John McQuaid

Following the Hegseth globe snafu, we've clearly reached the stage of Trump's second term where every disaster is also an instant metaphor for its broader degradations www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

So that's what DOGE was doing? www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Oh, this is awful. Ann was such a wonderful critic and a lovely person, too. Awful awful. www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

Remember the post-2024 vibe shift? Trump and top Rs claimed a mandate and numerous analysts and commentators rushed to declare that there had been a realignment. Less than two years later...

No two words send AI industry advocates into fits of rage more than "stochastic parrots." The question is: Why? Why do they get so worked up over this particular critical framework time and time again? I sat down with @emilymbender.bsky.social, one of the coauthors of the original paper, to discuss

Right then, our turn What's your fake Star Trek academic paper

Been reading about Paramount's promise that an outside body will ensure CNN's editorial independence, and man is it wearisome to be the sole person on Earth who remembers anything that happened more than 10 years ago www.theguardian.com/business/200....

Many — I suspect most — viewers and readers feel lost when they hear phrases like “pacing the frontier” and see references to the “Hugging Face incident.” And they wonder about the motives of the people in positions of power...

Trump has threatened to sue the left-leaning @americanprogress.bsky.social (CAP) and its donors over a study it published questioning the benefits of his National Guard deployment. I'm proud that Cato's president is speaking out against this act of intimidation. "We stand with CAP." /1

standard. SCOTUS allows Trump to continue to create literal facts on the ground while they 'consider' his his meritless challenge. nothing is more important than reforming the court and ending its corruption.

Questions, some of them skeptical, for Tom Rosenstiel on his just-published and important book, The Next Journalism. This week’s Second Rough Draft newsletter dicktofel.substack.com/p/what-the-n...

A lot of questions beyond "who did this?" Was this an academic experiment? If so, how was it developed/approved? If not academic, what were they trying to accomplish on behalf of whom? If not really an experiment at all, what was its real purpose?

“My first day on the job, I fucked up.” That’s the lede to this CJR account of my 4 months in Utah, where I worked as a junior editor. I wanted to see what’s changed since i left local journalism a few decades ago. A lot of things are different. But not everything. www.cjr.org/first_person...

interesting to learn nancy mace had the first line of mrs. dalloway tattooed on her. the first line, of course, sets up the scene of mrs. dalloway buying flowers for her dinner party, where she would wrestle with her homosexual memories of, and desires for, her friend sally.

Very insightful, particularly on the important role of the press as a source of independent verification of the president’s whereabouts, which the country – and White House – need in place if disaster strikes

My new investigation into a mass shooter’s harrowing history with ChatGPT reveals numerous red flags—and some very disturbing ChatGPT replies—from long before his attack on Florida State University www.motherjones.com/media/2026/0... 1x 🧵

I think the scholar had interesting observations about the popular entertainment but that critiquing popular entertainment from a scholarly perspective is bound to result in harsh assessments because the criteria and language for one perspective doesn't map well to the other

"disruptively"

Fascinating ethical failure here: metrophiladelphia.com/stories/will... I am always suspicious of any story about AI because tey seem to over-0index for being written by AI. But in this case it is an advertorial: 1/2 metrophiladelphia.com/stories/will...

Worst part of the new @status.news report is that the Bari Weiss team appears to get its view of what is actually happening in the world from Twitter. They were asking Vega to include things that *weren't real* b/c they didn't know any better. www.status.news/p/cecilia-ve...

Bari Weiss once again faced with the irreconcilable contradiction of practicing responsible journalism and carrying out the Ellison mandate deadline.com/2026/07/trum...

absolutely insane story, and yeah, just looking at this chart... with the exception of maybe two people, this entire class was cheating like motherfuckers

An interesting thing just happened ... and while my full account will appear in CJR Friday, I want to take note of it now. Start with this NYPost/Fox story that ran Sunday. Note the headline (including typo). Illegal immigration caused house prices to rise 30%! web.archive.org/web/20260705... 1/

An eventful week at Scientific American. Owner Springer Nature rushed to sell SciAm 3 days before the staff overwhelmingly voted to form a union, and laid off a lot of people. Including me. I got to work with amazing writers during my time, people who made me better. Thank-you list in comment below:

Did DoD just admit in a court filing that it used xAI's Grok Gov Model to hit the girls' school on the first day of the Iran war? Based on some passages flagged by @rgoodlaw.bsky.social in DoD's recent filing in NAACP's case against X, it looks like it did 1/

It appears Grok killed the schoolchildren in Iran, in tandem with a US military under Pete Hegseth who DGAF. Remember when Anthropic said 'No' to Hegseth's demand that they allow the DoD to use Claude to kill autonomously, with no human oversight? Check out this timeline:

News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media: Looking at the new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report. www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/news...

From a political communications standpoint, kind of brilliant. "Court packing" sounds bad; "we have the wrong number of justices" is a simple and compelling way to put it; makes you think, why do we have this (arbitrary/path dependent) number that doesn't represent a majority of the country

Some stray thoughts on gap-filling. Take them for what they are 1. Gaps in archives are not like rips in clothing; they don't have a well defined and wholly known, or in the broadest sense wholly knowable, shape or extent. You can't cut a patch for them or fill them with putty and smooth them over.

"What NJ needed was a strong response...What it got instead was a calamity. Sherrill struck exactly the wrong tone and embraced exactly the wrong tactics. This mishandling of legitimate protest over the past weekend has left her looking hopelessly in over her head." www.nj.com/opinion/2026...

The fact that tech firms aren't doing much more to prevent the pollution of our information spaces with AI scams and slop and bots monetizing AI-hallucinated bullshit right now when the problem is still more or less manageable is unbelievably irresponsible. Instead, they're pushing that shit on us.

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

The hyperzipper

Trump administration maybe getting a little scared of what its "let AI run rampant" policy might mean www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/t...

Game over for New Orleans in decades, according to a new study. Especially galling, recent politically motivated decisions by the governor and SCOTUS have accelerated this timeline. History will look back on so much of this period as, WTF were they thinking? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Wow, they actually *retracted* this so-called meta-analysis about ChatGPT effects on learning performance, though it got massive metrics and social media attention before that. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No. You need websites that are designed to serve human readers, quality, authenticity and trust not commodified programmatic scale. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/b...

“Trump slurs Black people” would be a very easy story to put together

We need more boring, predictable speeches on time-tested virtues that nevertheless are blistering critiques of the current administration

New investigative stories by @wired.com and @nytimes.com show why watchdog journalism is so important right now, with proliferating AI technologies and a legal system increasingly dictated from the top by right-wing partisan actors www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u... www.wired.com/story/madiso...

Pro tip: don’t lay off all the copy editors, you numpties. That’s how you end up with horror. (Also get you a less credulous skyline writer)

Maybe there’s more here but AP’s strategy sounds an awful lot like “we’re downsizing on journalists and pivoting to video and AI,” which is no strategy at all apnews.com/article/news...