Profile avatar
johnmcquaid.bsky.social
Journalist, author (Tasty, on science of flavor; Path of Destruction, on Katrina); currently PhD candidate at UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism studying media coverage/public debates over AI risk.
505 posts 506 followers 462 following
Prolific Poster
Conversation Starter
Posts 32 Comments 18

If I were trying to establish authoritarian rule in what is currently a democracy (which in fact I'm not) I would not be driving directly at existing institutions at 1,000 MPH betting that they collapse on impact

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Dan Balz situates a massive effort to destroy American institutions within the borders of normal politics, b/c anything other than normal politics is unthinkable to him. So his main question is how *effective* Trump is at this, with ineffectiveness = failure www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

"The Great Gatsby" was published 100 years ago today. Charles Schulz came back to it numerous times in "Peanuts," including in this strip from June 26, 1995, my favorite in the last decade of "Peanuts," so spare and melancholy and strange.

submitted 6 days ago • 4 comments

Access uber alles

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

The NYT folks I know get testy about all the criticism re: framing & headlines, but then they casually drop a 36 Perfect Hours In Bavaria With Goebbels banger like this and… 🤷‍♂️

submitted 6 days ago • 5 comments

Biggest mistakes I'm seeing in early reporting (thread): 1. Tariffmageddon isn't over: Lotsa tariffs to account for, but the average tariff rate is only down around one quarter. So most of the pain of Liberation Day is still with us.

submitted 6 days ago • 171 comments

This NYTimes story exemplifies one of the stupidest aspects of DOGE's crusade to "cut government spending." DOGE fired a NOAA employee who supervises a dozen NW salmon hatcheries to ensure they comply with the Endangered Species Act and other laws and it may screw up salmon harvests for years. 1/14

submitted 7 days ago • 5 comments

DOJ is making zero substantive legal arguments to support its deportation policies – or less than zero, since it also prioritizes taunting judges. It sees the courts entirely as a stage for political theater, and improvised political theater at that

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

We’ve lost so much: “People who will never know John Thornton’s name will owe him a debt because they have reliable, credible, independent news in their communities. Their communities are smarter, better, and healthier.” www.cjr.org/news/john-th...

submitted 14 days ago • 26 comments

By request: some comments on the @booker.senate.gov filibuster. 1) is it a filibuster? YES. Filibustering is defined as parliamentary delay for strategic gain. As of this morning, Booker had not delayed anything, so I would have said "no." But now he has consumed a full day of Senate "work." 1/x

submitted 14 days ago • 6 comments

She’ll be deputy secretary of education by next month

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Sign of the times: an "election analyst" (presumably an academic) – a group once generally fine with having their names appear in the Washington Post – asks to be quoted anonymously because they make a (self-evident) criticism of Trump www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Maybe it's been done, but I have yet to see a full journalistic accounting of how Columbia has basically self-destructed amid culture war forces unleashed in the wake of Oct. 7

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Susan Sontag on Fascinating Fascism:

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

The thing is, Executive Orders are the vaporware of governance. They’re the equivalent of Microsoft Windows notifications telling you what Windows thinks you want to happen, but that you don’t actually want, and which is wasting your time, if not actually going to cause the system to freeze/crash.

submitted 73 days ago • 2 comments

This is supposed to be the Trump high-stakes legal bid to ditch habeas corpus, but it's being run entirely as a PR operation with the legal stuff improvised

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Adam Serwer said this week the American intelligentsia has not produced a fraction of the criticism of Trump’s fascist assault on American freedom that it deserved. Here’s an example. Barack Obama should be literally yelling about the end of the American Republic. Does he not have the nerve?

submitted 24 days ago • 83 comments

Information Silos exist for very good reasons. Do you want your medical data, tax data, social media days, etc combined in one place and made available to anyone in the federal government?

submitted 24 days ago • 10 comments

Journalism still working, sometimes

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

what is an "opposition leader" can anyone explain this to me

submitted 25 days ago • 6 comments

If I were setting out to build autocracy in America, I wouldn't be saying things like this. But if I wanted to provoke a popular uprising against autocracy, this seems like an effective way to go

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

This reminds me of a rule that Austan Goolsbee (now Chicago Fed president, then an econ professor) once taught me. He called it the “pathological irony of crisis”: If you lose credibility, your statements begin to mean the opposite of what you say. www.axios.com/2025/03/20/t...

submitted 26 days ago • 35 comments

Saying that the FTC commissioners were, in fact, fired and that the FTC’s nearly century-long tradition of independence as a multimember agency is now, suddenly at an end is ***drumroll*** prejudging a legal outcome. You fail your own stupid test and must repeat newswriting 101.

submitted 28 days ago • 40 comments

New York Times headline ties itself in knots trying to avoid directly stating the truth. Hedges in the main headline ("Fear of a Constitutional Crisis") then the subhead says OK, busted, only question is how bad it will be

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

This is insightful and esp. interesting from a systems perspective. Can Trump simply shut down or smother U.S. democratic institutions so fast it kills them outright, or does the speed itself create so much chaos and instability in a large and usually slow-moving system that it ultimately backfires?

submitted 28 days ago • 2 comments

News media should note that in normal peace talks, *warring parties meet.* Instead, a chaotic round-robin: U.S. talks to Ukraine, presents that to Russia, which blows it off; then Trump talks to Putin, presents that to Ukraine. Aim is to disadvantage Ukraine. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 28 days ago • 1 comment

Just an absolutely, fundamentally wrong way to report this research. AI models do not experience "anxiety" or any other emotion. This is misinforming the public. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/s...

submitted 29 days ago • 30 comments

Rather than just straight-up hyping the false idea that chatbots have feelings (they have no consciousness, awareness, or any subjective experience) – maybe try to explain how feelings are proxied in language, manifest in AI datasets, and are processed by chatbots www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/s...

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

This is a really weird headline. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

submitted 30 days ago • 26 comments

This is an important article about DOGE from @wired.com , but I hope there's a part 2 that focuses on a few important questions: First, which AI tools are they using, and what's the process for determining that? Quite obviously, this will be a corrupt process designed to pay-off Trump's oligarchs.

submitted 31 days ago • 23 comments

I think @joshtpm.bsky.social is doing great work & this is generally a good assessment of 2 bad options. But he continues to minimize what has happened in the courts. Among other things (friction, friction, friction) they've been a key tool for public opinion. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/looki...

submitted 32 days ago • 16 comments

There are many Democrats who don’t agree with some or many of AOC’s policy ideas. But what she gets and more conventional Democrats do not is that political fight can be catalyzing and transformative. You can change the shape of the playing board in ways … www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/p...

submitted 33 days ago • 154 comments