288 unread articles spanning 2 days. Mode B (Curated TL;DR), aiming for ~⅓ coverage with selective theming.
- Coal revival. Trump announced $700M to restart and prop up domestic coal, including specifically reopening the AES Warrior Run plant in Western Maryland (Maryland Matters has the regional angle); 350.org counters with what fossil fuel imports actually cost on electric bills.
- Federal workforce squeeze. An executive order strips civil-service protections from ~8,000 senior federal workers (Daily Record framing), while disappearing demographic data hampers tracking layoffs.
- Other DC moves. Bolton expected to plead guilty over classified docs; Trump says he'll make Todd Blanche permanent AG; Stars and Stripes board sues Pentagon over alleged censorship; the House passed a war-powers measure restraining Trump on Iran; EPA quietly scrubbed historic hurricane info; Alsobrooks warns of an HHS leadership vacuum under RFK Jr.; CrimethInc has a mutual-aid timeline from inside the Delaney Hall ICE clashes; Drop Site keeps the Israel/Gaza/Lebanon ceasefire-rejection thread alive alongside Iran strikes on Kuwait and Bahrain; The Bureau ties UK local-government pensions to Iran-war fossil exposure.
- State politics. UMD laid off 84 employees; the MD Supreme Court removed Anne Arundel orphans' court judge Marc Knapp; MD's Board of Public Works approved an $800M bond sale; state treasurer rips a $10M Prince George's stadium project as "flushed down the toilet"; Baltimore City Community College gave financial aid to "ghost students"; op-ed argues Maryland needs a special session to support democracy; homelessness up in Maryland despite the national dip; Baltimore joined antitrust litigation against fire-truck makers; Federal Public Defender Jim Wyda is retiring.
- DC living. 51st on why DC's 311 app has been broken for ages, Bowser's budget worsening food access, and Eric's Law for residents with disabilities.
- MoCo highlights (35 posts; mostly daily-blotter / restaurant fluff — picking representatives): MCPS adopts $3.72B budget with 415 position cuts; $8.3M state funding for clean-energy projects; Drought watch for the metro region; bus lanes going in on Rockville Pike ahead of the Red Line shutdown. Source of the Spring covers Silver Spring housing pressure and WOODMOORstock weekend.
The Court backed the SEC's disgorgement power, rejected a "skinny label" patent challenge, upheld FCC's fine system against AT&T/Verizon, and cleared Alabama's pro-Republican congressional map.
- Critique & skepticism. 404 Media on Satya Nadella suddenly distancing himself from Microsoft's "addictive AI" pitch, Google employees memeing their own AI's failures, judges roasting lawyers for hallucinated case citations, and the AEO industry weaponizing Reddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google's AI search (Waxy linked the same). Simon Willison flags Charity Majors' "enthusiasts race time, skeptics race entropy" framing and Uber capping Claude Code usage to manage spend. Pivot to AI catalogs rsync going AI-slop and breaking backups. Schneier flags Meta AI chatbot account takeovers. And Waxy points at Ted Chiang on LLM consciousness.
- Power, capital, infrastructure. NYT on SpaceX's $135/share IPO and the Gwynne Shotwell adult-in-the-room profile; Distilled's Meta data center "Mad Max" phase and who actually builds their own power plants; the EU's plan to reduce U.S. tech dependence plus Canada's own AI sovereignty bet; Walmart shareholders kill an AI-workforce report.
- Use & abuse. Immigrant rights lawyers sue over Palantir's ELITE platform; NYT on internal social-media docs showing how apps hooked teens at school, the ChatGPT "heartwarming retro" ad campaign, what AI agents are actually doing at work per Arena, and LLM-managing small-business owners. 3 Quarks surfaces Lori Trahan urging AI legislation and a Demis Hassabis conversation; O'Reilly has DJ Patil's "Tidy House" listening tour and an essay on predictive vs enumerative security; FlowingData visualizes what LLM speed actually feels like; SAGE's STHV publishes Atmospheric Analytics on situated GenAI encounters; Social Epistemology continues the Bullshit Machines / epistemic-authorities exchange; Language Log eyes Andreessen's AI talking points on Rogan.
Elixir 1.20 ships gradual typing; RubyGems/Bundler add a cooldown for newly-published gems and pnpm 11.5 recognizes npm staged publishes — useful supply-chain hygiene; alexwlchan writes up using Pytester for Playwright fixtures; Inside Rust explains how the Josh tool manages cross-repo code; David Guerrero shares a tiny Fluent Bit / Parquet / DuckDB logging stack and Cybertec covers SQL/PGQ graph queries in PostgreSQL; Chrome 149 adds CSS gap decorations; Mastodon shipped v4.6.0-beta.1 plus point releases; Brian Suda introduces a "Today I Learnt" database; Lobsters' top picks include Kristoff's "My Software North Star" and Andrew Gallant's deeply personal post on his encephalitis diagnosis. Kagi Feedback (16 threads, mostly translation bugs and minor UX requests) — translation output not appearing is the dominant complaint; allow manually indexing sites that don't optimize for SEO is the more interesting feature request.
