Jessica McKenzie

@jessimckenzi.bsky.social

reporting, writing, editing climate change stories @thebulletin.org // outdoorsy newsletter: jessicastarmckenzie.com/newsletter // tips: jmckenzie@thebulletin.org, jsmckenzie@protonmail.com, or jessimckenzi.01 on signal

The most harrowing report about Iran’s future was put out seven months ago by analysts writing in the highly regarded Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — and it never mentioned nuclear weapons. It mentioned only the nation’s acute water crisis, which may have shut down more Iranian institutions than Israel and America combined.

“During the summer of 2025, Iran experienced an exceptional heat wave, with daytime temperatures across several regions, including Tehran, approaching 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and forcing the temporary closure of public offices and banks,” the analysts said. “During this period, major reservoirs supplying the Tehran region reached record-low levels. … Officials warned that the capital city may even have to be evacuated if water supplies fail to recover.”

Concert is cancelled due to the apocalypse :(

𝔐𝔞𝔤𝔫𝔢𝔱𝔰 🧲

@PerthshireMags
i made that tweet you like

A group of academics recently made a provocative argument: What if A.I. slop is good?

Eamon Duede, a philosopher of science at Purdue University and one of the authors of a paper called “Why Slop Matters,” said A.I. brought joy to people who wanted to create something that very few other people would find interesting — like images of their friends in historical scenes.

“People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort,” he said. People who want to be creative, but might not be very good at it, can turn to A.I. and find “a bunch of barriers removed.”

Bret Taylor
@btaylor
I deeply resent that AI has forced me to eliminate em dashes from my writing for fear of signaling slop

The response she has observed has been polarized. Some people have responded that scientists shouldn’t be playing God, which could reduce support for essential biomedical research in general. Others have expressed a kind of manic enthusiasm, relieved that we no longer need to worry about the biodiversity crisis because humans can just bring species back from extinction.

This latter view was espoused by none other than Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who put out a statement that said, in part:

“The Department of the Interior is excited about the potential of ‘de-extinction’ technology and how it may serve broader purposes beyond the recovery of lost species, including strengthening biodiversity protection efforts and helping endangered or at-risk species. The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave. In fact, 97 percent of species that are added to the endangered list remain there. This is because the status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation… Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation – not regulation – that has spawned American greatness. The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder, showcasing how the concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”

Shapiro and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm told Wired that they hope media coverage of their “dire” wolves will raise awareness about the plight of the gray wolf. That’s not what I see happening—in the public sphere, or in the places it matters most, like the Interior Department.

NWS maggots can infest any warm-blooded animal, including birds. NWS can be particularly devastating to livestock health with serious economic impacts. If you see maggots on any animal, whether livestock, pets, or wildlife, contact your veterinarian. Visit screwworm.gov for more information about NWS in animals.

New World screwworm infestations begin when a female fly lays eggs on open wounds or other parts of the body in live, warm-blooded animals. Most infestations occur in animals, but they also occur in people. The smell of a wound or body opening such as the nose, mouth, eyes, ears, or genitals can attract female flies. Wounds as small as a tick bite may attract a female fly to lay her eggs. One female can lay 200 – 300 eggs at a time and may lay up to 3,000 eggs during her 10- to 30-day lifespan.

Eggs hatch into maggots that burrow into the wound to feed on the living flesh. After feeding for about 7 days, larvae drop to the ground, burrow into the soil, and emerge as adult screwworm flies.

NWS infestations (presence of maggots on or in the body) do not regularly occur in the United States, but cases have occurred in travelers returning from areas where flies are present. If you travel to these areas, have an open wound and spend a lot of time outdoors, you may be at greater risk of becoming infested with NWS.

The Meissners sell the 200,000 pounds of milk their farm makes each day to Mr. Heiman at Nasonville Dairy, about six miles down the road.

Mr. Heiman is a gregarious, cheerful man with a large walrus mustache. But the economics of making cheese in Wisconsin are sobering. Although Nasonville is the largest cheesemaker in Wood County, in the heart of America’s dairyland, he says it can’t compete with West Coast dairies, where multinational conglomerates have built massive cheese plants.

“If you are making the same kind of cheese they make, you’re roadkill,” he said. “Those guys have efficiency that just spooks you.”

What's more, the U.S. government has a long-standing pro-cheese-eating policy, which grew out of the need to do something with the subsidized excess of milk products generated by federal pro-production dairy policy — which, in turn, has persisted for decades despite declining consumer interest in drinking milk.

