Trying something out and I’m interested in feedback. You can reply to the email (only I’ll see it) or comment on the page if you’re viewing this online (publicly visible).

I have a terrible habit of seeing something interesting in a newsletter I subscribe to or on social media, clicking to open it in a tab on my phone, and then… closing out hundreds of tabs months later. I also want to post here more. So I thought, why not try one of these “Best things I read this week” style posts and see if I can keep it rolling and folks are interested in it.

You can forward the email or share the link with others so I can see if type of thing has an audience.

At first I thought the main theme of the pieces I’m sharing this week was Minneapolis, or more specifically the United States Federal Government’s racist, bumbling, fascist, and illegal occupation of Minneapolis. But stepping back a bit, these stories are all about humanity, often standing in the face of powerful, overwhelming, inhumanity. Our humanity, as shared resource, actively protected for others who don’t look like us or share our privilege, is why they can’t win.

Some of these sites offer subscriptions, sign up to pay for something new this week if you can. Especially for smaller, more independent outlets.

The growing community safety support in the Twin Cities not only includes parents and neighbors providing meal delivery and monitoring ICE vehicles approaching, it includes the contemporary versions of old school telephone trees to share much needed information. It’s also observers bearing witness to the actual violence and disregard by ICE. 

It’s those of us who live here, whether natives to Minnesota, or long-time immigrants, or first-generation immigrants, or recent to the state in search of a better and more protective community, who will be the difference between a brake on or the acceleration toward domestic military police state (a surge by any other name.)

So, How’s the Occupation Going for You?

What’s it like to live in America with a domestic military occupation? Minnesota has the answer.

It's inspiring, this persistence of community and care in the face of a campaign to annihilate them, and the defiance of people who want to live their lives against a force that doesn't want anything at all, and all of these small and vital human things pushing up through the attempt to make those things and that resistance impossible. But it is also a reminder of how pathetic—how sincerely and deeply abject, how valueless and lost—this offensive is. There is all this rude and humble everyday life and all these different types of people who believe it is meaningful, and then there is this attempt, overseen by an elite that doesn't believe in anything at all, to replace it with something dumber, simpler, more demeaning, and more like content. They are going to lose, and not just because they are outnumbered.

Fascists Are Pathetic | Defector

Two days before a shouting cluster of its agents surrounded the car of a Minneapolis mother and shot her to death last week, ICE was demanding answers from the Hilton hotel group on Twitter. “Why did your team in Minneapolis cancel our federal law enforcement officer and agent reservations?” the government account of the Immigrations…

They were observing ICE agents while a friend from Robbinsdale drove. The agents had already stopped them to warn they’d be arrested, but they kept following the vehicle. Then they realized the agents were leading them to their friend’s home in Robbinsdale. 

“He pulled up to her house, both the agents got out of the car and were both performatively and theatrically taking pictures of her house,” Kovarik said. “Then they drove off and they went around to the back alley behind her house and took pictures of the back of her house."

It happened again to Kovarik last week when an ICE agent led them to a residence where Kovarik used to live.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/13/ice-using-private-data-to-intimidate-observers-and-activists-advocates-say

“Even though a lot of people that I know and at the school have said, ‘What does the walk out do? You're not directly affecting anything,’ I think it shows that there are people who aren't accepting what's happening and that it is wrong,” said Peyton, who asked that her last name not be used for this story.

I don't just mean that these actions performed by Musk and his company should be illegal, I think the whole AI service should be illegal. If you develop a product with so little forethought of its potential consequences that you end up creating a child exploitation or abuse material generator, your product should no longer exist and you should not be able to develop another product.

Grok, the Child Porn Generator, Should Be Illegal

X, the child sexual abuse material company formerly known as Twitter, is now removing the clothes of women and children with photos on the site on behalf of its users. I first joined Twitter in December 2015. Deeply closeted at the time, I originally started my account, then called @closettransgirl,

On Jan. 7, I received an email from a Royal Caribbean International communications person asking for a correction to a story. The request said that I had used an image of Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas cruiseliner in a story about a death on the Carnival Horizon ship, and asked if I could replace the image given that Royal Caribbean wasn't involved. A fair ask, for sure, but not something I could help with: The story was one I didn’t write, on a website I don’t write for.

I'm Not That Nicole Carpenter

I got a corrections request for a story I didn't write, and it pulled me down a journalism rabbit hole.

Reply or comment online to let me know if this type of post is interesting/valuable to you.