b.i.t. News-Ticker - Neue Publikationsmöglichkeiten für die Wissenschaft: Deutschland beteiligt sich an Open Research Europe | DFG

Mehr Sichtbarkeit für deutsche Forschung: Open Research Europe kommt nach Deutschland. Transparente, schnelle Publikation statt Paywall – ein wichtiger Schritt für offene Wissenschaft. #OpenAccess #OpenScience #DFG

www.b-i-t-online.de/neues/260421...

Regulierung als Chance: Warum wir Monopole brechen statt Spatenstiche feiern sollten Bernd Korz: Im Mai 2026 saß ich in einer Diskussionsrunde beim MDR. Vier Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, von der Politik über die Wirtschaft bis zur Wissenschaft, aber eine – durchaus überraschende – Einigkeit in einem Punkt: Der AI Act ist richtig. Europa braucht digitale Souveränität. Regulierung ist notwendig.Dann kam die Frage nach dem „Wie“ – und schon ging die alte Debatte wieder los: Regulierung versus Innovation. Als würde das eine das andere ausschließen. Als wäre jede Regel automatisch eine Bremse.Aber warum verstehen wir Regulierung eigentlich immer als Innovationsbremse? Regulierung neu denken Martin Andree, Medienwissenschaftler an der Uni Köln, brachte einen Punkt zur Sprache, der diese Frage auf den Kopf stellt: Wir haben ein unterkomplexes Verständnis von Regulierung. Wir denken, Regulierung bedeutet Kontrolle, Verbote, Bremsen. Dabei kann Regulierung das genaue Gegenteil sein: Ermöglichung. Empfehlungen der Redaktion Sein Beispiel: In den 1990er Jahren haben wir das Telekom-Monopol aufgebrochen – durch Regulierung. Wir haben den Markt geöffnet, Wettbewerb ermöglicht, Innovation freigesetzt. Regulierung als Befreiung, nicht als Einschränkung.Heute haben wir eine ähnliche Situation. 86 Prozent der weltweiten Plattform-Marktkapitalisierung liegt in den USA. In Europa: 2,2 Prozent. Bei KI wird es noch schlimmer. Wir haben digitale Monopolwirtschaft – und unter Monopolbedingungen können europäische Startups nicht konkurrieren. Egal, wie gut sie sind. Empfohlene redaktionelle Inhalte Hier findest du externe Inhalte von TargetVideo GmbH, die unser redaktionelles Angebot auf t3n.de ergänzen. Mit dem Klick auf

Regulierung ist kein Innovationskiller, sondern unser einziges Werkzeug gegen Digitalmonopole. Solange Politik lieber YouTube-Partys feiert als Alugha, Ecosia & Co. zu nutzen, bleibt „digitale Souveränität“ eine Leerformel. #Regulierung #DigitaleSouveränität #Europa

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“War destroys monuments” photo exhibition visited Frankfurt (Oder) Anton Protsiuk: In February–March, the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) was hosting an exhibition of photographs from the special category “War destroys monuments” of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine photo contest, which is organized annually by Wikimedia Ukraine.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in its fifth year, and in addition to its human toll and economic impact, cultural monuments have suffered as well. Just on 24 March 2026 a Russian drone strike hit a building in the area of the 17th  century Bernardine Monastery within the World Heritage property of Lviv. “L’viv – the Ensemble of the Historic Centre” was included on the UNESCO list in 1998 and added to the organisation’s List of World Heritage in Danger in 2023. The attack on Lviv was a part of the largest and longest aerial assault on Ukraine since the beginning of the full scale invasion in 2022. The city that houses a large percentage of Ukraine’s cultural heritage was attacked in broad daylight in front of the whole world1. Overall, over four years of full-scale war, Russian forces have destroyed or damaged 1,685 cultural heritage sites in Ukraine, according to the most recent data from Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture. Since 2023, as part of the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest, we have been documenting the consequences of Russian crimes against Ukrainian cultural heritage through the special category “War destroys monuments.”Image by Wikimedia Ukraine, CC BY-SA 4.0 (includes works by Renata Hanynets and Valentyn Moiseenko, CC BY-SA 4.0) The exhibition, organized by Viadrina University, featured 20 photographs of destroyed and damaged monuments from various regions of Ukraine submitted for this special category. They included, for example, a photograph of the ruins of the wooden Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Viazivka village, Zhytomyr Oblast destroyed by Russian shelling on March 7, 2022, or a photo of the “Store”, a historical building on Constitution Square in Kharkiv damaged by a Russian missile strike on March 2, 2022.“The pictures presented here tell a visual story of the toll of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on cultural heritage – places of worship destroyed in wartime, residential buildings and educational institutions under fire, libraries, theaters and monuments damaged and so on. Rockets, missiles, drones… Four years of documenting crimes against Ukrainian civilians and cultural heritage,” the authors of the exhibition note.Спасо-Преображенський собор після ракетного удару / © 2023 Odesa; Oleksandr Voropaiev / foto-still.comThe exhibition was initiated by Renata Hanynets, a participant of Wiki Loves Monuments in previous years, a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Heritage Studies at the European University Viadrina, and a staff member of the Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin (KIU).“Since Russia started its full-scale invasion, Ukraine has not left the front pages of the world’s newspapers. The focus has been on human losses, the humanitarian catastrophe, and the destruction of infrastructure. Yet the loss of cultural heritage often remains in the shadows. Destroyed museums, burned archives, damaged churches, and historic buildings do not always make it into the media spotlight, even though their destruction represents not only a material but also a symbolic loss.War destroys not just buildings – it destroys memory, historical continuity, and cultural identity. The destruction of heritage is an attempt to strip a community of its cultural foundation. The idea for the exhibition arose from the need to show that behind every ruin there is a story – architectural, artistic, human – that matters to us,” says Renata Hanynets.The exhibition was located in the main building of Viadrina University (HG).The most recent Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest took place in Ukraine in October 2025. The results of the 2025 contest are still being finalized, but you can read about the results of the special category for 2023 and 2024.“European University Viadrina offers a space for cultural projects and student organisation ASTA can help financially if they consider projects worth attention. I thought that it is a perfect opportunity to show the photos in order to encourage curiosity about the war in Ukraine and current state of cultural heritage. I worked more as a mediator between Wikimedia Ukraine and Viadrina University. I contacted Wikimedia Ukraine to ask for permission to use the photos as well as advice on how to exhibit them better, asked the exhibition coordinator at the Viadrina for a possible time slot and applied for the ASTA individual grant. The layout was made during blackouts in Ukraine, but I never heard any complaints from anyone, it was even funny once when I asked for something additional there was a response ‘yes, please tell what you need I have a powerbank for 30 more minutes’. From my side – it took just a few clicks to order printing, collect my order from the post office and only one hour to put the photos into the frames and give them to staff to hang them on the wall…” Renata Hanynets reflected on the organising process.Exhibition in the Viadrina university (photo: Renata Hanynets, CC BY-SA 4.0)The exhibition aroused considerable interest among both students and university staff, as well as among the city’s residents. An additional factor in attracting attention was the presence of Chairs at the university, the Entangled history of Ukraine (the only one in Germany) and the Chair of Heritage studies, as well as newly established Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin (KIU) which enhances the relevance and sensitivity of this topic. At the same time, the interest is also explained by the fact that since the beginning of the full-scale war, a significant number of refugees from Ukraine have been living in the city.You can check the pictures from the exhibition at Wikimedia Commons at Wiki Loves Monuments 2026 in Ukraine/War destroys monuments.Notes:Following the Russian attack on Lviv, UNESCO issued a statement that they are deeply alarmed and reminded that that cultural property is protected under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention, although that statement did not name Russia as a perpetrator. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, a government agency, called for Russia’s membership of UNESCO to be revoked adding that “constant attacks on the cultural heritage of Ukraine, which is under UNESCO protection, are a deliberate policy of the Kremlin, aimed at destroying Ukrainian national memory and cultural identity”. ↩︎

