enough to dry up Swalwell’s fundraising and unnerve supporters. Political operatives of all stripes were disconcerted watching the influencers play by their own set of rules, different from the norms of media outlets, and wondered if this would become a new normal in campaigns — a prospect that even unsettled the influencers. “I have a lot of fears about the blurred lines between content creators and journalists,” Hunt said. She knew her personal familiarity with Swalwell’s reputation would never have been sufficient basis for a reporter to write a story. “It was enough for me to feel confident in not getting sued, and to want to let other women know that they weren’t alone, and only from that place would we be able to break his story in a traditional news media outlet,” she said. “I don’t want this to be a green light to creators who think that they should be breaking sensitive news.”

The series of events that resulted in Swalwell's downfall bring up a really interesting (and depressing) conversation about traditional media vs. independent and how money in journalism controls who has the safety to tell the truth

www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

Only a little time left to donate to our campaign and claim these perks!! Ends tomorrow 4/14 at 11am PDT.

You can do so by visiting locusmag.com/igg26 or by clicking the link in our bio.
Big thank-you to everyone who has donated, your support means the world to us.

The world's worst dealmaker screws up the Iran negotiations Forget the "Art of the Deal” myth.

New in PN: The world's worst dealmaker screws up the Iran negotiations

"All of Trump’s weaknesses as a negotiator are now on display: His childish understanding of power, his inability to grasp the perspective of his opponents, his belief that anything can be accomplished by threats and violence."

2026 Journalism Fellowship — Daniel Singer Prize Nominations are open until April 20. Apply now.

Do you know a journalist who fits the bill? The Rosa Luxemburg Journalism Fellowship will award one $30,000 fellowship to an early to mid-career journalist w/a history of progressive writing who lacks institutional support to do their journalistic work. Deadline to apply is April 20 at 11:59 pm ET.

It's the 7th month of the US bombing random ships in Latin American waters they claim are drug smugglers (reminder that two survivors who were rescued were repatriated, not charged), and the death toll is 150+, and it barely gets discussed.

Today is the last day! Grab these deals before they're gone!

indiebook.sale

#NarratessIndieSale #Booksky

Screenshot Lucavi @lucavi_ftw good news everyone SPACE com Potatoes are better than human blood for making space concrete bricks, scientists say.

Were

Were those the only two options

This thread. I have been doing this kind of work for a very long time and I know a lot about exactly this. If you want to do misconduct reporting with scared sources going up against very powerful people, and also keep your soul, it takes time. So much time. It’s very difficult. Brain meltingly so.

Orban, Bolsonaro, Trump, and all the rest of these goons want you to believe they are inevitable and, once in power, invincible. They are not.

Hungarian Voters Increasingly Out Of Touch With Heartland America---Will This "Danubian Elitism" Prove To Be A Mistake?

analogy for the America brained is like if the Dems lost to Trump four times in a row and then ran Mitt Romney to save the country and won crazy supermajorities and also Mitt Romney was named Johnny America

Listen up: I am one of those rare sex assault victims who actually took the guy who did it to court. It was a local scandal that put my initials on the front page of the local paper (not my whole name because I was a minor).

You have no idea what happens to women on the stand or in the press.