Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Alberto Cairo

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 1d

anyway god speed to the good folks at cbs news who will now be taking editorial direction from this genius bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Olivia Messer @oliviamesser.bsky.social · 1d

I kind of can’t believe this Bari Weiss quote is even real, and yet www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/b...

“I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal … and that’s ok. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 1d

i want to remind people that the free press does not publish "journalism" in the way that someone who works in an actual newsroom would understand it

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 1d

"In an authoritarian context, all journalism will tend toward propaganda unless it is explicitly formulated as anti-authoritarian." @jvl.bsky.social www.thebulwark.com/p/the-washin...

The Washington Post and CBS News are dying. The Bulwark is the future.

We drink their milkshake.

www.thebulwark.com

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 6d

Thread

Rodolfo Viana @rodolfoviana.com.br · 6d

eu sou contra LLMs e RAG. sou contra modelos generativos usados para fins espúrios. sou contra o imenso desperdício de recursos (inclusive hídricos) com IA. sou contra data harvesting e o uso de produção alheia sem autorização. sou contra megacorps usando da má-fé, inclusive infringindo leis.

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 6d

This is pretty fucking rich coming from Greg Lukianoff, who spent a decade whipping up a panic about left-wing threats to speech while assiduously ignoring and downplaying right-wing threats. He's still being treated as an authority in these articles even while admitting he was wrong!

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Bryan Edward Stone (שָׁלוֹם) @bestonetx.bsky.social · 6d

All across the country, as faculty rights and freedoms are under attack, @aaup.org is really stepping into the breach. If you teach in higher ed and aren't a member, please consider joining.

North Carolina Conference of the AAUP @ncaaup.bsky.social · 7d

UNC CH Chapter & NC AAUP statement re Prof. Dwayne Dixon: @aaup.org

AAUP NC and UNC-Chapel Hill AAUP condemn the egregious violation of Professor Dwayne Dixon's First Amendment rights to free speech and free association, his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process, and his academic freedom. 1/

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Jordan Fischer @jordanonrecord.bsky.social · 6d

It's like a Choose Your Own Hatch Act Violation.

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 6d

This is very good

Free Łink - Matthew R Francis @bowlerhatscience.org · 6d

I wrote this open letter to my fellow science journalists, but it could very easily be adapted to address @jay.bsky.team and the rest of the bsky team galileospendulum.org/2025/06/05/o...

Open Letter to Anti-Trans Science Journalists

To my science journalist colleagues at the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and elsewhere: I write this open letter on the day the New York Times begins a podcast series…

galileospendulum.org

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 6d

Thanks for writing that. You have a new fan

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 7d

This great essay is by @benjaminjriley.bsky.social, by the way

Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 7d

"AI will forever be devoid of self-creation and self-extension so long as it lacks the capacity to imagine a world different from that which we’ve codified and fed to it. AI remains a dead-metaphor remix machine, with an emphasis on dead and machine." open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

We are the song death takes it own time singing

In the sweetness, in the bitter

open.substack.com

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Mél Hogan / The Data Fix @melhogan.bsky.social · 7d

“Not only is AI incapable of feeling pain, the desire to create AI is so clearly fueled by men who fear death, men desperate to escape and transcend the limitations of their bodies.”

Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 7d

"AI will forever be devoid of self-creation and self-extension so long as it lacks the capacity to imagine a world different from that which we’ve codified and fed to it. AI remains a dead-metaphor remix machine, with an emphasis on dead and machine." open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

We are the song death takes it own time singing

In the sweetness, in the bitter

open.substack.com

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 7d

That's another fantastic quote indeed

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 7d

"AI will forever be devoid of self-creation and self-extension so long as it lacks the capacity to imagine a world different from that which we’ve codified and fed to it. AI remains a dead-metaphor remix machine, with an emphasis on dead and machine." open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

We are the song death takes it own time singing

In the sweetness, in the bitter

open.substack.com

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 8d

“Some legal experts”

JVG 骨 @jasonv.bsky.social · 8d

Absolute all-timer sentence in today's @nytimes.com

"some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily execute civilians" says today's New York Times, continuing their long tradition of whitewashing fascism

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 8d

"Learn to tell — to read closely enough to tell — the work of people from the work of bots. Notice the poverty of the latter’s style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments"

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 8d

YES! THIS on GenAI!

Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

Large Language Muddle | The Editors

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

www.nplusonemag.com

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Matthew @dlthings.bsky.social · 10d

# of paragraphs for news orgs to mention there's no discernable need to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon

The Guardian: 1st paragraph
BBC: 4th paragraph
AP: 5th paragraph
Time: 6th paragraph
Politico: 8th paragraph
NPR: 9th paragraph
CNN: 10th paragraph
NBC: 12th paragraph
Fox News: never mentions

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 12d

BIG NEWS! We've updated the website of the Open Visualization Academy, where you can see all its contributors: openvisualizationacademy.org

This is the announcement in our newsletter: openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com/p/we-re-back...

#dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVis 📊

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 10d

Thoughtful essay on the ethics of mapmaking by Sam Dresser psyche.co/ideas/what-m... "While we may frame big moral issues as absolutes, we need to acknowledge that we are constantly negotiating even with them"

A world map that illustrates the article

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 10d

Charts I don't like:

Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 10d

Problems now, bigger ones ahead.

The decline of reading
% of US teenagers who read in their leisure time...
50
Hardly ever
40
30
20
10
Almost every day
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
2015
Source: US National Assessment of Educational Progress Long-Term Trend Reading Assessments
FT graphic: John Burn-Murdoch / @jburnmurdoch
OFT
2020

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 11d

Generals gathered in their masses... 🎶🎶

Dan Lamothe @danlamothe.bsky.social · 11d

WAPO SCOOP: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered hundreds of generals to travel on short notice from around the world to hear him make a speech on military standards and the “warrior ethos,” multiple people familiar with the event told The Washington Post.

www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

New details emerge on Hegseth’s unusual mass gathering of top brass

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has summoned hundreds of generals for what is expected to be a short lecture on the “warrior ethos.” But top brass is bracing for possible firings or demotions.

www.washingtonpost.com

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 12d

Pete Hegseth is planning a military coup in the right way

by Ezra Klein

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 11d

This sounds like a video game I'd play: bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/...

The game sees you as wander through the Alps as Friedrich Nietzsche, haunted by the wind-scattered pages of your final manuscript. Your shadow has taken form, speaking to you with sarcastic provocation, mercilessly exposing your contradictions and suppressed thoughts. What begins as a journey through flowered meadows transforms into a nightmare of twisted realities and philosophical terror.

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Fernando Cucchietti @fercook.bsky.social · 11d

There is this gem.

Cover of a paper titled “Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?”, the content of the paper is “probably not”

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Reposted by Alberto Cairo

Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 12d

Incl. @kanarinka.bsky.social and yrs truly!

Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 12d

BIG NEWS! We've updated the website of the Open Visualization Academy, where you can see all its contributors: openvisualizationacademy.org

This is the announcement in our newsletter: openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com/p/we-re-back...

#dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVis 📊

1/x

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 12d

We aren't in a fascist regime, but it's reasonable to say that the core tenets of the current administration are fascistic, therefore many of its actions are also fascistic. That's not giving up. It's calling things what we they are, which is essential for productive argument.

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