War destroys monuments – and with them, memory. A new photo exhibition at European University Viadrina shows how Russia’s ongoing invasion is erasing Ukraine’s cultural heritage, site by site. #Ukraine #CulturalHeritage #WarCrimes

diff.wikimedia.org/2026/04/06/w...

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Manuela Aeberli, Felix Hüppi: The article presents the first social impact study of public libraries in Switzerland, focusing on three urban library systems in the canton of Zürich. Using Seismonaut’s Social Impact Compass and mixed methods, the authors assess effects on wellbeing, knowledge, creativity and community, plus emergent dimensions of sustainability and the value of physical media. Results show libraries as heavily used “third places” that support learning, integration, family life and digital balance, far beyond circulation figures. The study offers an evidence base for service development, political advocacy and stakeholder communication, challenging outdated images of libraries as purely book-lending institutions.

“Es ist auch ein Treffpunkt”: new impact study on public libraries in Zürich (journal article). Zürcher libraries strengthen wellbeing, learning, creativity, community and sustainability, measured with the Social Impact Compass. #libraries #Switzerland #socimpact #Zürich

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A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher Alexandra Petri: Plato had just downloaded another update and was refusing to teach us math until we upgraded to a Be Best Platinum subscription, so we were left to our own devices. This was how our class spent most of its time. With the Be Best Basic plan, which was all that our school district could afford, we didn’t get very much instruction, mostly ads. Plato had been trying to sell us razors for the past three weeks, possibly because it had heard someone ask about Occam’s razor, but more likely because it had access to our data and understood that as tenth graders, we were entering the razor market. (This was when Plato was awake, which was more and more seldom due to the rolling blackouts.)Every classroom had a Plato in it—that had been Melania Trump’s vision. Plato was a humanoid-robot instructor powered by AI, the only kind of instructor our school had had for as long as any of us could remember. Except for Gregory, the Oldest Student. Gregory had been here for more than a decade; he had never been able to learn quite enough to graduate, but he was getting pretty good at football.Each morning, we gathered around whatever screen was functional and connected to the internet to watch Melania’s triumphant speech from March 25, 2026, when she had first laid out this future. How beautiful she looked, marching on a red carpet side by side with a robot! It was interesting to see this early-model humanoid, which had performed household tasks (fetching towels and groceries, serving champagne) before such tasks had been forcibly reassigned to women, a much more just system that freed us boys up to achieve greatness better.Today, the functional screen was Timothy’s phone, and we gathered around it to watch the video. There, on the cracked display, we saw her: Melania Trump, Our Lady Benefactress, whose dream we were now embodying. We recited along with her, “Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato. Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous: literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history. Humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deeper critical-thinking and independent-reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytical skills and problem-solving and adapt in real time to a student’s pace, prior knowledge, and even emotional state. The by-product: a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports, and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person.”Timothy snickered; Plato flickered to life and zapped him with its rear-mounted stun cannon. Despite being shut down for teaching, Plato was always listening. Timothy started to cry, and Plato zapped him again. “Be best,” we urged him. “Come on, Tim. Be best.” He kept crying, and Plato kept zapping him. It was difficult to be best under these circumstances. In moments like these, I sometimes wondered whether I really was becoming a more complete person with more time for hobbies. But I tried not to wonder it too loudly in case Plato could hear.The budget cuts had hit our classroom hard. Math was off the table. Also, our trial version of American History had expired, so we were able to access only events from the New Golden Age (2016 to the present, with an illegitimate four-year interregnum from 2021 to 2025). We knew that everything before that was the Dark Age anyhow, and besides, nobody expected to need any of this information in the future. We would never have jobs that required it. It was already a mark against us that we were in this classroom at all during what our state governor described as our “peak earning years, when the fingers are nimblest and the body best sized for crawling into narrow-gauge tubes.” But he still let us enroll.Once, on a rainy Tuesday, when Plato was downloading another system update, we asked Gregory what it had been like to have a human instructor.“Good,” Gregory said. “Better.”“Better at delivering utility?” we asked. “Did she adapt in real time to our pace, prior knowledge, and even emotional state?”“Yeah,” Gregory said. “Obviously, and way better.”“But it was so expensive,” Lars said uncertainly. “And wasteful, and sometimes she might have said Untruths.”Gregory squinted off into the distance as if trying to read something written very far away.“Not wasteful. She bought all the supplies herself. She knew my name. She knew everyone’s name. She spelled strawberry the same way every time. And she loved to teach.”We didn’t believe him. Lars called him a liar; he had downloaded MyPillow News Network’s Authorized History of the Greater United States and Canada-Greenland audiobook, and now he hit “Play” (none of us could read; we needed Be Best Platinum for that). The voice on Lars’s tablet insisted that teaching was one of the most obvious tasks to delegate to humanoids. Human instructors had been famously unable to adapt to the needs of students, and they had demanded compensation in the form of apples. (None of us had ever seen an apple; Gregory claimed that he had once seen one before the Low-Protein Purges had eliminated all foods not blessed to contain enough of the One True Source of Health. He claimed that it was like a medicine ball, but much smaller and lighter, and you could eat it.)Human teachers, Lars’s audiobook said, had lived in luxury, constantly demanding more and more items on so-called Amazon Wish Lists, wasting all of their income on such absurd luxuries as “human food” and “shelter” and “student-loan debt.” Also, sometimes they had disagreed with the things the State had wanted them to teach. Sometimes they had wanted their students to read books. Plato briefly stirred to life to announce that there had never been such a thing as a Department of Education, then shut back down. This made Gregory say that he remembered being told that there had been one, before the Golden Age.I went out and shoveled more coal into the Mandatory-Greatness Fuel Burner to see whether the extra power would help wake Plato up again, but it didn’t. The classroom was very hot and had a foul odor, a thick, pungent coal smell that we had been told to associate with freedom. Timothy, after consulting briefly with the rest of the class, put a rare Donald Coin (the big, golden one that showed the president glowering from behind a desk) into the provided slot on Plato, and the humanoid perked up briefly, swiveling its head from side to side and playing another ad for razors. Then it went back to sleep. Lars asked it to grade our worksheets from three weeks prior, but it didn’t seem to hear him.There was not much else we could do. They had replaced our district’s superintendent with a Plato three years ago, and it was on the Be Best Basic plan too. We played games on our phones in the meantime, and waited. Sometimes we took tests, but how we did on them never seemed to matter—whenever we got more funding, Team Be Best just increased the price of the subscriptions. Be Best Platinum classrooms were better, and Gregory had heard that sometimes they had a real human-teacher substitute when the Platos went offline for repairs, but Lars said that he was lying. Humanoid-AI instruction was the way of the future. Melania had said so, and she was always right.