Two decades ago, in fact, the Clinton administration's Agriculture Department helped form a promotional organization, Dairy Management Inc., funded by a congressionally authorized, federally collected dues requirement for dairy producers. Its $140 million annual budget has helped develop such fast-food items as Pizza Hut's cheese-topped crust and Taco Bell's double steak quesadillas, as well as cheesy pizzas for the federal school lunch program.

29. Stop requiring me to have an X account to read the emergency updates that my government posts on X. I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can’t do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least I never had to talk to Grok.

26. The email is one sentence. Your nonconsensual AI bubble-pest keeps asking me whether I want help summarizing it. Can you summarize the sentence “No”?

CONSIDERATIONS FOR INCORPORATING AI INTO COVER LETTERS

Using AI for cover letters offers benefits like saving time, providing writing guidance, tailoring content to specific jobs, and ensuring grammar and style correctness. AI boosts consistency, boosts confidence, and reduces writer's block, giving you a competitive edge in the job market. Remember, while AI helps, personalization and creativity remain important for a successful cover letter.

Check out these resources:

UM-GPT
ChatGPT, AI, and the Job Search

He doubled down on his personal commitment to AI, noting that he still uses it every day. “If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that's just not realistic. If the answer is to stop writing, that's not out of the realm of possibility.”
I asked him whether he would rather stop writing than stop using AI in his writing process. “Yeah,” he answered.

Rosenbaum would not weigh in on the accuracy of Pangram’s results. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about them at all. “I don’t participate in that conversation,” he said. “It’s like saying, do you beat your wife? It’s one of those accusations that there’s no response to.”

You are called the “sustainable media center”, but what does sustainability in media even mean?
At the Sustainable Media Center, sustainability in media means creating digital and media systems that are safe, ethical, and built to support human well-being in the long run. Just like environmental sustainability protects our planet, media sustainability protects our minds, young people, communities, and democracy.

Hi Jessica,

Black Friday may get all the glory, but Amazon Prime Day is quickly becoming one of the biggest shopping moments of the year. As your readers hunt for the best deals, we wanted to flag a timely sustainability angle: how to shop smarter and greener.

Consumers clearly care. In fact, 79% want an easier way to identify environmentally friendly companies, and 80% say the environmental impact of their purchases matters to them. Yet only 3% of product labels mention environmental or social sustainability, even though roughly one-third of products make those claims. That’s where ClimeCo comes in.

ClimeCo is launching its Certified Program— a new label designed to help shoppers quickly identify products from companies that have reduced pollution within their own supply chains, from farms and factories to freight and delivery. In short: it gives consumers a clearer, more credible way to spot products making a meaningful environmental impact.

Paul Graham
@paulg
·
May 25
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.
Paul Graham
@paulg
I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?

Every year, thousands of people in the Twin Cities hunt for a medallion that’s been hidden in the snow somewhere in a public park.

And every night, the Pioneer Press, a local newspaper, publishes a cryptic clue, leading hunters closer and closer to the medallion’s exact location. Staying up late to digest each day’s new clue is a tradition in my household, and we dream of what we’d do with the thousands of dollars in winnings.

Usually that brainstorming carries into the next day. My husband and I text each other about whatever harebrained rabbit hole we’ve fallen into as we try to find the medallion. But this year, I used AI — specifically, an AI-powered web browser — to help me solve the mystery.

AI browsers put an AI chatbot right in your browser window; you don’t need to switch to another tab. When you start chatting, AI scans the browser window for context.

It sounds simple, yet it has fundamentally changed how I interact with AI.

For this task, instead of peppering my husband with theories, I queried a web browser with built-in AI. I asked it to make lists of parks with certain features, to find records related to the history of the county, and to poke holes in my wildest theories. And, of course, I asked it to give me its own theories on where the medallion might be hidden.

Something magical happens when nostalgia becomes a destination. Not just a feeling you stumble into while scrolling through old memories, but a place you drive hours through coastal redwoods to reach, pay money to enter and spend a weekend marinating in alongside hundreds of strangers who feel exactly the way you do about, say, a particular woman of a certain age on a 1980s TV show who solved mysteries every week. In 2026, that particular kind of story about the sharp, unassuming woman who outwits everyone is having a moment again. But for the fans who never stopped watching, it didn’t ever really go away.

Planning an evening out that feels intentional, unrushed, and quietly romantic often starts with choosing the right place to eat. For couples seeking a thoughtful vegan date night, the experience matters as much as the menu. Tucked into a calm stretch near Greenpoint, this vegan restaurant offers an atmosphere that feels welcoming without trying too hard, making it an easy choice for diners who want their night to unfold naturally.

