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Alys Brooks

@alysbrooks.bsky.social
376 followers 395 following 896 posts

Freelance writer, reporter, and developer based in Wisconsin. she/her/hers. @transjournalists.org member. @MarquetteU alumna. Words @rewirenewsgroup.com, @AssignedMedia.org, Door County Knock, CapTimes

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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 9h
There was this story about medical students publishing increasingly more dodgy research, although it was more TriNetX in combination with AI. www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Medical students are using a popular research tool to pump out misleading studies
Critics say TriNetX’s easy analyses of electronic medical records fuel quick-and-dirty publications from inexperienced authors
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tuck woodstock @tuck.bsky.social · 13h
The 12th(!) Gender Reveal grant cycle is now open for applications! As always, these funds are for organizing / community projects led by trans people of color. We are particularly interested in funding existing projects that materially support trans folks, queer people of color, immigrants, etc.
Are you a trans person of color doing rad art or community organizing work? we want to give you $1000! applications for the gender reveal podcast's 2026 grant program are open now through October 31. apply and learn more at genderpodcast.com/grant.We are specifically looking for projects that materially support trans folks, queer people of color, and/or other marginalized communities, as well as projects that foster exploration and celebration of gender diversity and trans lives. 

We accept applications from anywhere in the world. Collectives/groups are welcome to apply.

Grant recipients are chosen by a paid panel of trans judges of color. Winners will be announced by December 31, 2026. 

AI-written applications will be deleted.
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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Arguably the biggest democracy referendum next month: Virginia is one of only three states where the state constitution says people should lose their right to vote FOR THEIR ENTIRE LIFE if they are convicted of any felony. This measure would allow anyone to vote after prison.
boltsmag.org
“It’s Time”: Virginians Will Decide Whether to Repeal Jim Crow-Era Lifetime Ban on Voting - Bolts
Voters will decide this year whether to end Virginia’s uniquely harsh felony disenfranchisement rules. They'll also vote on abortion, gay marriage, and redistricting.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Most of the large AI companies say they do not engage in these practices and provide the usual documentation of their scrapers. Of course we wouldn't necessarily know if they operate additional scraping efforts that don't identify themselves or contract with companies that do.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
What makes these AI scrapers different from (most) other scrapers is that they don't respect long-standing conventions to opt out of scraping and often operate through home users' internet connections, making it harder to distinguish them from human users. blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-...
blog.includesecurity.com
The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy - Include Security Research Blog
In this post we look under the hood of BrightData's SDK and how it turns ordinary consumer TVs into exit nodes of an enormous commercial, residential proxy network leveraged by the AI industry to scra...
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
It’s such a departure from common practice that I can’t fathom not warning people up front. The warning wouldn’t automatically make it okay, but there’s no way it could be ethical without disclosing that.
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
These victories were achieved through the efforts of Civil Rights activists, along with support from Neiman Marcus president Stanley Marcus, who was an early advocate for desegregation. The Neiman Marcus Dallas store manager purportedly warned Marcus that he would destroy his business this way.
A Black man protesting in front of a department store in San Diego, California. He's wearing a suit and holding a sign that says "We March Protesting the Indignity and Humility of Jim Crow." There are some people behind him. Stanley Marcus smoking a pipe. He's wearing a striped suit.
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The downtown Neiman Marcus flagship was one of the first major Dallas businesses that broke with these practices. In 1961, the company desegregated its Zodiac Room, a swanky lunch spot frequented by Dallas elites. Later, they welcomed Black shoppers to come and buy clothes without restrictions.
The Zodiac Room restaurant on the sixth floor of Neiman Marcus in Dallas. The photo shows a bunch of tables covered in white tablecloth and leather covered seats.
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Ian Weissman, DO @drianweissman.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
In a small kidney cancer trial, nine people received an experimental vaccine tailored to their own tumors. None experienced a recurrence during a median follow-up of roughly three years and four months after surgery. www.sciencealert.com/nine-patient...
sciencealert.com
Nine Patients Received a Personalized Kidney Cancer Vaccine. None Had a Recurrence.
How do you teach the immune system to recognize a cancer cell? Researchers are taking clues from the tumor itself, selecting unusual protein fragments and putting them into a vaccine.
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CalMatters @calmatters.org · 02/10/2026
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure to ban anyone from marrying anyone under the age of 18, making California the 18th state to do so in a decade-long nationwide push to outlaw the practice. cal.news/3U3J14X 📸 Rahul Lal
A demonstrator participates in a “chain-in” protest during a news conference at the state Capitol in Sacramento on June 22, 2023, urging lawmakers to ban child marriage in the state. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I don't want to boost the Needle piece any more, but I do want to address it saying Erin Reed has a "near-monopoly" on information important to the trans community. She doesn't! By all means, hold journalists accountable but don't overestimate our influence or underestimate yours.
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The Tennessean: Christa Pike still alive after administered drugs, attorneys say www.tennessean.com/story/news/c...
q THE TENNESSEAN
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BREAKING NEWS: Christa Pike still alive after administered lethal injection drugs, attorneys say
• 8:48 pm CT
Christa Pike still alive after administered drugs, attorneys say
Evan Mealins
A lawyer for Christa Pike said executioners have administered two syringes of lethal injection drugs to Pike but that she remains alive and breathing.
Kelly Gleason, an attorney for Pike, said she heard this from another of Pike's attorneys, Randy Spivey. Gleason said Spivey was in the death chamber with Pike but stepped out to call Gleason.
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Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear" www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...
AI polling results can lean on racial or partisan stereotypes

