Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Mark Healey

Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 2d

The humanities grad school papers on this dynamic are gonna go on forever.

dr. caitlin m. green @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social · 2d

there are SO many more inflatable costumes tonight. clearly we have settled on a motif

Wide shot of many people in inflatable costumes

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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 2d

Mark my words, "Toward an Inflatable Liberationist Theology" is gonna fill an auditorium at AAR.*

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Joshua Eaton @joshuaeaton.bsky.social · 1d

Reposting for info, *not* commentary.

Lynn Becker @cmgiulini.bsky.social · 1d

After spending 43 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, evidence hidden by the prosecution reversed his conviction. Rather than finally enjoying freedom, ICE abducted him for deportation

Depraved.

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

He was wrongfully imprisoned for 43 years. Moments after being released, ICE took him

Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam now faces deportation.

www.miamiherald.com

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Mark Healey @healeyparera.bsky.social · 2h

huzzah!

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 11h

Shared courtesy of my Penn History colleague, Ben Nathans

Image: A variation on Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” engraving, originally published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754. Each segment of the snake has the name of a university sent Trump’s “compact”: Texas, AZ, Vanderbilt, USC, Dartmouth, UVA, Brown, Penn, MIT.

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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 8h

Please nobody tell professional writer praising professional journalists Caitlin Flanagan what "out of whole cloth" means

Screenshot of text:

Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.

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Mark Healey @healeyparera.bsky.social · 7h

There should be a retirement ceremony, and perhaps a meme Hall of Fame. Not every meme so fully reaches its telos, after all.

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Mark Healey @healeyparera.bsky.social · 7h

Hot dog guy meme, final boss level

Mike Sacks @mikesacks.bsky.social · 15d

Justice Anthony Kennedy tells @npr.org's @ninatotenberg.bsky.social "very worried" about our country, and that "Democracy is not guaranteed to survive."

Kennedy wrote Citizens United and was the fifth vote in the rest of the Roberts Court's anti-democratic decisions.

www.npr.org/2025/09/27/n...

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Drew McKevitt @drewmckevitt.bsky.social · 2d

"subpar tech that was designed for rentseeking rather than performance" is my new favorite way to describe why everything is terrible

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 2d

These guys have gotten incredibly rich by fleecing the government with subpar tech that was designed for rentseeking rather than performance. A smart Dem agenda item would be to build internal tech capacity. The fact that it would punish these guys is just a silver lining.

Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social · 2d

Being a billionaire must really fuck with your mind. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

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Dustin Mulvaney @dustinmulvaney.bsky.social · 8h

Republicans are aiming next to dismantle the marine mammal protection act, which protects whales, dolphins, manatees, polar bears, and sea otters.. among other ocean wildlife. 🦦

Horror Tor, friend of Union ghosts @splitrailfence.bsky.social · 8h

I love it. Makes me happy.
Weird that I'm now seeing your post here after I just read about the bill to end the 1970s marine mammal legislation to protect these beautiful creatures.
abcnews.go.com/Politics/wir...

Republicans try to weaken 50-year-old law protecting whales, seals and polar bears

One of the U.S.’s longest standing pieces of environmental legislation, credited with helping save rare whales from extinction, is the subject of an effort for cutbacks from Republican lawmakers who n...

abcnews.go.com

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Andrew Middleton @mapcenter.com · 3d

Important alert for people who like working while a light white noise is playing in the background, there is a family of whales singing next to the Moss Landing Marine Lab hydrophone right now and you should listen! radio.garden/visit/moss-l...

Listen to live Moss Landing CA radio on Radio Garden

radio.garden

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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 8h

Describe the opposite of The Free Press in a sentence

Screenshot of text:

It’s a business story. [Highlighting begins] Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. [Highlighting ends] If creating such an enterprise seems simple

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Karthik Sankaran @rajakorman.bsky.social · 1d

The Uncanny Valet

Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social · 1d

our economy is currently being propped up by the promise of billions of fully autonomous robot butlers coming in a year or so

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 1d

"It should be an easy decision for college presidents not to stick their institution’s neck into this retroactive push-button guillotine."

Walter Olson @walterolson.bsky.social · 2d

New from me at Cato: I go through the numerous and massive First Amendment and academic-freedom violations of Trump's proffered "compact" with universities and then talk about the mechanism by which it would be enforced, by way of what I describe as a "retroactive push-button guillotine."

Universities Must Defend Their Independence by Rejecting Trump's "Compact"

The Trump administration has proffered a “compact” to universities that would require them to surrender their independence and academic freedom. How many First Amendment violations can we identify in ...

www.cato.org

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Rich Raho @richraho.bsky.social · 1d

Chicago priest Fr. Larry Dowling describes procession to ICE facility: “No one had the courage to speak directly to us. No one from Homeland Security could stand in the presence of the Monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. No wonder. Evil is repelled, recoils in the presence of Christ.”

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Mark Lemley @marklemley.bsky.social · 1d

And this:
92% of the growth in the entire country this year has been data centers. And some of that is "circular deals" that dont involve actual money

fortune.com/2025/10/07/d...

Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says | Fortune

Is a U.S. without data centers a country without GDP growth?

fortune.com

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Rob Shum @robshum.bsky.social · Jun 25

Team Pestilence. (17/n)

Cheryl Rofer @cherylrofer.bsky.social · Jun 25

What a headline!

Donald Trump and his administration are killing people.

Promise of Victory Over H.I.V. Fades as U.S. Withdraws Support

www.nytimes.com

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 1d

They know they won't be in power forever. So, they're breaking as much as they can right now, in the hope that whoever follows them won't be able to put it all back together.

Lena Sun @lenasun.bsky.social · 1d

NEW: @CDCgov hit hard by massive firings that several staff describe to me as a “bloodbath.”
Among those RIFd:
—leadership of the center for immunization and respiratory diseases;
—leadership of global health center
—leadership of the measles outbreak response; 1/4

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 1d

FULL STORY HERE: Emails began flooding CDC inboxes late Friday night announcing dozens of layoffs. HR people brought back from furlough to oversee the RIFs. Disease detectives, entire Washington office, global health, injury prevention, MMWR staff among those hit.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

www.nytimes.com

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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 1d

Argentina edition of Libertarian bible

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Mark Healey @healeyparera.bsky.social · 1d

A judicious assessment of the Nobel Prize for María Corina Machado from David Smilde

David Smilde @dsmilde.bsky.social · 1d

open.substack.com/pub/davidsmi...

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 1d

Does this make more sense?

headline adjusted to read: Academia is Broken. Trump University Can Help Fix it

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Mark Healey @healeyparera.bsky.social · 1d

Twins!

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Heidi Kitrosser @heidikitrosser.bsky.social · 2d

From Harvard & UConn researchers on the June 14th No Kings Day protests. (report came out in August)

THIS is why MAGA is so spooked by the upcoming (Oct 18th) peaceful protests.

New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history wagingnonviolence.org/2025/08/new-...

New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history

The historic number of No Kings protesters and their expansive geographic spread are signs of a growing and durable pro-democracy movement.

wagingnonviolence.org

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Mark Healey @healeyparera.bsky.social · 2d

misinformation on disinformation, would be delightfully meta if it hadn't sucked up so much energy and time

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