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Sam Easter

@samkweaster.bsky.social
204 followers 669 following 161 posts

Once and future j-school adjunct. Michigan-based. Nowadays: Freelance journeyman @ NYTimes, WaPo, Vice, Daily Beast. Good old days: GF Herald, MLive.

PostsRepliesMedia
Sam Easter @samkweaster.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Asking the doctor to give my next kid "the full Wembanyama" www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/s...
nytimes.com
In a First, Scientists Precisely Edit Human Embryo Genes
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Mina Kimes @minakimes.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
I can't stop laughing at this post. It's perfect.
A guy asking ChatGPT to review a series of fart sound effects and getting a serious kiss ass response that calls it atmospheric
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Robert Smith @bondhack.ft.com · 09/04/2026
Hall of fame FT correction
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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
In March, renewables produced more than a third of US electricity for the first time ever, even overtaking gas generation! Wind and solar combined reached over a quarter (26%) for the first time.
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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
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b. wolo @bwolo.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
William Butler Yeats gazing in the direction of Bethlehem:
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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Where does he go next? Bloomberg charts possibly ploys Trump will use to avoid compliance with today's SCOTUS ruling.
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Minnesota Star Tribune @startribune.com · 30/01/2026
The Minnesota Star Tribune, @mprnews.org @minnesotareformer.com , @spokesmanrecorder.bsky.social, @sahanjournal.bsky.social, Center for Broadcast Journalism and Minnesota Newspaper Association today released the following statement:
The Minnesota Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, the Minnesota Reformer, Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Sahan Journal, Center for Broadcast Journalism and Minnesota Newspaper Association today released the following statement:

“We strongly condemn the arrest of journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon, as well as any attempt to intimidate members of the press. The First Amendment recognizes the press as holding a distinct and protected role in our democracy. In America, we do not arrest journalists for doing their jobs. The Minnesota journalism community stands united in defense of press freedom and the essential role reporting plays in holding power to account.”
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Mike Hixenbaugh @mikehixenbaugh.com · 30/01/2026
"As a member of the press, I filmed the church protest a few weeks ago and now I'm being arrested for that," Indipendent journalist Georgia Fort said. "It's hard to understand how we have a Constitution, Constitutional rights, when we can just be arrested for being a member of the press."
kare11.com
Journalists Don Lemon, Georgia Fort arrested in connection with church protest against ICE
Lemon's attorney said he was taken into custody by federal officers Thursday night in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammy Awards.
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Sam Easter @samkweaster.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Science confirms it: going to the Lego store with a two year old whips ass
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JLRay @jlray.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
The latest from YouGov (n ~ 2.7k). A majority of Americans say ICE tactics are "too forceful." Only 27 percent say they are appropriate as-is. ICE approval: -13 Approval of recent protests against ICE: +2 today.yougov.com/topics/overv...
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Mike Hixenbaugh @mikehixenbaugh.com · 08/01/2026
Forensic analysis of objective video evidence. This is how you serve readers searching for clarity.
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CJ Ciaramella @cjciaramella.bsky.social · 23/12/2025
One of the most fun parts of being a reporter is sending people emails just to see if they'll crash out.
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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 20/12/2025
Currently at the funeral for the penny, happening at the Lincoln Memorial:
People are here for the funeral of the pennyA “celebration of life” sign People are sitting down An obituary that reads “Rest in Pence”
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
the epstein files as rick owens fall/winter 2024
Two photos. One shows a page from the Epstein files. Almost the entire page has been blacked out except for a single line at the top. The second photo shows an all-black Rick Owens outfit with the model's white face being the only visible part.Two photos. One shows a page from the Epstein files. Almost the entire page has been blacked out except for two lines at the top and five lines at the bottom. The second photo shows an all-black Rick Owens outfit with the model's white face and legs being the only visible parts.Two photos. One shows a page from the Epstein files. The entire page has been blacked out. The second photo shows an all-black Rick Owens outfit with the black model's face being the only visible part. Two photos. One shows a page from the Epstein files. Almost the entire page has been blacked out except for a block of text at the top. The second photo shows an all-black Rick Owens outfit with the model's white face being the only visible part.
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Matt Salomone @matthematics.com · 19/12/2025
Chief Wiggum stands defensively blocking a closet from the curious gaze of Bart Simpson and Ralph. “What is your fascination with my forbidden files of mystery?” Wiggum asks.
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Peter Baker @peterbakernyt.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
It all might make more sense if he actually were drinking. But Trump, with his "alcoholic's personality," seems even less inhibited in a way that has many in Washington shaking their heads and wondering if the leader of the free world has lost it. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/u...
nytimes.com
Shouting, Ranting, Insulting: Trump’s Uninhibited Second Term
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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
A lot of writers talk about their greatest fear being the empty page but to me that’s nothing compared to mummies
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Ned Raggett @nedraggett.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
Hell with it, I'm just going to post the whole thing here via screencap and alt text. It's Kaleb Horton, man, his writing always deserves the second read, especially since it could have just easily been lost forever like so much else. Read it, share it.
A look at forgotten Hollywood landmarks
By Kaleb Horton 

