Kristin Toussaint
@ktoussaint.bsky.social
270 followers 400 following 100 posts
Staff Editor, Impact at Fast Company / words in Teen Vogue, Vox, Vice, Metro, Boston.com she/her WGAEast member [email protected]
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Reposted by Kristin Toussaint
tressiemcphd.bsky.social
“Debate Me” culture is not organic, endemic, or apolitical. This mode of high jacking discourse is and has been central to a 30-year conservative training program that has produced untold numbers of people to do this for every reason but “civil discourse”
joshsternberg.com
It's wild to me how ostensibly smart people cannot/could not/will not see what is so obvious.

@mmasnick.bsky.social nails it. And my hunch is we'd be a better society if the Very Serious People with the Very Serious Ideas opened their fucking eyes.

www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/t...
There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”
ktoussaint.bsky.social
It sure seems like a lot of people, and institutions, and organizations are allowing this crisis to happen... But we must all as individuals still resist it
ktoussaint.bsky.social
He also said this has been the most aggressive administration in terms of government censorship in the modern era—more so than McCarthyism. Pulling #jimmykimmel off the air is just another example of that
ktoussaint.bsky.social
Today at @fastcompany.com Innovation Festival, there was a panel with 3 experts from the @aclu.org. When asked "Are we in a constitutional crisis?" Ben Wizner said: "That requires an active answer, not a passive one. We're in a constitutional crisis if we allow it. We're not in one if we resist it"
Reposted by Kristin Toussaint
ktoussaint.bsky.social
a lot of these tips say to use your laptop for things like social media instead of your phone, which sure, great idea—except for instagram in particular, the web version is so bad and so limited in terms of functionality. wonder if that's intentional.. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
15 Ways to Break Free of Your Phone
We asked screen-time experts how to avoid the relentless pull of our devices.
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by Kristin Toussaint
ketanjoshi.co
Definitely don't repost the research that anti-wind groups are trying to bury using lawsuits

www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/services-1

drive.google.com/file/d/1TAZw...
a snapshot of the research in thepaper a snapshot of the network Money is not the only currency in
the anti-OSW movement. With
each transmission of a false idea,
with each forum that spreads
misinformation, the anti-OSW
movement gains strength.
Reposted by Kristin Toussaint
rbreich.bsky.social
Trump doesn't care about crime in D.C. — which is at a 30-year low. He's creating another fake "emergency" in an attempt to show force. If he actually cared about keeping the city safe, he wouldn't have stoked insurrectionists to attack the Capitol on Jan 6. Hello?
ktoussaint.bsky.social
Over seven days in July, a rotating crew of GM workers drove a Chevrolet Silverado EV Work Truck for 1,059.2 miles on a single charge. It's a feat for EV range, but it required some behaviors you might not want to replicate—like not using the AC at all www.fastcompany.com/91379667/che...
Chevy engineers just drove the Silverado EV a record 1,059 miles on one charge (but don't expect to get that far)
Driving at low speeds with no air conditioning may not be ideal for most drivers, but the test showed just how far current EV batteries can be pushed in optimal conditions.
www.fastcompany.com
ktoussaint.bsky.social
post a picture of black lung next
goldengateblond.bsky.social
they wanna fuck coal now
the US Dept of Energy tweeted a photo of coal with little sparkles photoshopped on and the words 

She's an icon
She's a legend
And she is the moment ✨
ktoussaint.bsky.social
very apt day to get this fact from my @usafacts.org calendar...
A picture of a fact-a-day calendar that reads: "Between 2018 and 2021, heat-related deaths in the US increased 59%"
Reposted by Kristin Toussaint
rainesford.bsky.social
“An aid worker providing psychosocial support spoke of the devastating impact on children: 'Children tell their parents they want to go to heaven, because at least heaven has food.'"
More than 100 humanitarian groups warn of mass starvation in Gaza
A joint statement says the Israeli government's "siege" has left aid supplies "totally depleted".
www.bbc.com
ktoussaint.bsky.social
“Countries that cling to fossil fuels are not protecting their economies—they are sabotaging them,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a speech Tuesday “Driving up costs. Undermining competitiveness. Locking in stranded assets." www.fastcompany.com/91372559/tru...
Trump is trying to prop up coal, oil, and gas—but the economics of fossil fuel are failing
Electricity generated from solar power is now 41% cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel alternative, and onshore wind is 53% cheaper. Despite the Trump administration's best efforts, the outlook for f...
www.fastcompany.com
ktoussaint.bsky.social
can't believe I've been missing out on quality ads like this by using an ad blocker
A screenshot of an article on Curbed, in the middle of which is an ad block that shows a cartoon drawing of a cat peeing accompanied by the text "Your home smells like cat pee? Try This" with an arrow to a button that says "learn more"
ktoussaint.bsky.social
Because electricity is more costly for data centers than water, companies often prioritize building their facilities in places with cheap power, even if the area is drought stricken. “Water is an afterthought”...The thinking is, ‘Someone will figure that out later.’”
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/t...
Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door
www.nytimes.com
ktoussaint.bsky.social
there is something so...wild about seeing science come under attack broadly in this country, grants taken away from researchers who want to do actual research, while at the same time rich people cosplay making scientific discoveries via a glorified auto text generator
paleofuture.bsky.social
"I’ll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” said Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.

gizmodo.com/billionaires...
ktoussaint.bsky.social
to clarify: each reporter on this team had to publish 5 stories a day before noon!
ktoussaint.bsky.social
remembering a time when, as a young reporter, I was on a team tasked with publishing 5 stories every day before noon... they were, as you can imagine, not great, and the effort did not pay off!!
bencollins.bsky.social
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.
Reposted by Kristin Toussaint
bencollins.bsky.social
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.
ktoussaint.bsky.social
same same same. saw someone's recent post about how an AI chatbot "seemed to think it was a human." no! AI chatbots don't think at all, they don't believe anything, stop treating them like sentient geniuses!
ktoussaint.bsky.social
what the fuck???
mauraquint.bsky.social
Murkowski just told reporters that the bill That She Just Voted FOR isn't any good and that she wants the House to make changes and send it back to the Senate -- "My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we're not there yet"
ktoussaint.bsky.social
Should not be any surprise, to anyone at all, that people flocked to @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social , who ran a campaign focused on affordability in this city
ktoussaint.bsky.social
Since Eric Adams has been mayor (since 2022), & before last night's vote, rents on rent-stabilized buildings had already increased a combined 9%! In de Blasio's 2 terms — 8 years! — he oversaw 3 rent freezes & a combined overall 6% increase in rents. www.curbed.com/article/nyc-...
The 3 Percent Rent Hike Nobody Wanted
The mayor is unhappy. Landlords are unhappy. Tenants are unhappy.
www.curbed.com