Monstrous.

"federal agents detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours early Tuesday morning."

Super cool science: Parachutes are expensive and delicate to manufacture, which limits their use for humanitarian airdrops or drone delivery. Laser cutting a closed-loop kirigami pattern in a disc induces porosity and flexibility into an easily fabricated parachute. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

During this election season, lots of groups and people have been supportive (Sierra club, UAW, …) but this new on definitely means the most to me!

"A clear visual clue that the photograph was not taken in Portland was that the first officer’s shield is marked 'Policia', the Spanish or Portuguese word for police."

As you can see, I had to use cutting edge #OSINT techniques for this one.

My new op-ed with @lkfazio.bsky.social:

Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain.
Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government.
www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

And yet Google Maps is allowed to keep telling me that police are ahead

Nice project: A computational framework for quantifying route diversification in road networks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02582

Interactive: https://divercitymaps.github.io/

"[A]gents engulfed my car in tear gas, smashed my driver-side window, and pepper-sprayed my face.... I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. No explanation. No charges. No apology. One day, I was just told, 'you’re free to go.'" #KavanaughStop

“No self-respecting university could ever accept something like this,” said Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar and former Columbia University president. “Trying to protect conservative ideas against being ‘belittled’ — that’s about as violative of the First Amendment interests as you can get.”

I visited the apartment building ICE raided on Tuesday today. Story to come, but you can walk right in. Half of the apartments have no doors on them. Children's stuff abandoned in some flats. *Citizen* residents told me they were arrested and held for hours in zipties. This is America

This op-ed is excellent and I encourage everyone to read it.

Universities must reject the Trump compact.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

Are you a scientist, journalist, or civil society researcher studying New York State's distraction-free school policy, the one that bans internet-enabled devices in schools from bell to bell?

If so, I want to hear from you, as I refine a project to archive & classify published school policies.

I always pay attention to what stories People Magazine and other consumer media outlets cover. That's how you can tell that something has broken through the usual political and news bubbles. This horrific Chicago story has broken through. people.com/ice-agents-o...

boxd.it/beN8Br
Thematically related...

Polling small groups of people like Jewish Americans is always a difficult task - great to see methodologically careful work devoted to it

Spot the North-American anomaly: only region where social media use is still growing.
Great work by the FT’s @jburnmurdoch.ft.com
www.ft.com/content/a072... “Have we passed peak social media?”

Federal officer blasts chemical spray into vocal but nonviolent Portland protester, video shows

The interaction illustrates how federal law enforcement officers do use aggressive tactics against protesters who yell and needle officers but don’t appear to present clear physical threats.

This is what authoritarians do - use the powers of the state to humiliate and degrade their opponents in public so that others will not challenge them

*A Republican lawmaker objected to reference to Charlie Kirk holding “often racist and controversial views” in local Alaska news
*The corporate owner took down the story and edited it
*The journalists resigned

This feels like more and more of our media now.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/u...

Following Apple’s removal of ICEBlock, both Google and Apple have removed a similar app for reporting ICE raids called Red Dot.

Google states it removed the app for targeting a vulnerable group that is at risk of violence — ICE agents.

ICE is running around Chicago harassing people for not being white.

Just a year ago, that was illegal in the United States and now it’s commonplace.

That’s not making America great again.

Was kind of surprised by how good Mediaite’s was

I didn't realize that JAX is taking over in the probabilistic programming space. Very fair (afaict) post from Bob Carpenter, one of the core Stan developers, on how that looks from the Stan side.

This is the obvious absurdity of pulling ICEBlock. It is obviously legal, protected speech for anyone to say, in any forum, “I just witnessed some police activity at location X”. Indeed, people have been doing this regularly on social media since its inception.