In Alexandra Petri’s future classroom, Melania’s AI teacher Plato mostly serves ads and stun blasts instead of knowledge. Dark, funny, and a little too close to our ed-tech reality. #AI #education #politics

www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Libraries on Fire Leah Hinds, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub, organised a panel in Berlin to discuss: “Defending Scholarship in a time of Political Pressure”. In her introductory remarks, she explained the pu...

Last year, @leah-hinds.bsky.social, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub, organized a panel in Berlin to discuss: “Defending Scholarship in a time of Political Pressure.”

A new paper summarizes the discussion: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... (🧵1/4)

Steffi Grimm, Guido Scherp, Stephan Wünsche, Kay-Michael Würzner: The article traces ten years of the Open Library Badge, a certification scheme of the German Library Association promoting openness in libraries. It situates openness in the context of Open Science, inclusion, citizen science and digital sovereignty, and shows how the badge evolved from an informal checklist into a structured, juried programme. The new Open Library Badge 2025 introduces 28 criteria, organised as a matrix of seven themes and four action fields, to better reflect the diversity of open practices. The authors discuss institutionalisation, international potential and future challenges for sustaining openness in a changing political climate.

New article on the Open Library Badge and openness in libraries. Ahead-of-print in “Bibliothek – Forschung und Praxis”, Grimm et al. rethink the Open Library Badge after 10 years of practice. #OpenLibraryBadge #OpenScience #libraries

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Giulia Stella, Yvonne Voigt: The article presents “BiblioBreak”, a game-based format for teaching information literacy at SuUB Bremen. Drawing on constructivist learning and gamification research, the authors design a mobile escape game for up to 30 participants, mainly upper-secondary students and first-year undergraduates. Players solve coordinated analogue and digital puzzles that mirror real library tasks: using the catalogue, understanding call numbers, locating items, and managing their accounts. The paper details concept development, materials, roles, testing, and adaptation for events and younger audiences. Lessons learned highlight the value of clear learning goals, tight story–puzzle alignment, institutional support, and embracing failure as part of innovation.

New BFP article: Escape-game edutainment for teaching library use. Stella & Voigt present “BiblioBreak”, a mobile escape game at SuUB Bremen that replaces classic inductions with game-based, team-oriented learning for up to 30 participants. #gamification #informationliteracy

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Earth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record high State of the Climate report finds Earth’s energy has moved dangerously out of balance, with oceans absorbing vast majority of trapped heat

Every responsible decision maker in politics, industry etc. should read this. Or better yet the original WMO report it’s about (linked in the article).
And then think very seriously:
What am I doing to stop this?
Is it enough?
How do I want to be remembered?

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

16 Millionen NSDAP-Karten online: Chance für unbequeme Familienfragen US-Nationalarchiv stellt komplette NSDAP-Mitgliedskarteien ins Netz – kein einfacher „Naziscanner“, aber ein mächtiges Werkzeug gegen Verdrängung. #NSDAP #Familiengeschichte #Zeitgeschichte

www.heise.de/news/USA-erm...

Jens Mittelbach: My editorial frames “Zukunftsgestaltung in Bibliotheken” as shaping the present under conditions of polarization, institutional erosion and global crises. The special issue shows libraries as active democratic, social and educational infrastructures rather than neutral service providers. Case studies and research address everyday library work, third-place concepts, participation, educational partnerships, social impact measurement, openness, library pedagogy, licensing and legal frameworks, and political pressures on knowledge institutions. Together, they argue that future-making lies in organizational culture, reliable structures and critical reflection, highlighting libraries’ role in sustaining public discourse, inclusion, and conditions for science and democracy.

Editorial: “Zukunftsgestaltung in Bibliotheken” in Bibliothek – Forschung und Praxis. I introduce a special issue on how libraries actively shape democratic, social and educational futures amid crisis. #libraries #futures #democracy #openaccess

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Unbounded Julia Ravanis: In the early 20th century, Emmy Noether’s mathematics transcended the physical world. She longed to do the same herself- by Julia RavanisRead on Aeon

She freed physics, but couldn’t free herself. On Emmy Noether, whose mathematics slipped the bounds of the physical world even as her own life remained tightly constrained. #EmmyNoether #physics #mathematics

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Everyone but Trump Understands What He’s Done Anne Applebaum: Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States. Surely, the foreign-policy analysts murmured, Trump thinks beyond the current moment. Surely, foreign statesmen whispered, he adheres to some ideology, some pattern, some plan. Words were thrown around—isolationism, imperialism—in an attempt to place Trump’s actions into a historical context. Solemn articles were written about the supposed significance of Greenland, for example, as if Trump’s interest in the Arctic island were not entirely derived from the fact that it looks very large on a Mercator projection.This week, something broke. Maybe Trump does not understand the link between the past and the present, but other people do. They can see that, as a result of decisions that Trump made but cannot explain, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by Iranian mines and drones. They can see oil prices rising around the world and they understand that it is difficult and dangerous for the U.S. Navy to solve this problem. They can also hear the president lashing out, as he has done so many times before, trying to get other people to take responsibility, threatening them if they don’t.[From the March 2026 issue: America vs. the world]NATO faces a “very bad” future if it doesn’t help clear the strait, Trump told the Financial Times, apparently forgetting that the United States founded the organization and has led it since its creation in 1949. He has also said he is not asking but ordering seven countries to help. He did not specify which ones. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way from Florida to Washington. “It’s the place from which they get their energy.” Actually it isn’t their territory, and it’s his fault that their energy is blocked.But in Trump’s mind, these threats are justified: He has a problem right now, so he wants other countries to solve it. He doesn’t seem to remember or care what he said to their leaders last month or last year, nor does he know how his previous decisions shaped public opinion in their countries or harmed their interests. But they remember, they care, and they know.Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any cards.” Trump ridiculed Canada as the “51st state” and referred to both the present and previous Canadian prime ministers as “governor.” He claimed, incorrectly, that allied troops in Afghanistan “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines,” causing huge offense to the families of soldiers who died fighting after NATO invoked Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, on behalf of the United States, the only time it has done so. He called the British “our once-great ally,” after they refused to participate in the initial assault on Iran; when they discussed sending some aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf conflict earlier this month, he ridiculed the idea on social media: “We don’t need people that join Wars after ​we’ve already won!

Allies now grasp the cost of Trump’s impulsive foreign policy—he still does not. Applebaum details how tariffs, insults, and erratic war-making have pushed NATO partners to sit out America’s latest crisis. #Trump #NATO #foreignpolicy

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Stop manually curating your CV. ORCID DataCite can auto-update your record, crediting datasets, software, images, and more—building a PID graph that actually reflects your work. #ORCID #DataCite #OpenScience

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Andreas Brandtner: Andreas Brandtner reviews Ulrich Johannes Schneider’s essay on the birth of the modern library from 1850 to 1920. Schneider traces how libraries shifted from mere book repositories to reader-centered spaces, shaped by hygiene debates, new technologies, and urban industrial conditions. Case studies like the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the British Museum Reading Room, and the Boston Public Library illustrate libraries as refuges for “free breathing” and critical thought, yet also as institutions of discipline, regulation, and social exclusion. The study links historical reading rooms to today’s digitally supported library spaces, highlighting their emancipatory potential and persistent inequalities.

