Melissa Gira Grant

‘We Are Not Expendable’: Southaven Residents Fight xAI Plan for 41 Gas Turbines to Power Musk's Grok Many residents around Southaven, Mississippi, oppose xAI’s data centers and presence in their backyards, fearing for their health and environment.

“You can feel it rattling your eardrums,” Devan Jenkins, who lives in Memphis’ Whitehaven neighborhood, said while describing the sound of the turbines that power one of Elon Musk's xAI data centers. “It makes you feel like you're going insane.”

farming and gardening in 2025: how are we pivoting? YouTube video by Regenerative Gardening with Blossom & Branch Farm

I’m still just skating the surface of gardening youtube and so only now came across a video (from about a year ago) anticipating the impact on gardeners and small-scale market farmers from mass deportations, tariffs, USDA staffing, and losing science grants:

(it’s been two garden work days and I’ve had three total strangers just stop and stare and compliment flowers that are barely stems, the thirst for spring is real)

“working in the garden”? or an unsophisticated anarchist plot to meet one’s neighbors

A little offended Grammarly didn't make a sloppelganger of me

One in every 1,257 American residents.

Why independent bookshops strike fear in the heart of Germany’s culture tsar | Fatma Aydemir First he came for Berlin’s film festival. Now it’s books. Wolfram Weimer seems to be on a mission to curb progressive thinking, says Guardian Europe columnist Fatma Aydemir

“Is that the reason why Germany’s culture commissioner, Wolfram Weimer, is now consulting the domestic intelligence agency before approving funds to bookshops?… A quick look at the three bookshops is telling: they are antifascist, they are proud of it and they are institutions in their communities.”

Cool timing, or not, while Times Guild
members are currently bargaining over AI: newsguild.org/inside-ai-ne...

took no photos of the midday scene at Bryant Park today but you can imagine

No!!

an open notebook, blank pages, with pink and brown dried flowers coming apart into seeds strewn across

seedlings update: everything is happening at once! true leaves multiplying. playing roulette with not-potting-up, esp with frost feeling very distant right now (unrelated, a first: I sowed these seeds collected from the blood-red celosia I grew from seed last year)

……typo above I know—“being blunted by those who see (and/or who want others to see)”

signing off for a few days, away message:

is it so hard to see people are not waiting to be told what’s possible

particularly when people are putting their safety on the line to defend people from abduction by the state—is that expressing “disagreement” with anti-immigration “policy”? or maybe, more simply and directly, it’s people standing in the way

it’s never felt more stark to me, the way direct action, community defense, and a whole host of forms of refusal are being blunted by those see (and/or who want others to see) such actions as “disagreement with a policy” or “seeking policy change”

<3 hoping to create a little frog habitat in my garden this year, city frogs for life

illustration of three frogs dancing in a boombox forest grove, with the text GET IN THE FUCKI [line break] NG FROG PIT

are frogs still happening?

it’s been so long since I’ve been on the subway, the few people I saw with some kind of frog on them, I thought like a reflex, “hello comrade”

A WOMAN IS AGAINST THE LAW // LITTLE, BROWN // 2027

This has nothing to do with the specific content here, but Polymarket adopting the language of news, here with BREAKING, and with Texas election results earlier this week, is BAD. Polymarket is not and will never be a news org or break news. It's a betting app. It's Draft Kings for sociopaths.

Running for Congress on a platform of sneaking into Polymarket HQ and unplugging all their stuff. Overflow crowds at a local Knights of Columbus hall roar with delight as I promise to pour Florida's Natural Grapefruit Juice (with pulp) into the USB-C port of every computer in the damn place.

I’m in this line edit and I hate it

or it’s a repeat? I was at the one in New Orleans in 2015 (aka how to teach reporters with a hangover how to read a 990) and one near like, a Sea World in 2018

pretty sure I went to that session at IRE

the narrative lede was the first post, and this, the third post, is explaining that

if we’re editing other people in our heads today, I’m killing the nut graf

saw someone comparing the narrative lede to longass stories preceding recipes and—

Newly Poly Plover Dad Still Figuring Out His Time Management | Defector The animal kingdom is ruled by open sexual relationships. Bats, beetles, and bonobos all have multiple partners over a season or a lifetime. Barnacles and barracudas don’t even get to pick their partn...

which publisher will give this bird a book deal to explore his experience with ENM!
defector.com/newly-poly-p...

it’s been ages since the Times had a public editor responding to criticism of the Times in the Times. now they just have one of those self-hyping War Room accounts