Alexander Howard

Good morning from DC 🥵 If we need to connect: 🤳 Signal: digiphile.97 💡📲 civic-texts.ghost.io 📧 alex@governing.digital 🐦 X.com/digiphile 🧵 threads.net/@digiphile 🐘 mastodon.social/@digiphile 📇 linkedin.com/in/alexanderbhoward 👍 facebook.com/alexhoward 📸 instagr.am/digiphile 🖥️ youtube.com/digiphile

The electioneering outside of the polls here in Maryland is …energetic. If you’re a Maryland voter, you can find a helpful guide for the candidates & ballot initiatives from Maryland Matters: marylandmatters.org/voter-guides... If you’re not, make sure to register & vote! vote.org 🗳️ 🇺🇸 💪

@lulaoficialbluesky.bsky.social won re-election in Brazil, defeating Flavio Bolsonaro, halting the string of victories for the far-right in South America. Brazil held Jair Bolsonaro accountable after he attempted a coup, & now has rejected his son at the polls. The United States made other choices.

The IRS has relevant information about the new taxfree investment accounts Congress created in 2025 & named after the current President: www.irs.gov/trumpaccounts Personalist governance backed by official propaganda is a hallmark of authoritarian personality cults, not a government of the People.

#ShareGoodNewsToo Colorado wildlife overpass cut vehicle-animal collisions by 91%, study finds

…“the machinery of the state is not being used to strengthen public programs where payments are legal rights. It is being used to make it harder for people to access payments. It is being used to help personalist politicians & billionaires to selectively extend their largesse when &if it suits them”

Two years later, DOJ still fighting over whether Trump's blanket pardon for Jan. 6 defendants inadvertently swept in other egregious crimes committed by Jan. 6 defendants. Kelley was convicted by a jury of conspiring to murder his investigators. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28...

JUST POSTED: A Russian energy giant has secretly moved to acquire a position in a massive Alaska gas project. Its part of talks between Witkoff/Kushner & Putin. But CEO of US company resigns after learning of Russian money in the project. A wowzer of a story. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

America 250 is the bipartisan nonprofit organization & Commission established by Congress in 2016. Freedom 250 is the the public-private task force established by the Trump administration. No one is buying “Freedom 250” merch.

The renovations at the Smithsonian @Hirshhorn.si.edu Museum and Sculpture Garden are almost done, after 4 years. There will be a donor event tonight & then it these gardens and the galleries will open to the public next Saturday, October 31. Almost 30,000 new plants. hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/...

The Capitol Police expanded a security annex further onto the lawns of the parklands Olmstead designed around the cathedral of American democracy. I accept the need for cameras after the insurrection in 2021, & appreciate the relative beauty of these, but mourn the loss of unsurveilled civic spaces.

We found that as of right now 73% of your campaign donation goes back to the consultants and vendors (!!!), four times more than just 20 years ago. Only 13% to ads. Even I was shocked.

Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, a consultant class is raiding the Democratic Party and getting “generationally wealthy” along the way New from me and @adambonica.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2163...

Free and fair elections depend on people who are willing to speak up when they witness wrongdoing. That's why Government Accountability Project created a new guide: On the Front Lines of Election Protection: A Guide to Speaking Up. Here’s what to know... 🧵

It’s frustrating to find great writers persisting in using “real life” & “real world” in contrast to what happens online, like @katzish.bsky.social did today. We can find happiness online, connecting to humans & ideas globally we never could otherwise, from grandparents in a pandemic to remote work.

A key advisor to Secretary Kennedy has resigned, reportedly frustrated the corporations profiting from selling ultraprocessed food & pesticides have too much sway in a corrupted White House. www.wsj.com/politics/pol... Oligarchs influence Trump’s policy, not the public health of Americans. #MAHA

Super cool. @alexbenzer.com & team. I bet this will help a lot of independent authors & creatives remove friction from getting support from our communities & networks. I just added a link to Civic Texts, since I'm finally going to start writing again after losing another muse. Easy peasey.

“it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.”— Paul Krugman on Elon Musk, arguing that the U.S. government should nationalize Starlink. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

“I think the mistake that people in my party have made is that they confuse the separation of church & state with a separation of faith & politics. We want people to bring their faiths, their moralities, their ethics, their worldview, their philosophies to our politics.”— @jamestalarico.bsky.social

President Trump encouraged Americans to go to fraud.gov & report cases of “corruption & theft of taxpayer dollars” in our communities. How many of us will report a man from Queens, Donald J. Trump, for enriching himself & abusing entrusted powers for personal gain in DC? HT @jd-vance-1.bsky.social

“I’m a caregiver for my father, but I’m also a caregiver for my country.”

Most of this (don’t let one person dominate, listen actively, have fewer meetings), is pretty obvious, but stubbornly hard to enact.

"On average, it takes 50-100 hours to make a friend. But some people manage to do it in just a few hours or even minutes. They skip small talk and go straight to deep talk." We interviewed @adamgrant.bsky.social about his new book "VIBE": www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/the-secret...

Y’all, I hate to rain on the dead bot parade, but the Yandex data center destruction doesn’t seem to have significantly impacted social media bots. I made temporal graphs of X posts about AfD around the time of the attack and there’s no sign of a sudden dip or residual impact on that conversation.

“there should be at least one social media algorithm that is available for everyone to use, see, and study, which implements the state of the art in doing well by users and society.”— @jonathanstray.com open.substack.com/pub/greenear...

"Companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management." www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/o...

I served as an OSCE election monitor multiple times--in Ukraine, Poland, and Kazakhstan. Inviting in trained international observers both builds confidence in domestic elections and demonstrates support for free and fair elections to the world. Trump has banned OSCE election monitors from the USA.

The @nytimes.com reported out how an online campaign to unmask Jane Doe led to offline consequences for her & her family. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/16/n... What humans do online is part of the “real world.” Please stop doing this, folks: it makes it harder for survivors to get accountability.