Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 5h

idea that needs funding: a Wiki compiling all the crank notions spewed by IDW types

Reposted by Gady Epstein

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 1d

POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

@politico.com
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 1d

One thing I am glad this did (might not be accessible in the UK alas unless you have Means) is just absolutely go in on that nonsense "does it really count as starving children if the children are also sick for other reasons?" thing the Free Press did.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gieT...

Bari Weiss: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

YouTube video by LastWeekTonight

www.youtube.com

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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 1d

The entire incident is infuriating and terrifying. She’s a Latina woman who was working a service job. On her way home late at night, with her headphones in, she was detained for an hour by masked federal agents who wouldn’t give her their names.

Maria Greeley, 44, had just finished working a double shift at the Beach Bar on Ohio Street
earlier this month when she said she was surrounded by three federal agents who grabbed her, forced her hands behind her back and zip tied her.
Headphones in, Greeley had been focused on getting home to her two dogs for a walk.
Instead, she said she was detained by masked agents who did not answer when she asked for names. They questioned her for an hour, she said.

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Katelyn Boo-urns @katelynburns.com · 4d

I wrote a little about some of the little details you might have missed in this video and why it hit me so hard as a trans person this morning:

www.burnsnotice.com/you-have-to-...

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Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 2d

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

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A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 5d

Such disrespect for the tron arcade game

mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 5d

Pretty confused by how TRON became a big-budget movie franchise. Was it a bit hit when it came out? No. Did it become a big hit on video/TV? Also no. Do people have fond nostalgic memories of it? Eh kinda but not really. Was it secretly great and critically acclaimed? No again

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Daniel Knowles @dlknowles.bsky.social · 7d

Good reporting on the South Shore raid from South Side weekly here.

Confirms one thing I was told but didn't put in my own piece because I didn't have a second source and it seemed too insane: border agents segregated arrested residents by race

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children

Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes. Days later, neighbors are still searching for the missing.

southsideweekly.com

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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 7d

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

(RNS) — Last month, the Rev. David Black stood in front of a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and spread his arms wide. Adorned in all black and wearing a clerical collar, the pastor looked up at a group of masked, heavily armed ICE agents on the roof and began to pray.

“I invited them to repentance,” Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), said in an interview. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

But when Black began to lower his arms a few seconds later, the agents responded to his spiritual plea by firing pepper balls, or chemical agents that cause eye irritation and respiratory distress, video footage shows. One struck Black in the head, exploding into a puff of white pepper smoke and forcing him to his knees. Fellow demonstrators rushed to his aid, and as the pastor rubbed his face in pain, the agents continued to fire.

“We could hear them laughing,” Black said.

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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 7d

Read this graf pls

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 9d

perhaps the biggest story TFPever ran was a catastrophically shoddy argument that George Floyd ackshully died of an overdose. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the piece was simply wrong, Weiss didn’t take it down, she asked her critic, @radleybalko.bsky.social, to come on a podcast.

max tani @maxtani.bsky.social · 9d

David Ellison’s note to staff on Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 10d

I’m demonstrating faux-bravery on here by not taking the bait from that troll

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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 11d

"The twentieth century’s worst episodes did not begin with gunfire. They began with named categories—“parasites,” “vermin,” “degenerates,” “enemies of the people”—ways of talking that prepared the ground for ways of acting."

newrepublic.com/article/2009...

Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism

“Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas.

newrepublic.com

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Reposted by Gady Epstein

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 11d

Whoa. The criminal charge was for failure to file a change of address under 8 USC 1306(b), which makes it a crime for any noncitizen (of any legal status) to fail to register a change of address with the government within 10 days of moving.

Unheard of to charge for that.

Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney.bsky.social · 11d

JUST IN: Magistrate Faruqui continues sounding alarms about defective criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors in D.C

This time he says prosecutors sought to "gin up" a charge against an immigrant for misreading a confusing form — to jump start deportation. www.dcd.uscourts.gov/sites/dcd/fi...