Review of U.J. Schneider’s “Atmen beim Lesen – Bibliotheken im Industriezeitalter”. Brandtner situates Schneider’s history of modern libraries between industrial-era urban stress and the library as a carefully engineered refuge for reading and reflection. #libraries #history

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Wolfgang Schmitz: Wolfgang Schmitz reviews Patricia F. Blume’s 772-page dissertation on the history of the Leipzig Book Fair in the GDR. Based on extensive archives, press sources and interviews, the study reconstructs five phases from 1945 to post-1990 transformation, showing the fair as a nodal point of book trade, cultural policy, censorship and German–German relations. Schmitz emphasizes its analysis of the fair’s dual economic and symbolic roles, the pervasive influence of the SED and the Stasi, conflicts with Frankfurt, and the fair’s function as a semi-open space for readers. He praises its clarity, rich documentation and lasting significance.

Review of Patricia F Blume’s monumental history of the Leipzig Book Fair in the GDR. Schmitz highlights Blume’s archive-rich, interdisciplinary study of Leipzig’s book fair as a key site of cultural policy, censorship and East–West exchange. #Leipzig #bookhistory #censorship

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How Kristi Noem Lost Her Job Jonathan Chait: Updated at 7:52 p.m. ET on March 5, 2026Kristi Noem’s autobiography includes the harrowing story of her decision to put down her dog, Cricket. The ill-fated pet had first ruined a hunting foray by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” and went on to kill several chickens belonging to a neighbor. Noem then decided she had to shoot Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she recounts, “but it had to be done.”After Noem’s latest public-relations fiasco, a shambolic session before Congress this week, President Trump found himself facing a similarly difficult choice.As homeland-security secretary, Noem personally generated more scandals over the past year than a normal presidency would muster in four. Her department approved $220 million in contracts for advertisements that feature herself warning illegal immigrants that they face deportation. One contract went to a firm that has ties to Noem, and the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s former spokesperson.Not only did the secretary spend lavishly to promote herself as a ruthless law enforcer, but she also lived in high style. Her department leased a luxurious plane with a queen bed, a kitchen, four televisions, and a bar. The official explanation was that the vehicle “will serve dual missions—both as ICE deportation flights and for cabinet level travel,” a strange expenditure for a department that otherwise seems to delight in mistreating detainees.In her defense, Noem appears particularly sensitive to the discomfort of substandard air travel. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that a maintenance issue had forced Noem to switch planes, and when the pilot neglected to move her blanket to the new plane, he was fired on the spot, before being reinstated because there was nobody else available to fly her home.Even while spending DHS’s resources profligately, Noem subjected the rest of the department to ruinous parsimony. She sent a memo in June requiring that she personally approve any expense costing more than $100,000, a bottleneck that frustrated her underlings, causing the delay of more than 1,000 contracts and disaster-relief grants.[Read: Did Kristi Noem just doom her career?]Many of her difficulties stemmed from her relationship with Corey Lewandowski. Trump blocked Lewandowski, his former aide, from working as Noem’s chief of staff, in part over concerns that the two have maintained a romantic relationship—a claim they both deny. They are both married, but not to each other.Lewandowski evaded this ban by taking a role as a special government employee, limited by law to working no more than 130 days a year for the federal government. Axios reported that he evaded this limit by, among other methods, having DHS employees let him into the building so that he didn’t have to swipe his card. (The department disputes this.) In his supposedly part-time role, he acted as something like a co-head of the department. “Everything has to go through Corey,” a lobbyist who has worked with DHS told Ben Terris of New York magazine: “It’s all based on ‘You’re my buddy, or you’re not my buddy. You hired my friend, or you didn’t hire my friend.’ That place just runs that way.”At a House hearing yesterday, Noem declined repeatedly under oath to deny having a romantic relationship with her subordinate. “I am shocked that we’re going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today,” she said angrily but nonresponsively. “I would tell you that he is a special government employee who works for the White House. There are thousands of them in the federal government.” The trouble is that of the thousands of special government employees, Lewandowski is apparently the most special.In all probability, Noem’s fatal error was not infidelity, incompetence, or self-enrichment. All of these are sins that Trump would likely understand. What reportedly killed her was pointing the finger at her boss.Senator John Kennedy, somewhat unexpectedly for a Republican from Louisiana, grilled Noem for having leaked to reporters that the adviser Stephen Miller gave her bad information that led her to accuse Alex Pretti of “domestic terrorism” after immigration agents working for her department shot and killed the Minnesota man. Responding to Kennedy, Noem attacked the story for using anonymous sources.Noem also said that Trump had approved her controversial ad campaign. Her statement reportedly annoyed the president so deeply that he contradicted it in public and began calling Republicans to discuss firing Noem.Whether Noem was telling the truth is beside the point. The president, trained by the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, famously avoids giving written orders and looks askance at lawyers who take notes during his meetings. To publicly implicate him in the chain of responsibility is to violate what seems to be the president’s most sacred principle.Cricket was shot for yapping uncontrollably, bungling the mission, and killing innocent bystanders. Noem’s misdeeds are very similar, but she will be treated more mercifully. Trump announced that he will install his deposed homeland-security secretary as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas”—a new and apparently vital position that had been coincidentally set to be announced this weekend.There is no better choice than Noem for the distinction of being the first Cabinet member to be removed from this administration. She was fired, as Trump might put it, like a dog.

Kristi Noem, fired like a dog. Jonathan Chait dissects how Noem turned DHS into a vanity project, entangled Corey Lewandowski in shadow power, and finally crossed the one red line Trump never forgives: implicating the boss. #KristiNoem #Trump #DHS

