Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)

@jb4nay

Chemistry magazine editor 🧪 freelance journalist & grad student. 📚, puns, 🏀, supporting good journalism, art, and 🎮. I be posting links, yes ma'am. Trying to be a little less wack every day (he/they) | Texas ➡️ D(M)V | linktr.ee/jb4nay | Signal: j_forney.85

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Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· 27d

Reading Audre Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals”. This section from “The Transformation of Silence into Action” really hit home

surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.
But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change, or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had ever made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· 27d

What a pitiful state of affairs www.politico.com/news/2026/07...

POLITICO
Meanwhile, Democrats have asked Trump's administration nominees about the 2020 election, testing if they agree with the president's view that the race was stolen while it's treated as a litmus test among MAGA. Director of National Intelligence nominee Jay Clayton was asked several times by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) in his confirmation hearing on Wednesday who won the 2020 election. Clayton responded, "I'm not going to do this with you."
"Isn't it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president's delusions? Ossoff said. "We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question. Why can you not give it?"

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· 27d

And the other 75%, Drew? virginiamercury.com/2026/07/14/r...

Dominion Energy in Virginia sought $1.5 billion across three rate requests, including a $1.1 billion request in unrecovered fuel costs. In Michigan, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy have requested about $500 million each in rate increases.

“With more than $18 billion in requests already on the table for 2026, regulators face mounting pressure to scrutinize utility spending plans while balancing the infrastructure investments that a modernizing grid genuinely requires,” the report concluded.

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents the nation’s investor-owned electric utilities, says its members are focused on keeping energy reliable and affordable. Drew Maloney, president and CEO, pushed for permitting reforms at an energy summit last month, saying as much as a quarter of consumer bills are driven by “regulatory bureaucratic red tape.”

But Maloney acknowledged that energy costs are part of broader affordability concerns facing American consumers.

“We understand that energy costs are a component of that,” he said, “and every one of our members has programs that help people that need different relief from their electrical bills.”

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· 28d

"A temporary training won't solve a deeply engrained problem," Menefee said in a statement. "ICE has been radicalized.
Its agents have shot and killed unarmed people across the country. The agency needs to be torn down to the studs."

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 13

Lmao beyond parody. This is something out of Reno 9-1-1 www.axios.com/2026/07/12/l...

The final hours: Graham spoke with Trump by phone Saturday night and briefed him on his recent trip to Ukraine and the Russia sanctions bill he wanted the Senate to vote on soon.

Trump told Graham he was preparing to launch fresh strikes against Iran after another attack on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
A person who spoke with Graham shortly afterward said the senator complained that he was feeling unwell. When the person urged him to seek medical attention immediately, Graham said he would do so Sunday morning after his scheduled appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Graham then joked: "I can't die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization."
He passed away several hours later.

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 12

The first batch of men raised in this particular flavor of online manosphere content debuted on Love Island. It's unfortunately a good example of the current state of heterosexual dating www.them.us/the-manosphe...

I’d encourage us to refrain from condemning any of the individual men on this show, as we only get snippets of their days, conversations, and actions edited down by a team of producers. Their actions are fine to critique; they are adults who have signed up for this experience, after all, and their words have a cultural impact that needs to be dissected. But I worry that when we get lost in critiquing any one contestant, we miss the forest for the trees. This season of Love Island USA is a worrying warning sign about a generation of young men raised by cultural actors worse than Joe Rogan — one that anyone invested in straight romance should be sweating about.

As a trans person, I usually am not someone who engages in the heteropessimist read that all straight men brought up in a culture of misogyny are doomed. The Manosphere hurts people of all genders alike, and if vulnerable young men are susceptible to falling prey to the ambient misogynistic ideas it espouses, it’s bad for everyone. Rather than abandon all hope, the way forward seems to be trying to reform the thinking of a generation of men who have involuntarily grown up ingesting this toxic content, with the help of other men who call out the behavior. That’s the only way we heal — and it’s also the only way Love Island can be bearable to watch again.

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 11

Are we in a postliterate society? Between fewer people reading for pleasure, excessive screen time, the inundation of short-form video, and AI, there's certainly a case to be made (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Writing is hard. Orwell likened the experience to a “long bout of some painful illness.” AI promises a simple remedy. The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them. Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.

This feels true to me. My job is to write. With apologies to Orwell, the prospect of a painful illness fills me with less dread than a blank page. But there’s satisfaction in the struggle. The writing process is how I refine and formalize inchoate ideas and gain new understanding. By evaluating my arguments and discarding those that aren’t convincing, I find the ones that are. Writing is hard because the writer is learning. If AI eliminates the challenge, it also eliminates the learning.

By some measures at least, books continue to thrive. Last year, print-book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 new stores. Almost 400 independent bookstores sprang up in 2025. Substack has seen an explosion of subscriptions for long-form writing. Celebrities such as Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon have used their fame and influence to launch wildly successful book clubs. Audiobooks have become a billion-dollar industry.