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Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 12d

"Johnson said he was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours.

'I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up. I asked if they had a warrant and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.'"

Massive immigration raid on Chicago apartment building leaves residents reeling: 'I feel defeated'

The Department of Homeland Security said federal agents with Border Patrol, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested 37 people in the raid.

chicago.suntimes.com

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Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 14d

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 16d

⚠️ Chinese researchers have invented bone glue that mimics how oysters stick to surfaces underwater.

The adhesive can reportedly repair orthopedic fractures in 2-3 minutes, even in blood-rich environments, and is bioabsorbable.

interestingengineering.com/science/chin...

China's oyster-inspired 'bone glue' bonds fractures in minutes

A new oyster-inspired Bone-02 adhesive can revolutionize bone repair without metal fasteners.

interestingengineering.com

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 13d

“The censorious right does not represent the entirety of conservatism, but it is one of the movement’s most persistent and dominant strains” — much-needed corrective on the real history of cancel culture www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/o...

Opinion | We Have Seen the ‘Woke Right’ Before, and It Wasn’t Pretty Then, Either

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Gady Epstein

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 14d

Vance: "If you're an American citizen & you've been to the hospital in the last few years, you've probably noticed wait times are especially large & very often somebody who's there in the ER is an illegal alien. Why do those people get healthcare benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens?"

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 14d

He’s so good at the practice of politics and persuasion, to coin a phrase that’s popular this week

Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 14d

Zohran Mamdani calling it a genocide on The View and getting applause.

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Reposted by Gady Epstein

Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · 14d

"An attorney for a building trades union told me that a witness in a wage theft case in another state was recently targeted and deported by ICE. The union believes the employer encouraged ICE to target the worker, in a bid to undercut the wage theft case. "

prospect.org/labor/2025-1...

How ICE Terror Campaigns Are Used to Discipline Labor

While Chicago sees a surge of ICE detentions, workers are facing retaliation as immigrants when they advocate for their rights.

prospect.org

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 14d

Good succinct thread on the scorching opinion re targeted deportations of pro-Palestinian academics

Joey Fishkin @fishkin.bsky.social · 15d

Honestly, this entire opinion is just jaw-dropping. The first postings I saw on Bluesky were about the first page, which is lovely in its own right and exemplifies one of the less-well-explored roles of a judge in a democracy: to explain what is going on legally to non-lawyers.

There's way more.

Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social · 15d

reposting this (an excerpt from the district court's opinion in AAUP v. Rubio, a case about the government targeting noncitizen students and faculty for their pro-Palestine advocacy) w alt-text !

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 14d

Great piece

Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social · 14d

I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein, why swallowing live frogs is a bad idea, and how context and history can release you from bright-kid syndrome, the illusion that you yourself are going to have every answer or fix the world.

You don't have to swallow frogs

Klein and Coates show that if you don't know what your core beliefs are, you're going to get played.

degenerateart.beehiiv.com

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Reposted by Gady Epstein

Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 14d

Sup Brett Kavanaugh

Screenshot of text:

But like in Lyons, plaintiffs have no good basis to believe
that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the
future based on the prohibited factors—and certainly no
good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is
imminent. Therefore, they lack Article III standing:
“Absent a sufficient likelihood” that the plaintiffs “will
again be wronged in a similar way,” they are “no more
entitled to an injunction than any other citizen of Los
Angeles; and a federal court may not entertain a claim by
any or all citizens who no more than assert that certain
practices of law enforcement officers are unconstitutional.”

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 14d

I do!

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Gady Epstein @gadyepstein.bsky.social · 15d

Chappelle’s defense of his anti-trans material, unpersuasive as it was already, certainly hits different now: “The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it.”

www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

US comedians defend decision to play in Saudi Arabia: ‘They’re paying me enough to look the other way’

Usual supporters of free speech are under fire for signing on to Riyadh festival despite the government’s human rights abuses

www.theguardian.com

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