Let's say you come in from down south, and you're looking for an unsung movie landmark.

So you fly in to LAX, rent a car, blow right past Hollywood, leave Los Angeles county heading north, go over the Grapevine, gape at the monumental hills and, wow, there really is a Smokey Bear Road, then you turn off the air conditioner when the sign tells you. Once you come down the grade too fast and see the world's loneliest Denny's, you're well on your way to what you're looking for – the middle of nowhere.

You're going to Kern County to find the spot where Alfred Hitchcock filmed one of the greatest scenes in movie history, the crop duster sequence from "North by Northwest." It takes place in Indiana, of course, but the Indiana road sign and the imported corn field can't deceive this Bakersfield native. The parched and desolate heat of the scene feels too much like Kern County.

The scene people know off-hand — Cary Grant running from an airplane — isn't why "North by Northwest" is a classic. The film's greatness, as was often the case for Hitchcock, lies in its build-up, its suspense, its mood. The plane moment is almost anticlimax. It is those five minutes before Grant's desperate escape that constitute a mathematically perfect suspense scene. So expert is Hitchcock's hand that he creates suspense, a slow burning dread, with no camera tricks and no music in broad daylight.Grant's character is a prototypical James Bond. His perfect suit, fast wit, high-alcohol tolerance and effortless charisma have got him out of every predicament so far. In the city, among people, he has powers. Take him away from people, put him nowhere, and he's just like us — totally helpless. He has no powers: His suit is no good out here; his million-dollar tailoring and perfect haircut is just vanity now. No amount of pretending can provide escape. Here, is the one place where he can die, and he gets by on the grace of God. All he can do is wait for what's coming.

So when you seek the lost landmark of this scene, you're looking for an idea as much as a place. You're on Highway 99 now, going 30 miles north of Bakersfield, looking for an unassuming patch of dirt that carries spiritual weight. The scene was filmed neart Garces Highway to the west of Delano. You'll think there's a handy exit for it. There's not. You'll probably get lost in Delano, counting on a connection. You're at once a million miles from Hollywood and a hundred miles away. It's lonely. The horizon sprawls forever like there's nothing past it. There are broken down trucks on the side of the road, plumes of smoke from faraway fires. You'll find Garces eventually.

You'll pass a bar called Rosy's Place, abandoned houses, an oil field, a prison, a cemetery, a sign that says "we clean headstones," and a whole lot of gold-on-brown punctuated by an occasional trailer or car going faster than you. You're looking for where Garces meets Corcoran Road. That's where this "North by Northwest" scene was filmed. You'll get a vague idea where it is but you'll never be exactly sure, since there's little impetus for clear signage 10 miles from a prison. Maybe Corcoran Road is unlabeled. Besides, that Indiana sign and the prop cornfield haven't been there in 56 years.If you're anything like me, you'll lose the light and call it a day, unsatisfied with the route you took. You return to I-5 northbound. From the 5, you'll meet Route 46, and go through a place called Lost Hills, then back in to the location from Corcoran Road instead. That's how Hitchcock probably did it. More intuitive.