In many cases, our AI poll took beliefs or attitudes that are reasonably common among a particular subgroup and portrayed them as nearly ubiquitous. For example, our AI poll would indicate that:

    97% of Hispanic adults are at least somewhat likely to follow the World Cup (while the actual share is 43%).
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
"Two sides of the same coin" is important to note because in many cases they end up causing similar harms even if the ideological justifications are different.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I have yet to read the whole article but what I have read has not assuaged my concerns about the source or methodology.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I‘m not sure I understand your point about epistemic capture. Is that referring to researchers‘ independence?
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Kind of sounds like something that afflicts a heroine in a Brontë sisters novel.
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Rachel @rachelneedsanap.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Hearing a non-Jewish public figure cite Talmud respectfully is SO REFRESHING.
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Assigned Media @assignedmedia.org · 29/09/2026
Democrats seem headed for big wins, but one avenue for self-sabotage would be adopting R's framing on trans rights. @billiejsweeney.bsky.social spoke with insiders incl Lanae Erikson of Third Way and Rep. Sarah McBride for this substanial piece of new reporting. assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...
assignedmedia.org
Democrats Lose by Punching Down on Trans Issues, Strategists Say - Assigned Media
Insiders, including at centrist think tank Third Way, are cautioning Democratic candidates against echoing Republican talking points on trans rights.
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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 29/09/2026
“Three people dying in one day is an amplification of what we’ve already seen,” said Andrew Free, a former immigration attorney and investigative journalist who has for years extensively worked on ICE-related death cases.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
Three deaths, three states, 24 hours: one day in ICE’s quiet but ‘gruesome’ surge
These men in Maine, Georgia and Florida shared no ties – until they became casualties in Trump’s anti-immigration campaign
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
There‘s probably quite a few videos in the vein of trying Meta Horizon to dunk on it, but this reminds me of one by Jarvis Johnson where he found the number of active users on the busiest worlds added up to 900 or so. So it seems plausible there are virtually no Muse users.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I think it‘s safe to assume most people don‘t understand as much about stigmatized and undervalued jobs as they think, but the responses to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social‘s commentary on AI make me wonder if people understand as much about any job as they think, their own included.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Yeah, this process you describe is the step most optimistic hypotheticals of AI tend to downplay or leave out. It’s easy to make something sound like a no-brainer if you highlight only the time it saves and none of the drudgery it demands
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Luke Plunkett @lukeplunkett.com · 28/09/2026
Hi, I'm looking to speak to people who have left games journalism in the last few years and have gone onto do something else. DMs are open, or luke@aftermath.site, thanks!
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 27/09/2026
You don't have an inalienable right to be an antisocial dipshit because you're doomscrolling all day and it makes you feel terrible. There are no qualifiers to this. You are not released from the obligation to try to be decent just because Elon Musk is lighting the world on fire.
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Campus rape is really widespread; statistics suggest a significant percent of women who go to college will be raped there; feminism opened up a good conversation about it around 2012-13; it's weird when people treated Cornell like an isolated rather than dramatic example of a pervasive problem.
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Hugo Lowell @hugolowell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
TRUMP will meet Anthropic’s Dario Amodei for one on one dinner tonight, per person familiar and confirming Axios
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Sometimes extremist ideas diffuse through the right wing, other times their advocates are invited in by Trump and his officials, but either way, extremist rhetoric and ideas repeatedly find a home in the White House.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
A small point in favor of the Globe story about The Last Ditch Bar being inspired by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's podcast is that the author follows both (but not the podcast) on X. I say a small point because she follows 1,367 other people and doesn't seem terribly active.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Excellent advice for anyone discussing LLMs and other AI systems, journalist or not.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Having any disability perhaps wasn't a major risk factor, but weren't a variety of specific disabilities major risk factors? (Even if they collectively don't represent a large percentage of the disabled.)
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The Globe article makes it sound like the author was personally there on Sept. 12, and the screenshot shows a publication date of Sept. 17, so probably not unless the podcast was in early access or something similar.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It’s a great resource for both (recent) historical and present day questions. The search function isn‘t as good as I would like so I‘d recommend Google with the keyword ”fred“ as a fallback. (Site:fred.stlouisfed.org is probably better but often unnecessary)
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I certainly don't blame people for feeling Urquhart's essay should have been more specific about the harms of Molloy's actions—they are real and serious!—but I do wish there was more acknowledgement that her actions are not the focus of the piece.
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Bowiesongs (C. O'Leary) @bowiesongs.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
William Claxton, "Coltrane at the Guggenheim," 1960
JC on the Guggenheim staircaseColtrane in profile
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 22/09/2026
Sen. Susan Collins helped steer millions in federal defense contracts to Navatek, whose CEO illegally funneled thousands of dollars to her campaign. The FBI sought to launch a probe and was eyeing Collins and other lawmakers. Then Trump gutted the unit in charge. THREAD 🧵
Martin Kao, CEO of defense contractor Navatek, poses next to Sen. Susan Collins for a photo. Collins is holding a model of a boat in her hands. Behind them is a large sign with the Navatek logo.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Here's White's piece: www.citationneeded.news/i-am-my-own-...
citationneeded.news
I am my own legal department: the promise and peril of “just go independent”
Independent publishing is one important facet of the media ecosystem, and while I love it, I know it is not the path for everyone.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It makes me think of @molly.wiki's post showing "the staff" of Citation Needed—all Molly White. Newsletters give opportunities, sure, but they also leave writers to the face the vagaries of the internet alone and, worse, leave marginalized writers unprotected in the pressure cooker Evan described.
Photo of our team, showing Molly White as editor-in-chief, Molly White in sunglasses as general counsel. Molly White in a different shirt as growth, Molly White in a baseball cap as communications, and half of another row of Mollys.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I really liked @evanurquhart.bsky.social's piece today. It was partly about Parker Molloy. But it was really about marginalized voices getting picked off one by one with no system to replace them. (A problem even if you assign some blame to writers themselves.) assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...
assignedmedia.org
The Subtraction Game - Assigned Media
We're losing prominent trans writers much faster than we can replace them.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Liberal Currents writeup: www.liberalcurrents.com/what-are-dem... Cross tabs: stratpolitics.org/wp-content/u...
stratpolitics.org
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The specific example of moving to the right given was "bans on trans children playing on school sports teams," which is one of the most popular restrictions on trans rights. I wonder how many respondents were thinking of that right-wing move specifically as opposed to a broader shift.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
A recent poll by the Center for Strategic Politics found Democratic voters tend to oppose the party moving right on trans issues, with 42 percent against, 35 percent in favor, and 23 percent undecided.
"Democrats should move right on transgender issues: -7" Showing 42 percent against and 35 in agreement.
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The condescension in much of the criticism of "stochastic parrots" (the paper and the term) is truly off the charts. The authors are definitely worth a follow if you're interested in the technology, its societal implications, or both.
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WIRED @wired.com · 21/09/2026
You don’t need to listen to a three-hour podcast to find the manosphere; it’s right there in the conference room. 🔗 www.wired.com/story/women-...
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Nancy SF @bulldykechinashop.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
with alt text
Congresswoman Kaptur,

