How Twitter became a haven for climate misinformation

How Twitter became a haven for climate misinformation

Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson write: On World Meteorological Day in March, the UN Climate Change Twitter account posted an anodyne tweet reminding people that “every bit of additional global warming worsens climate impacts.” But thanks to Elon Musk’s new paid blue checkmark system, the most prominent replies to it are flooded with nonsense like “these commies are doubling down” and calls to “stop globalist fake alarmism.” This is just one way in which Twitter is rapidly becoming a hellscape for climate scientists who…

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How to mourn a forest. A lesson from West Papua

How to mourn a forest. A lesson from West Papua

Sophie Chao writes: One torrid afternoon, I journeyed with an Indigenous Marind woman and her family to a patch of razed forest at the edge of the plantation frontier, where workers had cleared the way for oil palm trees. Her name was Circia*. A mother of three in her late 50s, Circia was imposing, but her footsteps were gentle, almost silent when she led us across the wet soils of Merauke, a district in the Indonesian-controlled western half of New…

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Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain

Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain

PsyPost reports: A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has presented preliminary findings suggesting there can be a surge of brain activity linked to consciousness during the dying process. The new study aimed to investigate the brain activity of patients during the dying process, particularly focusing on whether there are any neural correlates of consciousness. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported by some cardiac arrest survivors and are described as highly vivid and real-like…

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Twitter is a far-right social network

Twitter is a far-right social network

Charlie Warzel writes: Twitter has long been described, even by its most ardent users, as a hellsite. But under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network. In December, I argued that if we are to judge Musk strictly by his actions as Twitter’s owner, it is accurate to call him a far-right activist. As a public…

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Republicans are trying to seize control over voting in Texas’ largest Democratic county

Republicans are trying to seize control over voting in Texas’ largest Democratic county

Mother Jones reports: The Texas legislature passed a series of bills on Monday that amounted to a sweeping power grab giving Republicans more control over how elections are run and administered in the state’s most populous Democratic county, which includes the city of Houston and is home to nearly 5 million people. One bill would allow the secretary of state, who is appointed by the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to remove local election officials for “good cause” based on…

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You cannot hear these 13 women’s stories and believe the anti-abortion narrative

You cannot hear these 13 women’s stories and believe the anti-abortion narrative

Michelle Goldberg writes: It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans. Since the end of Roe v. Wade, there has been a barrage of gutting stories about women in prohibition states denied care for miscarriages or forced to continue nonviable pregnancies. Though some in the anti-abortion movement publicly justify this sort of treatment, others have responded with a combination of denial, deflection and conspiracy theorizing. Some activists have blamed the pro-choice movement…

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Harlan Crow: Investigating my gifts to Clarence Thomas is unconstitutional

Harlan Crow: Investigating my gifts to Clarence Thomas is unconstitutional

Mark Joseph Stern writes: Congress has regulated the Supreme Court for as long as the two institutions have existed. For more than a century, Congress compelled justices to travel around the country to serve as appellate judges, often on horseback. It forced the court to hear certain cases and denied it the ability to hear others. It added and subtracted seats, increased and decreased its budget, and postponed a term to avoid an adverse decision. According to attorneys for billionaire and GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow, however, there is one thing…

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The man in charge of knowing when the U.S. runs out of money

The man in charge of knowing when the U.S. runs out of money

The Washington Post reports: At the beginning of every workday, from his second-floor office in the U.S. Treasury Department, Dave Lebryk starts his morning looking at a color-coded dashboard tracking the most critical operations of the largest payment system in the world. More than $6 trillion flows out of the Treasury every year in payments, salaries and purchase orders, and more than $5 trillion flows in, mostly through tax collections and fees. Lebryk’s job is to make sure that these…

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How Russia’s FSB recruits former ISIS fighters — and tries to plant them in Ukrainian battalions

How Russia’s FSB recruits former ISIS fighters — and tries to plant them in Ukrainian battalions

Lilia Yapparova and Vera Mironova report: In January 2014, when Baurzhan Kultanov first joined the Islamic State, he wasn’t surprised by almost anything he encountered in Syria and Iraq’s occupied territories. While recounting his experiences there, he compared Raqqa, ISIS’s then-capital, to Istanbul, where he had met his recruiters, as well as to his hometown of Astrakhan, Russia. “People live their lives there, just like anywhere,” Kultanov told Meduza. “The women sit at home, they go to the bazaar —…

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Some neural networks learn language like humans

Some neural networks learn language like humans

Steve Nadis writes: How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from elaborate webs of artificial neurons, ostensibly mimicking the way our brains process information, we don’t know if they process input in similar ways. “There’s been a long-standing debate as to whether neural networks learn in the same way that humans do,” said…

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Why Trump wants the U.S. to default on debt

Why Trump wants the U.S. to default on debt

Dennis Aftergut writes: Lest you have any doubt, the three exclamation points are Trump’s. You could be excused for thinking he wants a default. He loves chaos. But he also has a purely self-serving reason to seek an economic catastrophe. You don’t need to be a stable genius to know that a bad economy typically hurts the incumbent in a presidential race. And Trump is desperate to get the immunity from prosecution that being elected president would provide him. He’s…

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Concerns about Biden’s reelection swamped by fear of Trump in swing voter focus groups

Concerns about Biden’s reelection swamped by fear of Trump in swing voter focus groups

The Washington Post reports: Nearly all of the 15 gathered swing state voters described feeling negative emotions when they saw President Biden on a television or computer screens — “confused,” “concern,” “worry,” “sad,” “sorry” and even “panicked.” Every single one said they wished Biden and his old Republican foe Donald Trump were not running for reelection. Several offered dire assessments of Biden’s mental and physical capacities, calling him too old or speculating about the possibility of dementia. But as the…

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Texas forced this woman to give birth to a stillborn son. She’s suing

Texas forced this woman to give birth to a stillborn son. She’s suing

Rolling Stone reports: After multiple miscarriages, Kiersten Hogan thought she would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. She’d nearly given up hope when in June 2021 she learned she was pregnant. But at just 19 weeks — days after Texas’ Senate Bill 8 went into effect — Hogan woke up at 5 a.m. in excruciating pain. She called 911 and was instructed to unlock her front door and lay on the ground until EMTs arrived. “It was…

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Pro-Ukrainian Russian partisans advance into Russia’s Belgorod region in surprise raid

Pro-Ukrainian Russian partisans advance into Russia’s Belgorod region in surprise raid

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Russia may have taken the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut Sunday, but forces aligned with Ukraine apparently took a tiny part of Russia on Monday — or so video and photograph footage suggested as of just after noon local time. Ukrainian armored vehicles, including at least one tank, were seen attacking a border post, in the town of Kozinka, in the Belgorod region of southern Russia. Drone footage, taken from the Ukrainian side of the…

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