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Joshua Benton (@joshuabenton.com on Bluesky)
132.2K posts
Joshua Benton (@joshuabenton.com on Bluesky)
@jbenton
Senior writer + founder of @NiemanLab at Harvard. I write about (a) digital journalism and (b) southern U.S. history, mostly. Cajun.
"Deutsche Bank has been cooperating with this office" has to be one of the more terrifying-to-Trump things Tish James said this morning- I have finally figured out what Twitter's feed design was born for: dramatic reveals of insane bird feet
- Dr. Phil's great-grandfather, Matthew Strickland, was from Pickens County, Alabama, where his relatives were significant slaveowners. In 1860, the Alabama Stricklands owned 96 human beings to do their hard work.Dr. Phil: This country was built on hard work.. Not on DEI
00:00 - There are two approved Louisiana history textbooks for the state's 8th graders. This is how one of them introduces the Civil War: as tough times for a poor young white woman whose family owned 120 slaves.
- One of the richest men in the history of mankind, casually endorsing the end of voting rights for Americans without children.
- I'm not sure how you write a story about how great the schools in Highland Park, Texas, are without noting that they exist entirely to allow rich white Dallasites to maintain Jim Crow-style segregation. THREAD
- Astonishingly racist: The Louisiana House votes to make juvenile records PUBLIC — but ONLY in the three Blackest urban parishes that include New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport.
Story from a very long House floor session last night: Louisiana House approves releasing youth crime records in majority-Black parishes #lalege #lagov theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/ne… via @theadvocatebr - There is some nonsense going on in Caddo Parish (Shreveport), Louisiana. Black man and white man run against each other for sheriff. Black man wins by 1 vote. He's the first Black sheriff elected in this majority-Black parish. There's a recount, as you'd expect. He wins that
- Wow — this is awful. For the record, @Harvard has no school of journalism, no department of journalism, and no professors of journalism. (It does have @niemanfdn! But we have no faculty and no classes. And it does have @ShorensteinCtr, but no journalism-specific faculty.)I have been the victim of a very serious phishing attack. I’m putting this statement out to set the record straight about what I’ve been through. I will not be addressing this issue any further on social media.
- I did it, I found the worst gif on the internet
GIF - In the Pfizer vaccine trial for 5- to 12-year-olds, there were 4,647 participants and only 5 "severe adverse events," none of them related to the vaccine. The best of them, BY FAR: "Ingestion of a penny (1 person in the vaccine group)" yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/vaccines-for…
- A former NBA player dies young, and AI writes this headline: "Brandon Hunter useless at 42" And check that prose: "Former NBA participant Brandon Hunter who beforehand performed for the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic, has handed away on the age of 42."
- How in the world do you (a) create a formula to determine how much “adversity” a 17-year-old has faced, (b) using only school-level and neighborhood-level data, not personal data, and then (c) hide the formula’s results from the kid?