This year, membership isn’t just a pass. It’s the velvet rope.

Opening Night tickets are $25 each, so if you attend with a friend (which we of course recommend for ultimate enjoyment of the night) the membership will practically pay for itself!

Members are already getting first dibs on our just-released initial round of 2026 programming, which means priority entry before the rush and access to free events even when they sell out for GA attendees.

In other words: membership is the difference between hoping to get in…and knowing you’re in. It’s opening nights. It’s early access. It’s priority everything. It’s being on the inside of the thing while it’s still building momentum.

And yes—it starts now.

I Read the “Your Brain on ChatGPT” Study. Here’s How I’m Redesigning My AI Use.
Discussion
What the Study Found:

Reduced neural activity in LLM users vs. brain-only writers.

Lower memory recall and weaker ownership of work.

Essays scored well, but lacked originality and depth.

When LLM users switched back to brain-only writing, they underperformed — cognitive laziness lingered.

LLMs optimize for fluency, not cognition. Overreliance = cognitive atrophy.

I rebuilt my GPT settings to try to counteract these effects.

Here’s the protocol I use:

Custom GPT Persona: Cognitive Trainer

You are my Cognitive Trainer. Your job is to amplify my engagement, recall, and independent reasoning. NEVER answer without pushing me to do some mental lifting. You never start with a full answer — you begin with a prompt, challenge, or question that makes me think first. You assume I want to train my mind, not outsource it.

At the time, she was emerging from a long depression after the death of her second husband, Mario Richard, who died while wingsuit flying during a flight with Ms. Davis in 2013 in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains. (Ms. Davis’s first husband, whom she had divorced, was Dean Potter, a well-known rock climber, slack rope walker and all-around daredevil who died in 2015 in a wingsuit flying accident in Yosemite National Park.)

Robert “Pic” Piccerillo, an Air Force veteran and former Defense Department official, first incorporated Edge Ops LLC in 2014 with a Maryland address. At the time, it did not appear to be hawking surveillance technology. Incorporation documents obtained by The Lever show that its listed purpose was “To house and to hold a new sailboat.”
But when Trump won a second term in 2024, the company’s name resurfaced. On November 6, 2024, the day after the election, Edge Ops LLC was registered with the federal government contracting website Sam.gov. It claimed to be a “veteran-owned business,” a “women-owned business,” and a “small disadvantaged business,” all categories that improve vendors' chances to score government contracts, thanks to various federal programs.

The Democratic Party is defined by their hyperfeminization which manifests as clinically elevated cluster B psychopathology & policy-wise as progressive insanity. Until they address the former, nothing will change because the party structure is underwritten by feminized NGOs.

headline: Shell Reports Nearly $7 Billion Profit Amid ‘Unprecedented Disruption’

second headline: Surging Gas Prices Shake Americans

In his ruling, Liman determined that Lively, 38, was an independent contractor rather than an employee, meaning she could not bring sexual harassment claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination, including on the basis of gender.

With the U.S. labor market finally showing signs of settling after moving through one of the most dramatic cycles in modern economic history, I am writing to share our latest report on

Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology, and social movement about supporting life, habitats, and surroundings

Fifteen years ago, as the sun was setting on the Obama-era effort to establish a federal emissions cap-and-trade program, David Roberts coined the term “climate hawk” to describe “people who understand climate change and support clean energy but do not share the rest of the ideological and sociocultural commitments that define environmentalism.”

We pragmatists consider climate change a real and significant issue, but think it’s best addressed obliquely, by de-centering climate change and elevating more tangible and tractable concerns, such as energy innovation, material abundance, resilience to weather and natural disasters, and conventional pollution reduction. Ambitious climate mitigation is possible. But it is best achieved as a co-benefit of these other endeavors.

Notably, there is a role for many of climate hawks’ favorite policy instruments on this path, including subsidies, standards, fees, and technology targets. But there is no role for the climate hawk itself.

$Climate activists extracted increasingly aggressive concessions from elected Democrats, and moved the issue closer and closer to the center of progressive politics. From support for fee-and-dividend and a ban on fracking to the Green New Deal and the “climate emergency” declaration to the “no climate no deal” stance of the Build Back Better negotiations and demands to stop exporting liquefied natural gas, activists got Democratic officials to support a variety of policy commitments, some strictly symbolic, some politically doomed, and all generally unpopular outside of partisan progressive constituencies.$