Nathaniel Ohlheiser

Last summer, Scientific American's owners were stalking the site, making sure it wasn't being too critical of Trump. This summer, the magazine was sold and gutted. I wrote about it for The Nation www.thenation.com/article/soci...

NEW: I wrote about a disturbing pattern of Islamophobia taking off on Facebook, a wave of human and AI-generated content calling for a violent "crusade" against Muslim Americans in Dearborn, Michigan.

bro is Thomas's entire concurring opinion just him noting that the court's opinion should have been more vicious towards trans people

30 years for moving some zines www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The biohackers subreddit banned all posts about peptides and HRT because peptide companies were spamming + manipulating the sub in order to manipulate Google AI and ChatGPT answers. Very insidious industry that is drastically changing the internet www.404media.co/companies-ar...

1/ Tear gas was created to incapacitate grown men. So when I started seeing reports of kids hurt by tear gas deployed by federal immigration agents, I wondered how often it was happening. My colleagues and I started to count:

In the spirit of that, read my FULL story! www.theverge.com/report/92000...

New: Manosphere influencer Clavicular is everywhere, and that’s not an accident. A paid marketing campaign is spreading video clips of his controversial antics across social media. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

After a breaking news event, unverified speculation and bs seeks out your attention because it moves faster than the process of verifying facts. It tells you what you want to hear. This is no different. I am once again asking people not to pollute online.

I probably worked harder while a student at Hampshire than I have at any point in my life, and yet, this college was often a place of healing and recovery for me. I figured out what I wanted to do with my life there. I'm sad to see it go.

Pete Hegseth believes that Jesus guides Tomahawk missiles, even when they hit elementary schools. I wrote about the roots of his militant faith - from the Crusades to the confederacy - and what they mean for the US and Iran today.

Good morning, Baltimore (and beyond)! Proud to roll out our data exploration tool. This interactive visualizer lets you see how—and where—DHS is spending its $190B+ budget.

Btw the PWHL (women's hockey)'s season starts up again on Thursday and if you're in the US at least you can stream their games on Youtube for free www.usatoday.com/story/sports...

NH state house passes "CHARLIE Act," which bans teaching, I kid you not, "critical consciousness" & "prohibited world-views," such as that queer people exist, or that slavery involved race, or, implicitly, that the Nazis murdered Jews based on identity. newhampshirebulletin.com/2026/02/19/h...

Ben Goertzel, popularizer of the term AGI and creator of the Sophia robot, congratulating Jeffrey Epstein the day after Epstein was released from prison. Goertzel is mentioned in the files nearly 800 times, including well after the Miami Herald investigation in 2018.

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast. The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me. But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.

Looks like The Baltimore Banner is going to fill the gap left by the Post's end of sports coverage.

He Was Laid Off at The Washington Post After Working There 60 Years www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/b...

I've got a "Democracy Dies in Darkness" t-shirt and a Washington Post mug with a "#freepress" hashtag printed on it from my time working there. Both have faded to the point of being basically unreadable over time, just astronomical levels of prescience emanating from them.

Former executive editor @postbaron.bsky.social says the Post is "a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction." www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

The auteur lens of the creator economy too-often makes invisible the infrastructure necessary to do most work well. That is exponentially more true for work like journalism & scholarship that needs institutional memory, costly databases, EDITORS, fact-checking, & when really vital/risky, LAWYERS.

WaPo laid off: -- A journalist covering protest movements and extremism -- A Pulitzer-winning local enterprise reporter -- the race and ethnicity beat reporter -- ... the Amazon beat reporter In addition to so many others

Furious for the friends and journalists I admire still working at WaPo, this is such a sad and extremely avoidable situation

Anyway here's something I wrote a couple years ago on how Huberman plays the role of an illusionist in the MAHA landscape www.vox.com/technology/2...

"Believe your eyes" - great piece from @cwarzel.bsky.social @theatlantic.com on people risking their lives to document ICE. Includes an interview with @startribune.com photographer Richard Tsong-Taatarii. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

I guess one good thing to say about being online this week is that we learned that the war guy also has terrible form on kettlebell swings

Armed ICE agents trapped US citizens in a restaurant and demanded their papers. Federal agents walked into East African restaurants in Cedar-Riverside, MN. They closed and blocked the doors. Then they demanded to see everyone’s papers. Every person present was a US citizen.

“It’s a story about volume, value, and what journalism becomes when “content” grows functionally infinite.” - @davey.bsky.social www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/in-2...

New from me: The internet promised the democratization of information, power, and expression. Now there are vanishingly few ways to be online that don't involve being a billboard. I wrote about the weird — and sometimes devastating — experience of being *influenced* www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

SCOOP from me + @makenakelly.bsky.social: despite recent reports, DOGE isn’t dead—it’s actually everywhere. @wired.com www.wired.com/story/what-i...

I really wanna know nuzzi's salary at vanity fair esp given recent layoffs maybe the NYT could have tracked down info like that instead of taking beach pics i dunno

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S. Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world. www.nobelprize.org

“The injections Suza needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, USAID and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air.” wapo.st/489jGvd

New: ICE has bought a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones globally, updates every single day. Usually harvested from apps and advertising www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

Response from @karenattiah.bsky.social counsel, @normeisen.bsky.social et al, at @democracydefendersfund.org: "She did precisely the job you hired her to do as an opinion writer ... She spoke truthfully and forcefully about ... difficult truths at a challenging time"

YouTube removed a channel that was dedicated to posting AI-generated videos of women being shot in the head following 404 Media’s request for comment. The videos were clearly generated with Google’s new AI video generator tool. 🔗 www.404media.co/ai-generated...

If someone goes from a media outlet to a government agency and then implements a policy attempting to prevent the media from reporting on the agency, what does that tell you about their media outlet?

it feels so good to write again, to play games again, after the worst year of my life. i picked a ridiculous game (that i love!) to relearn controller skills with, but taking my time makes it possible aftermath.site/silksong-hol...

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

This is a book everyone should read, ASAP.