Julia Wallace

just a note to the NYT editing team, Israel doesn't start with the letter J so what does it stand for?

When you ask an Epstein conspiracist for evidence:

It's genuinely terrifying to see how conspiracy theories have penetrated every aspect of political discourse among influential segments of both the right and the left in the world's most powerful democracy.

"everything is pedophilia" is this generation's satanic panic

my toddler:

If anyone who lost a job today has an untold story they'd like to pitch, I'd be glad to chat (DMs open). @OCCRP pays competitive rates for investigations, reported features, and explanatory pieces on corruption + crime (interpreted broadly), and their effects on people's lives.

and the most overwrought hysterical "this is the first step towards requiring government ID before you read or talk online at all" predictions have been borne out in full so swiftly that I don't see how you can possibly feel certain it won't happen here

The dangers to children of potentially seeing porn are trivial compared to the benefits of being able to freely access the internet

the A/B testing at OpenAI creating the creepy sycophancy problem made me think of this passage from Frankenstein: the doctor carefully selected each part of the creature for its beauty, only to be horrified by the effect of the whole.

Kyiv today. Ukrainian kids waiting for their friend to be rescued from under the rubble. He didn’t survive. #StandWithUkraine

This is terrible, terrible, terrible news for the American people and the tax system. The only winners are high-cost tax preparers. When fully built out, Direct File would've saved taxpayers ~$20B annually. apnews.com/article/irs-di…

The federal government doesn’t ‘give’ money to Harvard. The $2.2 billion in frozen payments isn’t for Harvard sophomores’ tuition or library books. The US government is buying services from Harvard: scientific & medical research & development. These aren’t ‘woke donations.’ They are contracts. Proposed, reviewed, awarded, with metrics and deadlines and standards of performance. Harvard is a government contractor in that sense — lab by lab, scientist by scientist — just the way any other company is a contractor. That’s true of Columbia’s $400 million in ‘frozen’ contracts — and all the rest. R1 research universities do crucial research the federal government can’t do itself, but that we as a nation have decided we need done. Mission driven. Pioneering. Essential. They can’t be done — as Sean Hannity just suggested — at community colleges & vocational schools. That’s not what the $2.2 billion is being spent on. …You could Google it. Of course.

Before 2020, face masks were so limited to actual robbers that banks and liquor stores barred entry with them. Now, they are commonly used to conceal identity across the spectrum. Is this compatible with open society?

It's worth re-stating occasionally. Calling generically for "peace" between Russia and Ukraine, or asking if Ukraine "wants peace," is morally insane. RUSSIA INVADED AND IS STILL INVADING UKRAINE. All that needs to happen for peace is for Russia to send its troops home.

This is a really big deal we should be paying more attention to.

PEPFAR has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades because cheaply saving the lives of millions of children is good and the right thing to do. If Congress decided to end it, I'd be devastated. But that's not even what's happening. Congress authorized it! Our democratic government decided to spend money on this! The state department has ordered a stop-work on funding that Congress did authorize, because 'stop all foreign aid' sounded good to someone. It's not clear that anybody wanted to let tens of thousands of babies die of HIV/AIDS. My best guess is that they just, you know, didn't really know what all of the programs they were ordering halted did. I'm old enough (like...two years old...) to remember when Republicans considered themselves the party of saving babies' lives. I defended the pro-life movement against charges that they really just hate women, saying that I've been honored to know a lot of pro-lifers who sincerely want to save babies. But if you can't bring yourself to take a stand on this - that the state department should not abruptly halt a program half a million sick children depend on, which Congress authorized and paid for, with no justification, in a way that will make the problem much much worse when work on it starts again - then you aren't pro-life, and you never were.

assassinations are bad

Of course, it's legitimate to criticize us for choosing to accept government grants (US, EU, UK, France, Sweden, etc). But claiming to "reveal" something that is actually publicly disclosed is dishonest framing, intended to create an aura of intrigue.

The fact that OCCRP's largest single income is via US aid grants has long been publicly disclosed. It's on our website: occrp.org/en/about-us/an… Nonetheless, they released an "investigation" that dishonestly claims this was hidden.

Another day of @yphilippin promoting this non-investigation into @OCCRP. We don’t dispute the facts of our funding because we publicly disclose it on our website: occrp.org/en/about-us/an… Spinning this as “hidden” is dishonest, tabloid framing that puts journalists in danger