Let us be clear and direct regarding your recent television ad this election cycle: Shame on you and your campaign staff for pushing this incredibly harmful anti-Trans rhetoric that now unfortunately plays in countless homes and businesses across our beautifully diverse District Nine.
Every election cycle, the LGBTQIA+ community is often faced with two choices at the ballot box. The overly zealous Republican, who gladly pushes a homophobic and Transphobic narrative for votes, and the silent Democrat, who now fears to stand up for all the constituents they represent.

Too often, our community votes for the silent candidate, as we're told it would be "much worse" if the other person were in office.
However, your direct words stating, "I voted with Republicans to keep Transgender ideology out of our schools... as if this is even happening, and "boys should not play in girls' sports..." give us great clarity this November. We now know one thing to be true: There is no difference between whether Marcy Kaptur orDerek Merrin serves as our next Congressperson - you are both united against the LGBTQIA+ community.

Not only do your words create deep emotional harm and place an unnecessary spotlight on our Trans community members, putting them in more danger than they already are given the current climate, but you have also now engaged in a race to the bottom with Republicans. Your rhetoric, coupled with the onslaught of anti-Trans laws that plague our country, has resulted in a 72% increase in suicidal attempts by Trans and non-binary youth (Trevor News, 2024). Such words, like yours, come with a real impact.
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Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · 22/09/2026
Kaptur loses the support of a local LGBTQ group
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
AI detectors, including Pangram, are not perfect, but I think the student journalists at the Dartmouth did a good job validating their work and describing what we know about the accuracy of such tests.
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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 21/09/2026
Holy smokes they actually did it www.cnbc.com/2026/09/21/t...
cnbc.com
White House TV press pool won't cover Trump after CNN ban
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Alys Brooks @alysbrooks.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Yeah, I feel like any chess engine vulnerable to losing against (semi) random moves would be buggy. I don‘t think it was ever an inherent limitation of chess software.
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Elise Gould @elisegould.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
New data alert 🚨 - CEO pay surged in 2025, rising 14% to an average $27.9 million - CEOs are paid 325 times as much as the typical worker in their industry - Between 1978 and 2025, top CEO pay rose 1,316% compared to only a 28% increase for typical workers www.epi.org/blog/ceo-pay... #EconSky
epi.org
CEO pay surged in 2025: CEOs are paid 325 times as much as the typical worker
Key findings: CEO pay at the top 350 U.S. firms rose 14.0% in 2025 to an average of $27.9 million. CEOs made 325 times as much as the typical worker in 2025. It hasn’t always been this way. In 1965, C...
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