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

How Kristi Noem Lost Her Job Jonathan Chait: Updated at 7:52 p.m. ET on March 5, 2026Kristi Noem’s autobiography includes the harrowing story of her decision to put down her dog, Cricket. The ill-fated pet had first ruined a hunting foray by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” and went on to kill several chickens belonging to a neighbor. Noem then decided she had to shoot Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she recounts, “but it had to be done.”After Noem’s latest public-relations fiasco, a shambolic session before Congress this week, President Trump found himself facing a similarly difficult choice.As homeland-security secretary, Noem personally generated more scandals over the past year than a normal presidency would muster in four. Her department approved $220 million in contracts for advertisements that feature herself warning illegal immigrants that they face deportation. One contract went to a firm that has ties to Noem, and the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s former spokesperson.Not only did the secretary spend lavishly to promote herself as a ruthless law enforcer, but she also lived in high style. Her department leased a luxurious plane with a queen bed, a kitchen, four televisions, and a bar. The official explanation was that the vehicle “will serve dual missions—both as ICE deportation flights and for cabinet level travel,” a strange expenditure for a department that otherwise seems to delight in mistreating detainees.In her defense, Noem appears particularly sensitive to the discomfort of substandard air travel. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that a maintenance issue had forced Noem to switch planes, and when the pilot neglected to move her blanket to the new plane, he was fired on the spot, before being reinstated because there was nobody else available to fly her home.Even while spending DHS’s resources profligately, Noem subjected the rest of the department to ruinous parsimony. She sent a memo in June requiring that she personally approve any expense costing more than $100,000, a bottleneck that frustrated her underlings, causing the delay of more than 1,000 contracts and disaster-relief grants.[Read: Did Kristi Noem just doom her career?]Many of her difficulties stemmed from her relationship with Corey Lewandowski. Trump blocked Lewandowski, his former aide, from working as Noem’s chief of staff, in part over concerns that the two have maintained a romantic relationship—a claim they both deny. They are both married, but not to each other.Lewandowski evaded this ban by taking a role as a special government employee, limited by law to working no more than 130 days a year for the federal government. Axios reported that he evaded this limit by, among other methods, having DHS employees let him into the building so that he didn’t have to swipe his card. (The department disputes this.) In his supposedly part-time role, he acted as something like a co-head of the department. “Everything has to go through Corey,” a lobbyist who has worked with DHS told Ben Terris of New York magazine: “It’s all based on ‘You’re my buddy, or you’re not my buddy. You hired my friend, or you didn’t hire my friend.’ That place just runs that way.”At a House hearing yesterday, Noem declined repeatedly under oath to deny having a romantic relationship with her subordinate. “I am shocked that we’re going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today,” she said angrily but nonresponsively. “I would tell you that he is a special government employee who works for the White House. There are thousands of them in the federal government.” The trouble is that of the thousands of special government employees, Lewandowski is apparently the most special.In all probability, Noem’s fatal error was not infidelity, incompetence, or self-enrichment. All of these are sins that Trump would likely understand. What reportedly killed her was pointing the finger at her boss.Senator John Kennedy, somewhat unexpectedly for a Republican from Louisiana, grilled Noem for having leaked to reporters that the adviser Stephen Miller gave her bad information that led her to accuse Alex Pretti of “domestic terrorism” after immigration agents working for her department shot and killed the Minnesota man. Responding to Kennedy, Noem attacked the story for using anonymous sources.Noem also said that Trump had approved her controversial ad campaign. Her statement reportedly annoyed the president so deeply that he contradicted it in public and began calling Republicans to discuss firing Noem.Whether Noem was telling the truth is beside the point. The president, trained by the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, famously avoids giving written orders and looks askance at lawyers who take notes during his meetings. To publicly implicate him in the chain of responsibility is to violate what seems to be the president’s most sacred principle.Cricket was shot for yapping uncontrollably, bungling the mission, and killing innocent bystanders. Noem’s misdeeds are very similar, but she will be treated more mercifully. Trump announced that he will install his deposed homeland-security secretary as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas”—a new and apparently vital position that had been coincidentally set to be announced this weekend.There is no better choice than Noem for the distinction of being the first Cabinet member to be removed from this administration. She was fired, as Trump might put it, like a dog.

Kristi Noem, fired like a dog. Jonathan Chait dissects how Noem turned DHS into a vanity project, entangled Corey Lewandowski in shadow power, and finally crossed the one red line Trump never forgives: implicating the boss. #KristiNoem #Trump #DHS

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Read these words from 100 years ago about immigrants in Britain – and see how history is chillingly repeating itself | George Monbiot George Monbiot: Our political memory fails us. We treat government policies as if we’re seeing them for the very first time. But much of what appears to be novel has deep historical roots. If we fail to understand those roots and the soil in which they grow, we will fail to resist the assaults on our humanity.The home secretary’s new attack on the rights of immigrants and refugees is shocking and disorienting. Shabana Mahmood wants to raise the qualification period for immigrants to achieve indefinite leave to remain in the UK from five years to 10 (and up to 20 for refugees). It looks outlandish. So does her wider assault on asylum seekers, denying them permanent refugee status even if their claims are successful. But both are eerily familiar.Just over a century ago, in 1924, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, sought to appease rightwingers by appointing Sir William Joynson-Hicks as home secretary. As Martin Pugh notes in his 2005 book, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!, Joynson-Hicks had “established himself as an unapologetic antisemite”. As home secretary, he “raised the hurdle” for immigrants to achieve “naturalisation” (equivalent to indefinite leave to remain) “from five to 10 years, and to 15 years for Russians”. “Russians” tended to mean Jewish refugees, fleeing pogroms and other oppressions.Joynson-Hicks made it as hard as possible for refugees to settle in the UK. As the historian David Cesarini has noted, the home secretary “issued instructions to immigration officers to increase their vigilance and never to give the benefit of the doubt to an alien attempting to enter the country”. He visited the ports “to examine the tighter procedures and encourage officials to greater zeal”. In other words, while there is no suggestion that Mahmood is an antisemite like Joynson-Hicks, his policies uncannily prefigured Mahmood’s.The same goes for the context. The rightwing press, led by the Times, the Daily Mail, the Express, the National Review and the Morning Post, had spent the preceding 20 years whipping up paranoia about a “flood” of “aliens” and “undesirables” entering the country. “Aliens” and “undesirables” tended to be code for Jews. Jews in Britain were widely accused of “tribalism”, of refusing to “assimilate”, of being “un-English” and unpatriotic and of “leeching” off the state. The Imperial Fascist League issued stickers with the slogan: “Britons! Do not allow Jews to tamper with white girls.” Jewish immigrants were blamed for the housing shortage and unemployment.Joynson-Hicks spoke disparagingly of Jews, who, he claimed, “put their Jewish or foreign nationality before their English nationality” and believed that leftwingers “would like to see England flooded with the whole of the alien refuse from every country in the world”. Many rightwingers believed there was a conspiracy to create a Jewish world order.In other words, the stories being told about Muslims and immigrants today are the same stories that were being told about Jews a century ago. Both Muslims and immigrants are now accused of tribalism and a failure to assimilate, of hostility to “British values” and of “tampering with white girls”. They are blamed for the housing shortage and unemployment and for “leeching” off the state. Rightwing conspiracy fictions claim that Muslims in Britain are seeking to create an Islamic world order in the form of a “global caliphate”. Figures such as Suella Braverman and Matthew Goodwin suggest that people from ethnic minorities cannot be truly English or truly British. Braverman proposes a literal blood-and-soil definition of Englishness, “rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity” with “generational ties to English soil”.Lord Rothermere’s Hurrah for the Blackshirts! article in the Daily Mail, 15 January 1934. Photograph: AlamyJust like the age-old generalisations about Jews, these characterisations are entirely false. To give one example, a poll last month found that Muslims in both the UK and the US are more likely than non-Muslims to believe that “democracy is the best system of government” and to express loyalty to the country.So why all the hatred? Well, the primary source is the same as it was a century ago: the media. Still the Daily Mail (now owned by the 4th Lord Rothermere), the Express and other newspapers pour division and bile into our lives. Today they are supplemented by outlets such as GB News and the social media site X. But just as they did 100 years ago, governments will blame anyone and anything else for polarisation and hate. Last week both Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage, apparently reading from the same script, took this blame-shifting in a remarkable new direction by accusing the Green party of “sectarianism”, which appears to mean that it attracted Muslim votes. Is “sectarian” now code for Muslim?If you want to stop hatred, polarisation and division, stand up to the rightwing media. This, too, is a lesson from the past. The alliance between the first Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists could have led to disaster. But in 1934, soon after Rothermere published his notorious Hurrah for the Blackshirts! article and Mosley held his monster rally in London’s Olympia, one of the Daily Mail’s biggest advertisers, J Lyons & Co, owned by a Jewish family, threatened a boycott unless the newspaper dropped its support for fascism. When the Mail caved and withdrew its blessing from Mosley, his movement began to wither. I write this with pride as the family were my ancestors, and the Lyons chairman at the time my great-great uncle Sir Isidore Salmon.Of course, it shouldn’t have been left to advertisers. Then and now, it’s the government that needs to confront the lies in the media. Instead, it endorses them and grovels to the oligarchs.One result is that governments are constantly behind the curve. Net migration might turn negative this year, with dire consequences for crucial public services, especially hospitals, care homes and universities as well as many private employers. In political terms, the government’s rightwing policies are equally destructive. Not only does the latest polling put the Greens ahead of Labour for the first time in history, it also shows that of those who voted Labour in 2024, only 37% intend to do so now: an astonishing collapse. To appease the billionaire press, Starmer’s government has burnt its house down.“Scheming aliens undermining our values” is a narrative built across a century and more, originally by antisemites. It has been drilled into our heads as if it were an incontrovertible truth. It creates an environment in which every minority becomes less safe – not just Muslims, recent immigrants, refugees, Black and Brown people, but also Jews and everyone else who has suffered at the hands of the far right. Learn it or repeat it: that is, and has always been, our choice. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