NYT on the New World screwworm's U.S. return, a first in precise CRISPR editing of human embryos, urban light pollution worsening pollen allergies, Arizona/Nevada trading Colorado River water for desalinated Pacific water, farewell to MAVEN at Mars, and an obituary for herpes virologist Bernard Roizman. On environmental governance: EU steps up ocean monitoring as the US dismantles its system (Yale E360 covers the AMOC-tracking shutdown), Yale E360 also on how humans are altering nature's smellscape, and Places Journal's gorgeous plastic-forensics-of-animal-guts essay. FlowingData visualizes Ebola outbreak trajectories and 3 Quarks asks what it will take to stop the outbreak; Platypus blogs outbreak mitigation at the crossroads of expertise and politics.
The biggest reading-mode bucket. Jenny Odell on soft eyes and deep listening; Scott Barry Kaufman's "anti-woke or just wounded?" typology; Geoff Shullenberger on antihumanism turning on itself; Nicholas Low on the techno-optimists; Brandon Ogbunu on risk-aversion stifling science; Seabright on the shadow of Gibbon and Smith; Scott Samuelson on Elizabeth Bishop talking like a human being; Conan O'Brien's 2026 Harvard commencement paired with a ChatGPT-collab "Median Commencement Address"; the perennial "drowning doesn't look like drowning"; average guys outsmarting Wall Street via prediction markets; and Bouterse's blackly funny Why we ought to kill the healthy patient. Harvard Gazette has how loneliness became a public health crisis and a 7-hour Béla Tarr Sátántangó screening. Plus Theory/Culture/Society's toxic whiteness as institutional atmosphere and the Journal of Cultural Analytics' Wittgenstein-family-resemblance network paper.
ProPublica drops Republican lawmakers facing backlash after challenging abortion bans, a generational child sexual abuse pattern in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, and how to get CA teacher misconduct records. Bellingcat traces Viory's links to RT's old Ruptly operation.
No Depression posts Deer Tick's top 5 right now, reviews Bella White's A Sign in the Weather, Futurebirds' Far Out Country, Caleb Caudle's Heavy Thrill, and the Color Me Country book on Black women in country. Aquarium Drunkard revisits Anika's 2010 debut, praises Bedouine's Neon Summer Skin, digs into Robert Wyatt's 1972–74 Peel Sessions, and runs Matt Sweeney on Neil Young's "Barstool Blues". Igloo Mag covers ambient releases by Empusae & Maris Anguis, anthéne, and a Meat Beat Manifesto archival review; Rough Trade ranks Belle and Sebastian's albums. Sad note: Waxy flags Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi has died at 56. DC concert pick: Rhizome's No To Nationalism July 4 fundraiser. And monome turns twenty.
Robin Sloan's Dragoncatcher post on the architecture of a pause (also surfaced via the Dragoncatcher blog); macwright's monthly "Recently"; laze.net on Bandcamp page spam and a Junited list of June posts worth reading; rachelbythebay on shift work and maintenance scheduling; Codemanship's confessional A Car Crash In Slow Motion; Mihai Parparita's Stream Spigot now consuming Bluesky/Mastodon/Nitter via RSS (via Waxy); and Joanna Stern on the cottage industry removing Meta Ray-Ban recording lights. New platform: Pagecord, "blog without the slog" via url.town. Foucault News links Balibar's "Sur la catastrophe informatique"; Verso continues Blackburn's Prologue to the Cuban Revolution part II; The Common publishes Jeffrey Wolf's Loons in Strandir.
Journal of Western Archives publishes a case study on OSIRIS-REx born-digital archiving; JLSC has a faculty survey on open-access publishing; the US Copyright Office redesignated the MLC and DLC under the MMA; Library of Congress Bookmarked previews a Carlotta Walls LaNier appearance on June 13; Software Sustainability Institute drops a practical "AI for Humanities Research Software" guide; Wikimedia Diff highlights Bolivia hosting WikiConference Latin America 2026 and the Africa Wiki Women mentorship program.
Three artist interviews from The Creative Independent: Kelsey Armstrong on knowing when to stop, Yasmina Hilal on staying in Lebanon, and Andy 'Red' PK on hard work. Reasons to be Cheerful covers a state model of relentless mental-health outreach and block parties replacing cars. Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel are running a College For All Jubilee School livestream. Theresa O'Connor pulled out Scituate's 1776 instructions to its representative — apt for a week of executive-power news. And IEEE Spectrum has the now-genre-required 7 ways new engineers can flourish in the age of AI.
Note: 38 articles older than the 2-day window leaked through via FreshRSS's crawl-time filter — they were dropped client-side and aren't included above.