Still in the middle of nowhere, but on your way to Corcoran Road, you're right next to another Hollywood landmark: Blackwells Corner, James Dean's last stop. It's a glorified Texaco, and gas is 50 cents a gallon more than it should be. They sell Jelly Bellys and '50s kitsch artifacts — plates with Marilyn Monroe's face on them, and so forth. They really figured out how to cash in on death. You don't want to stop here.

But I stopped. I asked the kid at the Blackwells Corner counter how to get to Corcoran Road. He gave me a look that said "there's no reason to go there," and then wearily told me where to go anyway. I was about 8 miles from the destination.

Going there is a meditative experience. You're not just going to the middle of nowhere. You're going to the perfect nowhere. Going alone, in the hypnotic heat of the Central Calfiornia Valley, you might even forget what year it is. There is no reason to believe the road would be so well preserved for half a century, intimately tied to the career of an actor born in Bristol 111 years ago, but it has been.There's an abandoned house. A barn with a cross on it. But almost nothing has changed in 56 years. At some point new lines were added on the road. There's overgrowth where there didn't used to be overgrowth. A couple discarded Budweiser cans from who knows when, but mostly it's identical. This is the same sleepy loneliness that Alfred Hitchcock used to make great art in 1959. And that may sound dull, but tranquility is the point. You stand on that dirt and there's no distraction from what's in your soul. It's an inner destination, not an outer one.

I told my grandma about it when I got back to Bakersfield. She told me her Uncle Harold thought it was the prettiest road in America. And she showed me a picture of a Corcoran grade school class posing in the dirt with Grant and Hitchcock. It's just a field trip picture. The kids are fidgeting, many with arms folded, some shielding their eyes from the sun, all with obedient smiles. They'd all be in their sixties now, but they'd remember where this road is.