History is repeating itself on immigrants and refugees in Britain. Monbiot shows how today’s attacks on migrants echo 1920s antisemitic scares, media hatred and state cruelty – and why standing up to the billionaire press is essential. #immigration #racism #media

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Physische Treffen sind kein nostalgischer Luxus, sondern ein unterschätzter Produktivfaktor. Warum Konferenzen, Meetups und Workshops vor Ort trotz Homeoffice, Videocalls und KI relevanter sind, als viele glauben. #Konferenzen #Meetups #NewWork

www.heise.de/blog/Meeting...

Sam Altman Is Losing His Grip on Humanity Matteo Wong: Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI CEO was asked by a reporter from The Indian Express about the natural resources required to train and run generative-AI models. Altman immediately pushed back. Chatbots do require a lot of power, yes, but have you thought about all of the resources demanded by human beings across our evolutionary history?“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told a packed pavilion. “It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took.”He continued: “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.”Altman’s comments are easy to pick apart. The energy used by the brain is significantly less than even efficient frontier models for simple queries, not to mention the laptops and smartphones people use to prompt AI models. It is true that people have to consume actual sustenance before they “get smart,” though this is also a helpful bit of redirection on Altman’s part—the real concern with AI is not really the resources it demands, but the amount it contributes to climate change. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is at levels not seen in million of years—it has been driven not by the evolution of the 117 billion people and all of the other critters to have ever existed in the course of evolution, but by contemporary human society and combustion turbines akin to those OpenAI is setting up at its Stargate data centers. Other data centers, too, are building private, gas-fired power plants—which collectively will likely be capable of generating enough electricity for, and emitting as much greenhouse-gas emissions as, dozens of major American cities—or extending the life of coal plants. (OpenAI, which has a corporate partnership with the business side of this magazine, did not respond to a request for comment when I reached out to ask about Altman’s remarks.)[Read: Every time you post to Instagram, you’re turning on a lightbulb forever]But what’s really significant about Altman’s words is that he thought to compare chatbots to humans at all. Doing so suggests that he views people and machines on equal terms. He didn’t fumble his words; this is a common, calculated position within the AI industry. Altman made an almost identical statement to Forbes India at the same AI summit. And a week ago, Dario Amodei—the CEO of Anthropic, and Altman’s chief rival—made a similar analogy, likening the training of AI models to human evolution and day-to-day learning. The mindset trickles down to product development. Anthropic is studying whether its chatbot, Claude, is conscious or can feel “distress,” and allows Claude to cut off “persistently harmful or abusive” conversations in which there are “risks to model welfare”—explicitly anthropomorphizing a program that does not eat, drink, or have any will of its own.AI firms are convinced either that their products really are comparable to humans or that this is good marketing. Both options are alarming. A genuine belief that they are building a higher power, perhaps even a god—Altman, in the same appearance, said that he thinks superintelligence is just a few years away—might easily justify treating humans and the planet as collateral damage. Altman also said, in his response to concerns about energy consumption, that the problem is real because “the world is now using so much AI”—and so societies must “move towards nuclear, or wind and solar, very quickly.” Another option would be for the AI industry to wait.[Read: Do you feel the AGI yet?]If Altman’s comparison of chatbots and people is purely a PR tactic, it is a deeply misanthropic one. He is speaking to investors. The notion that AI labs are building digital life has always been convenient to their myth, of course, and OpenAI is reportedly in the middle of a fundraising round that would value the company at more than $800 billion—nearly as much as Walmart.Tech companies may genuinely want to develop AI tools for the benefit of all humanity, to echo OpenAI’s founding mission, and genuinely believe that they need to raise amounts of cash to do so. But to liken raising a child—or, for that matter, the evolution of Homo sapiens—to developing algorithmic products makes very clear that the industry has lost touch, if it ever had any, with what it means to be human. To “train a human”—that is, to live a life—is to struggle, to accept the possibility of failure, and to sometimes meander simply in search of wonder and beauty. Generative AI is all about cutting out that process and making any pursuit as instant, efficient, and effortless as possible. These tools may serve us. But to put them on the same plane as organic life is sad.

When AI CEOs start equating chatbots with humans, something’s gone badly wrong. Matteo Wong on Sam Altman, data centers as fossil-fuel engines, and an industry that calls code “life” while externalizing the real climate costs. #AI #climate #ethics

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

GitHub - jmiba/zotero-redisearch-rag: An Obsidian plugin that synchronizes selected Zotero full-text items with your vault in realtime, vectorizes them and lets you chat with your pdf documents. An Obsidian plugin that synchronizes selected Zotero full-text items with your vault in realtime, vectorizes them and lets you chat with your pdf documents. - jmiba/zotero-redisearch-rag

Beta testers wanted: Zotero Redis RAG for Obsidian (local-first). Imports Zotero PDFs, indexes in Redis, returns cited answers in your vault. Requires Zotero + Docker/Podman. Install via BRAT.

Repo: github.com/jmiba/zotero...
Docs: jmiba.github.io/zotero-redis...

Largest dictionary of English-language slang now free online Rob Beschizza: Green's Dictionary of Slang, the largest collection of English vulgarities, slurs and other ne'er-do-well words, is now free to read online thanks to author Jonathon Green. It is 'Quite simply the best historical dictionary of English slang there is, ever has been…or is ever likely to be,' according to the Journal of English Language and Linguistics. — Read the rest The post Largest dictionary of English-language slang now free online appeared first on Boing Boing.

