Rahul Bhargava

There is blatant voter suppression happening right now in Brazil: flights cancelled and buses suspended to Northeastern capitals where Lula holds the majority, polling stations changed to thousands of kms away last-minute, voters in London told they need to go to Edinburgh… This is criminal.

Trump Unleashes Racist Tirade That should be the headline in every newspaper.

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

“Young people of India have given us the most hopeful moment for a very long time.” @SalmanRushdie, via @amitavakumar in @thewire_in. This Diwali, we celebrate the courage to defend an India that belongs to everyone. buff.ly/42HNiEH

Data drums is coming to Bologna! 👏🏽+📊+🌍=🤔 So excited to share that I'll be closing out the @visualisingclimate.com event in Bologna in Nov with an experimental body-percussion activity based on rhythms and climate emissions from 🇮🇳🇧🇷🇺🇸 visualisingclimate.com/programme/#s...

#Call for projects: Are you an NGO, company or research institution using an #AI system for a societal cause & #sustainability? Apply for a voluntary #ImpactAI assessment to gain independent feedback & attention for your AI project! Info calls: 4 Nov, 2 Dec & 13 Jan 👉 www.hiig.de/en/impact-ai...

While on sabbatical I've been learning about "live journalism" & potential connections to my Data Theatre Collaborative work / the new participatory street live data stuff I'm doing. Then I found out this year's Live Journalism Fest is in Berlin! See you there? www.headliner.eu/ljf26

Anyone who still supports Trump is a supporter of treason and complicit in the destruction of democracy and destabilization of the global order.

I enjoyed the Unboxing the Future session on consumer health data tracking at Berlin IFA last month. This issue needs *way* more attention. Spot me with a question in their highlights video! www.youtube.com/shorts/BFteU...

Did you know that when an investigative journalist says "database" they almost always mean "Google spreadsheet"! Excited to learn that, and so many other more useful things, from two separate groups of investigative journalists over the last few weeks.

Per the Middle East Studies Association, since October 7, 76 North American academics have been fired for speaking out against the genocide in Palestine. Two-thirds of those people are non-white. 16.5% are Jewish. afi.mesana.org/resource/les...

Berlin tidbit: the state-level regulations says that schools must "develop personalities who are able to resolutely oppose the ideology of National Socialism [Nazism] and all other political teachings striving for tyranny" (auto-translated) schulgesetz-berlin.de/schulgesetz/...

Newsroom staff are exercising their agency and power to question deals their corporate leaders are making. Is working with a military and surveillance tech company involved with ICE and IDF really aligned with USA Today's journalistic principles? dankennedy.net/2026/09/10/u...

Conferences can be hard to justify and attend. I appreciate efforts like @ire.org's AccessFest, which is an online event designed for virtual attendance. Not the same, but still useful and accessible to many more. Cheap for students! Starts Thurs. www.ire.org/training/con...

A 1974 Ethiopian stamp charts world population in bars smaller than your thumbnail. Julie Peasley tracked down 180 chart-covered stamps from 88 countries and found the data stories hiding on them, this week in Nightingale. buff.ly/LZ0yspM

"South Korea has already run the experiment. Its law requires the National Assembly to vote on presidential impeachment by anonymous ballot, and that rule has now removed two presidents." [@andycraig.bsky.social]

I got all excited at the contemporary art museum because I thought found the original of @jerthorp.bsky.social’s amazing book’s cover, but it was just a visually related work 🤣🤦🏽‍♂️

NEW: Remember when John Oliver opened a church to expose how easy it was to get tax exemptions? This year, ProPublica reporters set out to establish private schools to test if, truly, anyone could open one. We founded two. Here’s how.

"caravan" IS popping up more in immigration-related news as the US election data approaches. Media Cloud partisan-ish media data confirms. Sampled headlines suggest spike in attention from left-ish media is reactionary reporting about political right-ish using term. tinyurl.com/mc-caravan-s...

I know there is so much bad news out there, but here is some more. This is how you destroy entire disciplines.

🚨 [Token][ization] Paper Alert 🚨 Tokenization is a wildly understudied area of language modeling despite it having effects across all of NLP. Over the past ~8 months, 32 (!) tokenizer researchers put together the most comprehensive survey of the field. Check it out!

Good news for @mediacloud.bsky.social users: our software speed-ups have enabled us to *double* the weekly default query quota. Hope this helps your work! We'll keep increasing if the servers can handle the growing usage.

MIT spent $3 million on 500 AI-capable surveillance cameras while laying people off, shutting down libraries, and canceling journal subscriptions. In this article, 4 faculty & I discuss our new arts initiative to celebrate surveillance and repression on college campuses: fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

Weekend read: I sat down and wrote up a version of my SciCAR keynote talk on "teaching data journalists in the AI era". This one is about how we learn and know things, and I hope it sparks relevant reflections for you. dataculture.northeastern.edu/2026/09/17/s...

Another SciCAR highlight: Prof. Francesca Morini from @uclab.bsky.social at FH Potsdam summarized insights from viz research for data journalists. I always enjoy a talk translating research findings into concrete and tips 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Could this be a turning point in the anti-MSM politics trend? Or is it just be an eddy in the ebbing of mainstream media political power? Seems to me that Trump's usual attempts to bypass and subvert the usual channels might not work this time. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Weird billionaire media moguls should be criticized & mocked relentlessly. As usually, @theonion.com leads the way: theonion.com/the-onions-e...

Worth your listen: a solid episode of @theverge.com's Decoder podcast on the business of digital journalism and related AI impacts. www.theverge.com/podcast/9807...

What do you think of the 80s? This op-ed will probably change your mind. Prof. Kaufman (my boss!) summarized the thesis of his new book for the NYT: "The Decade That Ruined Everything" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/o...

Great use of @mediacloud.bsky.social data: @joshuabenton.com found few outlets have taken up "Gulf of America" renaming www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/trum...

I've long ranted against "big milk"s influence in the U.S. I'm lactose intolerant, like most of the planet, and that's not a deficiency. There's even more to this story about milk, racism, commerce, and "nutritional imperialism": theconversation.com/lactose-into...

UN: Let's use a more realistic map! 🎉👏🏽 US: Hell no to radicals and "equal area" projections! 🙈 Me: embarrassed & outraged 🤬 guess I need to keep showing that West Wing clip in my data storytelling class each year 🤦🏽‍♂️ news.un.org/en/story/202...

I knew this Amazon-book-eating story sounded familiar... I recently read "Service Model" by @aptshadow.bsky.social & there's a chapter where the protagonists discover robot "librarians" doing very similar things! Why does life keep imitating art in the wrong ways 🤦🏽‍♂️ www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

Problem gambling is a ballooning crisis, especially among young men.

NewsGuild of New York, representing 2,000+ NYT workers, urges NYT to drop a potential Athletic-Kalshi partnership, saying it threatens journalistic independence (Front Office Sports) Main Link | Mediagazer Permalink