It emphasized the ugliness of James Dean's last stop becoming a place to sell T-shirts. It's about what we preserve, and what we don't, and what we remember, and what we don't. It's easy to find shrines to morbidity and hard to find meaningful places. For those, you have to go looking.
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Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
I will never forget having to edit Jamal’s final, posthumous piece for the Washington Post, after he was murdered. He was calling for free expression in the Arab world. You can read it here : www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/glo...
washingtonpost.com
Opinion | Jamal Khashoggi: What the Arab world needs most is free expression
The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events.
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Joost van Spanje @joostvanspanje.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
Today in Dutch newspaper @parool.nl: The murder of a lawyer in 2019 made judges sentence Dutch citizens of Moroccan descent 71% harsher on average in the weeks after. The researchers who discovered it call it a salience effect - judges paying more attention to particular traits that a suspect has.
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Jim Calabro ♟️ @calabro.io · 03/11/2025
This is a fun chart! The green is the main bsky load balancer traffic throughput from Saturday night, and the purple is how much traffic there was 7 days before (the previous Saturday) The spike is due to the world series - pretty incredible! ⚾
A chart of the main bsky backend load balancer request throughput compared to 7 days earlier (the previous Saturday). There's a massive spike during the world series game.
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Amy @lolennui.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
brand new sentence
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Ryan Teague Beckwith @ryanbeckwith.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Editor in chief, city editor, features editor
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Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
The sport that is 'America's sport,' according to US adults: Football 53% Baseball 27% Basketball 8% Soccer 3% Auto racing 3% Hockey 1% www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/202…
Chart showing more than half of Americans (53%) say America’s sport is football – about twice the share who say it’s baseball (27%). Much smaller shares choose one of the other four sports we asked about: basketball (8%), soccer (3%), auto racing (3%) or hockey (1%).  We also included the option for Americans to write in another sport. The most common answers volunteered were golf, boxing, rodeo and ice skating.
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John Schwartz @jswatz.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Aw, no. Not Jane Goodall. www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...
washingtonpost.com
Jane Goodall, primatologist and friend to chimpanzees, dies at 91
She used her global fame to draw attention to the plight of dwindling chimpanzee populations and, more broadly, to the perils of environmental destruction.
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Jacob Bogage @jacobbogage.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Lightning round of what’s closed and what’s open during this government shutdown. Got questions? Drop them in the replies and I’ll work to answer them through the day.
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Sam Easter @samkweaster.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
What has Tom Hanks done now
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Ryan Teague Beckwith @ryanbeckwith.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
If you have an extra $10 a month to spare, here's a list of worker-owned cooperative news sites you might want to support: • 404 Media • Defector • The Flytrap • Flaming Hydra • The Appeal • Aftermath • Racket • Hell Gate • The 51st • The Colorado Sun • Range Media • Discourse Blog • Pop Heist
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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 16/09/2025
YouGov asked Americans to identify which elements of American culture are associated with the MAGA movement. I took the data and made some charts and an interactive. www.pbump.net/o/the-maga-s...
pbump.net
The MAGA subset of American culture
One of the things I appreciate about the polling firm YouGov is that they are able to poll a lot of things over a short timeframe. One effect of that is that they can ask unusual questions and get sta...
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Sam Easter @samkweaster.bsky.social · 14/09/2025
Did a double take when I realized the outlet
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Matt Pearce @mattdpearce.com · 12/09/2025
Tapping the sign. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-plotle...
In my own past work as a reporter covering the public violence of mass shooters and terrorists, I saw that the emotional and propaganda impulses of the political arena almost always seek clarity at the cost of accuracy, indulging a tendency to look away from the inevitable chaos of biographical truth: The killers have narrative, in a sense that the events in their lives follow one after another, but frequently lack plot. The James Earl Ray who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 was a racist, it's true, but that's almost giving the real Ray too much coherence. It was Dr. King who was one of the great and inevitable Americans, the Hegelian world-historical figure hauling us toward to our republican destiny; Ray was a small-time criminal and a drifter interested in hypnosis who was thinking about going into the pornography business. What's ridiculous is that we ever had to know who Ray really was. The biographical limitations here are that the more you learn, the less you really understand.
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Amarnath Amarasingam @amaramarasingam.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Toronto man wakes from nap to find himself falsely accused online of killing Charlie Kirk www.thestar.com/news/gta/tor...
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Sam Easter @samkweaster.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
It's important to cool it until we see something more substantial than "officials said." We don't have anything yet.
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Eric Columbus @ericcolumbus.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Here is the New York Times from September 11, 2001, already old news by the time I picked it up from my doorstep. I’ve never been able to open it up or throw it out.
Photo of the newspaper inside a blue plastic home delivery bag
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Nolan Hicks @ndhapple.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
The Salt Lake Tribune had a photographer at the Charlie Kirk rally, who has sent back photos of the immediate aftermath -- www.sltrib.com/news/2025/09...
sltrib.com
Photos: Charlie Kirk shot in Utah
Photographers from The Salt Lake Tribune were covering Charlie Kirk’s speech at Utah Valley University when he was shot.
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David Nir @davidnir.com · 10/09/2025
Breaking news consumer's handbook
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Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · 10/09/2025
Among the many reasons not to start posting your takes yet is that we literally have no idea what happened or why
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
WaPo on who's responding to the ICE recruitment drive www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
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kim @kimmymonte.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
*opens up your fridge and sees you have 2% milk* hey bro you need to charge your milk
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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
The photos in the post below are by Gabriele Galimberti and I interviewed him about them after they went viral in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy. Was a fascinating interview www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...
theatlantic.com
What the Viral Gun Photographer Has to Say About His Subjects
“When people use my photos to judge the people in them, that is a mistake. The real judgment in my work is on the society that allows this.”
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Kashmir Hill @kashhill.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
The exchanges between Adam and ChatGPT are devastating. This, in my mind, is the worst one. One of his last messages was a photo of the noose hung in his bedroom closet, asking if it was "good." ChatGPT offered a technical analysis of the set up and told him it 'could potentially suspend a human."
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Kashmir Hill @kashhill.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...
nytimes.com
A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.
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Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
UPDATE: Lisa Cook says she's not going anywhere and Trump's bid to fire her is baseless. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
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The Onion @theonion.com · 21/08/2025
Businessman Does His Work Lying On Bed Like Schoolgirl
Businessman Does His Work Lying On Bed Like Schoolgirl
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Sam Easter @samkweaster.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
It's not even 11 and I've already reached the "add a thing to the to-do list just to cross it off the to-do list" part of the day
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