A treasure trove of English lowlife now costs you nothing. Green’s Dictionary of Slang—the definitive historical record of vulgarities, slurs and other ne’er-do-well words—is now free to read online. #slang #language #lexicography

boingboing.net/2026/02/17/l...

Nicolas Bach: Nicolas Bach reviews the second edition of Lang and Bohne-Lang’s ‘Praxishandbuch IT-Grundlagen für Bibliothekare’. The book introduces essential IT concepts tailored for library professionals—especially newcomers—covering systems, metadata, RFID, digitization, and current topics like machine learning and makerspaces. While praised for accessibility, structure, and pedagogical clarity, the review critiques its limited source referencing, uneven chapter weighting, and omission of non-commercial tools and up-to-date Discovery system discussions. A call is made for more inclusive language and open access. Nonetheless, the book remains a recommended starting point for those entering library IT or expanding their digital understanding amid rapid technological change.

Review of the 2nd edition of 'Praxishandbuch IT-Grundlagen für Bibliothekare'. A timely critique of a core IT manual for library staff navigating digital transformation, AI, and cybersecurity. #libraries #ITliteracy #digitaltransformation #OpenAccess

doi.org/10.1515/bfp-...

America Is Losing the Facts That Hold It Together David A. Graham: This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The CIA World Factbook occupies a special place in the memories of elder Millennials like me. It was an enormous compendium of essential facts about every country around the world, carefully collected from across the federal government. This felt especially precious when the World Factbook went online in 1997 (it had previously been a classified internal publication printed on paper, then a declassified print resource), a time when the internet still felt new and unsettled. Unlike many other pages on the World Wide Web, it was reliable enough that you could even get away with citing it in schoolwork. And there was a special thrill in the idea that the CIA, a famously secretive organization, was the one providing it to you.Memories are now the only place the World Factbook resides. In a post online yesterday, the agency noted that the site “has sunset,” though it provided no explanation for why. (The agency did not immediately reply to my inquiry about why, nor has it replied to other outlets.) The Associated Press noted that the move “follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”The demise of the World Factbook is part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration. This is different from the administration’s assault on truth, in which the president and the White House lie prolifically or deny reality. This is something more fundamental: It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans. “Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it … in person or virtually,” the CIA wrote in the valedictory post. Left unsaid: You’re on your own to figure it out now.If the World Factbook was indeed shut down because it didn’t meet Ratcliffe’s standard for core CIA functions, that reflects the Trump administration’s impoverished view of the government’s role. The World Factbook was a public service that helped Americans and others around the globe be informed, created a positive association with a shadowy agency, and spread U.S. soft power by providing a useful service free to all. I’ve been unable to determine how much it cost the government to maintain, but there’s no reason to think it would be substantive.At least the raw information the World Factbook collected is available elsewhere (and the current version of the Factbook is available on the Internet Archive). The same is not true of some of the other casualties in the war on information, which have fallen victim to both ideology and incompetence. The executive branch has removed data from its websites, such as those of the CDC, the Census Bureau, and other departments, or removed the webpages that hosted them. Almost 3,400 data sets were removed from Data.gov in the first month of Trump’s term alone. At the start of the second Trump administration, some nongovernmental bodies worked to preserve government data by scraping information from existing sources. That’s valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help with future data—or data that never get collected in the first place.As the University of Michigan law professors Samuel R. Bagenstos and Ellen D. Katz write in a new paper, “The Trump Administration has scrapped existing obligations to collect and report racial, ethnic and gender-based data involving law enforcement, education, federal contracts, public health, environmental justice, and social research.” In some cases, the administration has simply stopped collecting information. In others, it has significantly changed what data it collects, especially information related to gender identity and race, because of executive orders from the president.These shifts may sound abstract, but changes in federal data-collecting can have direct impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods. As NOTUS reported this week, data erasure means it’s harder to disseminate word about opioid drugs, feed hungry Americans, assess U.S. schools, and understand changes in prices. After the CDC’s entire Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System staff was placed on administrative leave in April, maternal-mortality data weren’t collected for months. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose commissioner Trump fired last summer, did not report monthly jobs data for October, because of the fall government shutdown—the first time in 77 years that an unemployment rate was not released.The war on information is perhaps even more dangerous than the war on truth. When people can see evidence that obviously contradicts what the administration is saying, they’re primed to disbelieve the officials. (Case in point: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that only 22 percent of people believe that Alex Pretti’s shooting was justified.) But democracy requires voters having access to accurate and shared information so that they can assess the claims that the government makes. This is what the Trump administration is undermining. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone was entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. Now it’s not clear that anyone is entitled to any facts at all.Related: Donald Trump’s war on reality The short-circuiting of the American mindHere are three new stories from The Atlantic: The intellectual edgelords of the GOP The only thing that will turn measles back Alexandra Petri: Should you buy a newspaper or a yacht?Today’s News The Trump administration issued a rule making it easier to discipline and potentially fire about 50,000 senior federal workers by reducing long-standing job protections. The New START treaty between the United States and Russia has expired, ending decades-long limits on deployed nuclear warheads. No replacement talks are under way, and officials and experts warn that the lapse could fuel a new nuclear arms race. The Trump administration is set to launch TrumpRx.gov, a website designed to connect Americans with drugmakers to buy prescription medicines directly and, according to the White House, at lower costs.Dispatches Time-Travel Thursdays: A new iron curtain now separates American dance and Russian dance, bringing an abrupt end to a rich dialogue that spanned centuries, Sara Krolewski writes.Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening ReadIllustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Kathryn Riley / Getty; Winslow Townson / Getty.Mike Vrabel Is Redefining NFL CoachingBy Sally JenkinsThe New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel leads from his ventricles—not from shallow-chested sentiment but from the pump action of his brawny heart, out of which blood occasionally makes its way to spurt from a split lip after a head bump from one of his players. During the team’s playoff run, the defensive tackle Milton Williams gave Vrabel a celebratory helmet to the mouth. “I forgot Vrabes ain’t got no helmet on,” Williams said, to which Vrabel, a former linebacking great, replied, “I’ve been hit harder than that.”Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Jonathan Chait: Democrats mess with winning in Texas. Radio Atlantic: How Jeff Bezos broke The Washington Post Sally Jenkins: You can’t kill swagger. The relentless Andrew Yang It was too easy for her to kill herself, Elizabeth Bruenig writes. The chatbots appear to be organizing.Culture BreakIllustration by Pat ThomasRead. Bekah Waalkes recommends seven books to read when you don’t have time to read.Watch. The show Fallout (out now on Amazon Prime) blows up all expectations about a quintessential American genre, Shirley Li writes.Play our daily crossword.PSIn Tuesday’s edition of this newsletter, I wrote about how President Trump was ramping up his attacks on the integrity of the midterm elections. I cited the attorney Bob Bauer’s concern that Trump might use ICE to interfere with polling locations. After we’d sent the newsletter, I saw a clip of Steve Bannon saying, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” You don’t need to take his statement literally—ICE has about 22,000 agents, and the country has had some 100,000 polling places in recent cycles—but this comment from an influential MAGA voice is another reason to take the threats to fair elections seriously.— DavidRafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

No facts, no foundation. The quiet shuttering of the CIA World Factbook isn't just sad Millennial nostalgia—it's a data void by design. David A. Graham chronicles how access to shared truth is being systematically erased. #TrumpAdministration #DataErasure #CIA

www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Sophia Dörner: Sophia Dörner’s article offers a content analysis of 13 German Open Access transformation contracts, focusing on open metadata provisions and research analytics services like text and data mining. While many contracts promise openness, they often lack clear licensing and restrict reuse for commercial or AI purposes. The study highlights inconsistent implementations and limited transparency, especially regarding metadata quality and accessibility. Only a few contracts permit broader reuse under CC0 licenses. The article stresses the need for clearer policies, open licensing, and contract accessibility to support innovation and compliance monitoring in academic publishing infrastructures.