But the optimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 8

The generation whose cost of living was low enough to actually do jobs and “pay their dues” needs to recognize the actual realities of this current generation

"It is a distinctly generational phenomenon," said Ruth Milkman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, who studies labor movements.
"It's not the 60-year-olds in publishing leading this, it's coming from these younger people who are under all this economic pressure."
Shea Dunlop, a sales representative at Abrams, said attitudes have shifted among younger employees, who no longer accept the old argument that publishing is a labor of love.
"The idea that publishing is a creative career that you are lucky to land a job in has allowed the general public and people who are making the rules around here to keep wages low," Dunlop said. "The idea is,
'Oh, you're lucky to have this job! I'd love to buy into that mind set if I could, but I have rent to pay."

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 8

🫡 apnews.com/article/dart...

The ominous orchestral music of “The Imperial March” from the Star Wars movies was the soundtrack for O’Hara’s peaceful protests against President Donald Trump’s ongoing deployment of Guard members in Washington. Millions of TikTok users have viewed O’Hara’s videos of his interactions with troops, according to his lawsuit.

O’Hara, an artist who works in the hospitality industry, says he didn’t interfere with the Guard troops during their Sept. 11, 2025, encounter on a public street. One of the troops summoned Metropolitan Police Department officers, who stopped O’Hara and kept him handcuffed for 15 to 20 minutes before releasing him without charges, according to the lawsuit.

“The law might have tolerated government conduct of this sort a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But in the here and now, the First Amendment bars government officials from shutting down peaceful protests,” the suit says.

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 7

Housing is caught up in red tape forever but the guy who didn't even know how much power data centers use has no issue pushing those through

The Trump administration announced last month that it would not set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the data center industry.

While there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, states and communities know what works best for them, EPA chief Zeldin said at a Politico energy summit in June.

By not enforcing federal regulations, Clara Vondrich, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, said that the EPA gave Big Tech the green light to build polluting power plants and water-intensive facilities without any environmental protection enforcement.

“Big Tech executives have lobbied hard to ingratiate themselves into the Trump administration’s orbit,” Vondrich stated. “Zeldin made clear that their investment was money well spent.”

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 6

Incredible stuff on how the FIFA hydration (ad) breaks aren't fooling anyone www.theguardian.com/football/202...

But this resilience comes from that basic structure. Football is long, hard and boring at times. This is its power. It also presents a modern paradox. For all the marketing doublespeak that young people only want short things, that it is our duty to continue driving slop into their brains for profit, football remains the world’s most popular shared entertainment. It also remains one of the last long, uninterrupted things in that space, still running to its amusingly uncooperative Victorian timelines.

With breathtaking chutzpah, Fifa has made football into a game of four quarters, has crossed a line nobody thought possible, and done it right under our noses. Zoom out a little, and this is the biggest change to the basic structure of the game since 1897, when it was codified that teams would play two halves of 45 minutes. Substitutions and red cards have all followed. But nothing so fundamental to the two basic axes of the game: time and space. It is an act of casual violence, one that changes not just the staging, but its most basic rhythms.

What to do about this? For a start we really should stop calling it “a hydration break”, giving room to the kind of phoney science-style language you might hear in an advert for a shampoo that leaves your hair four times as avocadoliciously multivitaminated. It’s an advert break. We know this. They know it. And language matters. This is the space where the truth is lost. But then Fifa also knows had it not styled this as a drinks break, which sounds swift and manageable, had it just said we are going to make football a four-quarter game so we can have adverts, there would have been outrage, protests even from people in the industry.

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 5

This is all calculated. So many words and yet none of the ones that would actually be useful in this situation. She knows what she's saying (and not saying)

Clark also expressed disappointment about the harassment that came as a result of the situation.

“The harassment, the hate, none of that is OK,” she said. “That goes for the opposing team we play, that goes for my teammates, that goes for my coaches. There should never be a question of character. I’ve always stood up here and said that, and that’s truly what I believe. That’s how I was raised. None of that is OK, and I don’t want anybody to ever experience that.

“I think it can be really frustrating to me at times, and I think it’s difficult. I think a lot of people sometimes think I’m a robot. I’m not a robot. I have emotions, I have feelings, and it can be really difficult to go through a lot of that. I’m 24 years old, trying to navigate a lot. And I think at times — I’ve been in this world for four years now, and you would never change any of it. But there are times that it is hard, and there are times that it probably affects me a little bit more than I do put on.”

She called it a disservice to the league. She also addressed her frustrations related to the reaction.

“I think people just using my name in ways that are just inappropriate,” Clark said. “A lot of people, you don’t know me. You don’t know who I am. … Talk about if it was a flagrant or not, but everything that came after that is confusing to me. And it’s not acceptable.”

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 4

This isn't entirely the league's fault—especially with how algorithmic YouTube recommendations can be—but, man...

Two YouTube thumbnails for the previous WNBA players of the month for the western and eastern conferences, respectively. Both were posted one day ago. A'Ja Wilson's video has 783 views. Caitlin Clark's has 16,000 despite averaging fewer points and rebounds

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jul 4

Kind of crazy that Douglass already rebutted the "try to appeal to the bigots" argument centuries ago

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, "It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed." But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

Jonathan Forney (JB 🕵🏾)@jb4nay· Jun 30

It’s getting to a point where the Trump admin will claim national security risk every single time someone questions the legality of what they do www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...