Maria Browning
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marbro.bsky.social
Maria Browning
@marbro.bsky.social
Books, dogs, birds, music, art, wild things & human rights — not necessarily in that order
Reposted by Maria Browning
Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous
February 9, 2026 at 1:38 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
why do you need to observe your house if you're not in it. you are giving yourself an opt-in mental illness. no one has to live like this
February 9, 2026 at 6:06 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
once again I am cursed by literacy
February 8, 2026 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
The ‘You Don’t Have to Apologize for Being White Anymore’ guys have now made it against the law to use the word Black at college.
February 8, 2026 at 6:40 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
Former Washington Post journalists have launched a GoFundMe to help repatriate fired staff members who are effectively stranded in foreign countries.

One of the richest men in the world fired them from the paper and didn’t even pay to ensure they got home.

Abolish the billionaire class:
Donate to Support for Washington Post international employees, organized by Michelle Lee
Among the hundreds of journalists laid off by The Washington Post on … Michelle Lee needs your support for Support for Washington Post international employees
www.gofundme.com
February 8, 2026 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”

What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.
February 7, 2026 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
We are deciding right now whether we want to be a country with ethnic cleansing and concentration camps.
The banality of evil is shocking. An ex-Big Lots warehouse for cheap consumer junk is bought by ICE to ship as many as 7,500 handcuffed human beings, as the Trump regime builds a U.S. gulag archipelago

The unthinkable comes to Pa. coal country. My special report www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...
From Big Lots to warehousing humans: ICE plan sparks fear in Schuylkill County | Will Bunch
A massive warehouse in Tremont. Pa. that once moved cheap goods will now detain migrants in an $119 million ICE deal.
www.inquirer.com
February 7, 2026 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
The number of people currently in ICE custody is now over 73,000, the most in history.

Your reminder that ICE is a for-profit industry and the companies profiting are huge donors to the politicians who voted to continue funding ICE.
February 7, 2026 at 3:10 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world now. That's what we can't face. It's our world. Where sexual desire for children is protected, victims receive no justice & the President of what used to be called the free world is Jeff's friend. This is Jeff's World now.
1/

open.substack.com/pub/broligar...
We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world
The most disturbing revelation so far
open.substack.com
February 7, 2026 at 11:26 AM
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The moon
February 7, 2026 at 12:12 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
1. It was not an accident.
2. It was not a staffer.
3. While the president may have dementia his racism is not due to dementia.
4. He isn’t sorry. He means every racist thought he shares.
5. His base agrees with him.
6. He will do it again.
7. No one in power will hold him accountable.
February 6, 2026 at 5:42 PM
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February 7, 2026 at 12:54 AM
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Reminds me of this @alexanderchee.bsky.social quote that stopped me in my tracks in Trump 1.
February 5, 2026 at 4:14 PM
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A man taken into custody in Rochester Thursday by federal immigration agents and now held at the Whipple Federal Building in the Twin Cities is a recent organ transplant recipient who is without his needed anti-rejection medication, state Rep. Kim Hicks tells MPR News.
Transplant recipient arrested by federal agents in Rochester needs medicine, state representative says
State Rep. Kim Hicks told MPR News she drove to the Whipple Federal Building near Ft. Snelling Thursday night to give the man his medication but authorities wouldn't take it without a doctor's note. S...
www.mprnews.org
February 6, 2026 at 6:07 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
Write it down. Tell the story of this time in your own words. All too soon, people will try to re-write history, their own complicity in these horrors will be scrubbed away. But take a pen, take to the keyboard. And write. Remember for the rest of us.
February 6, 2026 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology
She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.
www.nature.com
February 6, 2026 at 9:09 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
Today, in the U.S. annals of women hating:
The rate of sepsis in Houston surged 63% after Texas banned abortion.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where hospital leaders empowered doctors to intervene before patients’ conditions worsened, it rose 29%.

(Published May 2025)
Why Hospital Policies Matter in States That Ban Abortion
Our first-of-its-kind data analysis found that a seismic split emerged in how medical institutions in Texas' two largest metro areas, Houston and Dallas, treated miscarrying patients — and in their ou...
www.propublica.org
February 6, 2026 at 4:02 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
the Epstein files are really devastating because they remind me of how many girls and women miss out on professional opportunities, mentorship and careers because of how many powerful, rich and influential men only view girls and women — and interactions with them — through the lens of sex
February 5, 2026 at 5:05 PM
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It will be the theme of the halftime show.
Are we going to hear “Fuck ICE” chants at the Super Bowl?
February 5, 2026 at 1:19 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
Because the value of books & arts coverage doesn't reside just in the criticism and essays published.

Its ultimate value is in sustaining our culture by inspiring people—including future generations—to care about ideas, stories, beauty, creativity, and what it means to be human beings and citizens.
February 5, 2026 at 3:03 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
I would put even money on the possibility a statute exists requiring the CIA to collect this information and place it a publicly available place. Just today, someone sued because the Department of Energy is refusing to allow clean energy users access to a publicly available dataset.
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!

This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Somewhat devastating news today from the CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they …
simonwillison.net
February 5, 2026 at 2:53 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
ICE is running a “conveyor belt” of illegally detained Minnesota families.

Agents are arresting entire families with legal status and immediately shipping them off to Texas to deny them legal representation and avoid the federal courts in Minnesota.

The cruelty is endless.
‘ICE conveyor belt’ illegally detaining, moving Minnesota children to Texas faster than courts can respond
ICE is pulling Minnesota immigrant families with legal status out of their driveways, homes and school commutes and send
www.mprnews.org
February 3, 2026 at 1:01 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
Remember the incident where DHS claimed officers shot a guy because he attacked them with a snow shovel?

Yeah. It didn't happen. They shot him through the door of his own home. And then arrested him. And then lied about it. Again.

And they almost shot some kids in the process.
They just blindly shot through the fucking door.

"Additional photographs show damage consistent with a bullet fragment lodged in a bedroom wall down the hallway — suggesting it traveled between a mattress and a portable crib in a room where several small children sleep."
"Photographic evidence from the shooting scene of a Venezuelan man by federal agents last month in Minneapolis supports the account of witnesses there – and appears to undercut the narrative provided by federal officials." www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...
February 3, 2026 at 11:33 PM
Reposted by Maria Browning
Read this. We're going to need a lot of smart people to figure out how to undo all of this. If that's still even possible.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/o...
Opinion | ICE Is Watching You
www.nytimes.com
February 4, 2026 at 12:14 AM
Reposted by Maria Browning
In my business, we typically call people like this "Bad Guys."
Fucking surreal that people dressed like this and carrying assault rifles are permitted to kidnap people off our streets
February 4, 2026 at 3:25 AM