New article analyzes OA transformation contracts. Sophia Dörner examines 13 German OA agreements, focusing on metadata openness and research analytics—revealing major gaps in transparency and AI usage rights despite alignment with ESAC principles. #OpenAccess #Metadata #AI

doi.org/10.1515/bfp-...

Kampf um die Demokratie: Was laut einer Analyse gegen eine autoritäre Regierung hilft

Demokratie ist kein Selbstläufer. Eine neue Analyse zeigt, welche Faktoren eine autoritäre Regierung verhindern können – und wo Zivilgesellschaft entscheidend ist. #Demokratie #Autoritarismus #Zivilgesellschaft

www.spiegel.de/politik/deut...

Banner des Wettbewerbs Zukunftsgestalter:innen in Bibliotheken 2026, zusammen mit dem Ende der Einreichungsfrist am 15.2.2026.

Noch bis 15.2. bewerben: Wir suchen die Zukunftsgestalter:innen in #Bibliotheken: Personen, Teams und Einrichtungen mit Blick nach vorn, die Ideen konkret umsetzen und Bewegung in die Bibliothekslandschaft bringen.
www.degruyterbrill.com/publication/...
#libsky @jmiba.bsky.social @covo.bsky.social

Welcome to the Clicktatorship Donald Moynihan: Gregory Bovino, the man who became the face of Donald Trump’s Minneapolis crackdown, lost his job as the Border Patrol’s “commander at large” after agents he oversaw shot and killed Alex Pretti. Bovino also reportedly lost his X account, a development that may seem trivial until you remember: Bovino loves to post.In the two days after Pretti died, Bovino relentlessly trolled Democrats who condemned the shooting—and defended Border Patrol agents as the real victims. When Representative Eric Swalwell wrote on X that ICE officers should walk off the job to protest the killing, Bovino replied: “I was thinking the same for you.” At about 1 a.m. last Monday, Bovino replied to a user who said he would “never pay for a beer again” after mocking Swalwell: “Lol!!  � � � � � �.”Getting silenced on X is, and I realize how absurd it sounds, the worst professional fate a Trump official can face. It signals that Bovino is no longer a player in an administration that has, from top to bottom, merged a social-media-first worldview with authoritarian tendencies. I like to call it the clicktatorship. Political appointees in the clicktatorship are not just using online platforms as a mode of communication. Their judgment and decision making is hyper-responsive to what’s happening on the far-right internet. They view everything as content.No one better exemplifies the clicktatorship than the president himself. Trump routinely makes policy announcements via social media. Consider when, in August, he attempted to fire the Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook on Truth Social. When a government lawyer was questioned by the Supreme Court on the lack of an appeals option for Cook, he suggested that Cook could simply have made her case on Truth Social. In the clicktatorship, due process is reduced to the right to post.You can see it everywhere. The administration’s official social-media feeds pump out far-right xenophobic memes and celebrate deportations with ASMR videos of undocumented immigrants in shackles. Just days before the killing of Pretti, the White House posted an image of a woman who was arrested after a protest at a church in Minnesota. It had been edited, presumably using generative AI, to show the arrestee as weeping uncontrollably. The effect is to reinforce an impression of dominance and control. Truth matters less than attention. Reporters who pointed out the manipulation were mocked by a White House spokesperson, who posted: “uM, eXCuSe mE??? iS tHAt DiGiTAlLy AlTeReD?!?!?!?!?!” (“The success of the White House’s social media pages speak for itself,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email. “Through engaging posts and banger memes, we are successfully communicating the President’s extremely popular agenda.”)[Read: The gleeful cruelty of the White House X account]Aspects of the clicktatorship existed during Trump’s first term, when the president used Twitter as a bully pulpit. But it has ratcheted up to new levels in his second go-round. His appointees are more likely to be keyboard warriors. They are obsessed with spectacle, and every government decision presents a potential opportunity to own the libs. Our government lost 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s last year, but seemingly has more posters than ever.Consider Dan Bongino, who jumped from hosting a podcast to becoming deputy director of the FBI. (Bongino recently stepped down and returned to podcasting.) Or Harmeet Dhillon, who was a paid X influencer on top of her day job as a lawyer before becoming the head of civil rights at the Department of Justice. She continues to post up to a hundred times a day, between her personal and professional X accounts. “I’ve been stuck at the same level of followers on this account pretty much since I started my government job,” she wrote on X last month. What, am I chopped liver over here? What kind of content do my folks want to see more of to like and share?” And after the Venezuela raid in early January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was photographed at a makeshift command center in Mar-a-Lago. Behind him was a screen displaying X posts.[Read: Everything reacting to everything, all at once]Poster brain and authoritarianism reinforce each other: They thrive on conspiracy theories, lack all restraint, and jump to extreme solutions. Trump officials pointed to claims about welfare fraud from the social-media influencer Nick Shirley to justify cutting off billions in aid to five Democrat-led states. And Trump-administration officials pointed to Shirley’s viral video in attempting to justify a crackdown in Minnesota that has now resulted in the death of two American citizens. Meanwhile, government budget proposals and strategy documents now read like Truth Social posts, replete with online tropes. The White House website now alleges that President Obama hosted terrorists, speculates that Hunter Biden had cocaine in the White House, and says that “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection” on January 6, 2021.Social media and authoritarian regimes have one other negative tendency in common: They feed information bubbles. Online, people select into circles of those they already agree with. In nondemocratic regimes, senior officials wall themselves off from reality because their underlings are afraid to deliver bad news. In both cases, the bubbles encourage radical actions rather than compromise—doubling down rather than moderation.But the thing about bubbles is that sooner or later they burst. The Trump administration maintained a unified front after the killing of Renee Good, arguing that agents were acting in self-defense, even when video evidence complicated that version of events. Many administration officals attempted to follow the same playbook after federal officials killed Pretti. But the fiction has not held up. The people who put their bodies on the line to record what was happening in Minneapolis revealed a valuable truth. The same tool that makes clicktatorship possible—the smartphone—can also be used against it.

When posting is power, getting banned is political exile. Trump’s admin doesn’t just govern—it posts. In the clicktatorship, trolling is policy, memes are PR, and due process means going viral. #clicktatorship #Trump #authoritarianism

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