As we make the final push to reach our $500,000 goal for the TPM Journalism Fund drive, I want to thank all of the lawyer contributors and see if I can convince a few more to help out. 

Some of the biggest contributions to date to the TPM Journalism Fund drive have come from the legal community. We can’t thank you enough for that. 

We’re at the end of the drive, folks. Three more days. Friday is the last day. We’re at $445,000. That’s 89% of the way toward our goal. We have $55,000 to go. If you’ve been waiting, if you’ve been on the fence, now is the time. We can still get there but we’ll need a big final surge to do it. Here’s the link. It’s super fast, especially if you’re already a site member. We thank you in advance.

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.