Josh Wallaert
jwlrt.bsky.social
Josh Wallaert
@jwlrt.bsky.social
Editor, writer. Kinda quiet. New here and I'll probably read more than talk. Bikes, streets, music, ethics + infrastructures of care, SF Bay.
Where will I go, now that I'm gone?

youtu.be/_CuENt0vkpE?...
Working on a Song
YouTube video by Todd Snider - Topic
youtu.be
November 15, 2025 at 11:48 PM
Deleted a post bc it was getting attention I didn't want, but yes it's real. Search the files for icebox plums. Dark.
November 13, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
@rollovereasy.org Gooooooooooood morning from Dogpatch! Yesterday I met Emily Sneddon, creaton of Fran Sans, a tyoeface based on the destination display signs on the Muni Breda Light Rail Vehicles, which are, as of today, retired. emilysneddon.com/fran-sans-es...
Fran Sans Essay — Emily Sneddon
Archive
emilysneddon.com
November 13, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
sometimes the word community is used but the word workers would be more accurate
November 1, 2025 at 2:32 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
I think often about those pebbles around the stacks at the Poetry Foundation.
Poetry Foundation, Chicago — I haven’t been here since this delightful building opened in 2011! Love the stone border in front of the bookshelves 🪨📚
November 1, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
man, it sure looks like republicans are using threat of federal government force to try and silence journalists
October 30, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Careful out there folks! This article comes with risk of electric shock.
I just tried to high-five a lamp in my hotel room. Public libraries are one of our greatest institutions; absolutely nothing less could make me say kind things about, say, Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Carnegie.
I wrote about public libraries as spaces of civic solidarity, common knowledge, and public infrastructure — all endangered by commercial and federal saboteurs
October 29, 2025 at 2:20 AM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
"Societies are defined by their libraries — by what we hold, what we lend, what we borrow and return, the knowledge we create, the values we defend."
October 28, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
I wrote about public libraries as spaces of civic solidarity, common knowledge, and public infrastructure — all endangered by commercial and federal saboteurs
Extralibrary Loan: Making the Civic Infrastructure We Need
Amid a war on public knowledge, libraries are pushing outward, enlarging the commons through new configurations of civic and creative life.
placesjournal.org
October 28, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
October 27, 2025 at 11:54 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
NEW: For years, the Phoenix nonprofit Keys to Change has run a mail room for thousands of homeless people.

Now the U.S. Postal Service is cutting its $24,000 investment, leaving the organization to raise the extra money to keep it open.
U.S. Postal Service Cuts Funding for a Phoenix Mail Room Assisting Homeless People
The loss of support comes at a time of uncertainty for one of Arizona’s largest homeless services providers as the Trump administration calls for reducing and restructuring homelessness assistance grants.
www.propublica.org
October 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM
"The entire human commons is about to become a Superfund site." The most Gen X (complementary) article I have read in a while. Worth reading if you have the stomach for it. All I can say is that the crash needs more care workers and librarians. (But yes, technologists, please return to blogging.)
I’m writing for the local paper again!
People are scared of what happens after the bubble bursts. @ftrain.bsky.social is looking forward to it www.wired.com/story/ai-nor...
October 27, 2025 at 1:23 PM
Feeling this 💯 in the Bay Area. Thank you @kalxberkeley.bsky.social @gramophoneybaloney.bsky.social @djjohnrichards.bsky.social (plus JJ at #KPOO)
I know it's because I'm lucky to be in broadcast range of a lot of amazing stations but I am really flabbergasted by how much great music I can quickly discover just by turning on the radio. I don't think I've listened to an hour of radio without finding a new Favorite Song all year
October 27, 2025 at 3:38 AM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
One of the many things @ninalakhani.bsky.social does so well is show the very real, very now cost of climate change at the most human level. This story is devastatingly good: www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Americans are dying from extreme heat. Autopsy reports don’t show the full story
Official reports are likely to overlook heat’s role in a death. As US temperatures rise, experts say the true toll needs to be counted
www.theguardian.com
October 25, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
This is how you blurb
October 23, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
The editor of Governing magazine has resigned after pressure to censor his work.

This is a tragic development for (what was) an excellent magazine.

www.politico.com/news/magazin...
Opinion | My Bosses Were Afraid of Crossing Trump. So, I Quit.
A veteran journalist opens up on the censorship that he says led to his resignation.
www.politico.com
October 22, 2025 at 10:07 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
While this federal administration has been busy empowering ICE to become, essentially, an extrajudicial militia allowed to disappear people from our streets, the Bay has been organizing. We will not be beaten down.
What We Can Do About ICE
ICE is in the Bay Area. And yes, we can all do something about it.
www.coyotemedia.org
October 22, 2025 at 10:12 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
It's official! 🏛️ 🎉 The SF Board of Supervisors has unanimously declared October 22, 2025 as Internet Archive Day — celebrating our 1️⃣ trillion webpages preserved & our mission to provide universal access to all knowledge.

Learn more & celebrate with us tonight! ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/10/22/h...
October 22, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking to the site

www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
www.404media.co
October 17, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
We are so grateful to everyone who signed our petition (1,300 OF YOU!) asking our management to agree to a fair contract with basic job protections for us! THANK YOU!!! We keep doing fearless journalism because you make us fearless 😍
Today we delivered to senior management in NY a petition signed by 1,300 ProPublica readers, donors and supporters, as well as fellow journalists at peer newsrooms and former ProPublicans. It’s clear that we have wide support for a fair contract NOW.
October 15, 2025 at 11:03 PM
The first and only MacArthur fellow identified as a cartographer* is Potawatomi mapmaker Margaret Wickens Pearce. See her atlas of Land-Grab Universities @highcountrynews.org + all her work at www.studio1to1.net

(*a handful of geographers have been previously awarded, including some who make maps)
Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.
www.landgrabu.org
October 8, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
This essay on place making in a pluralist city, valuing memory and identity and acknowledging fracture, but also moving toward a collective rebuilding and repair, is vital reading. It's about Homs in Syria, but no city can design its way out of history: placesjournal.org/article/mapp...
Memory Maps of Homs, Syria
A mapping workshop with refugees from Homs, Syria, illuminates the complexity of rebuilding after war.
placesjournal.org
October 8, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
Local cops are not on the side of Democratic politicians or under their actual control. People refuse to understand this too even though we've been making this point for decades.
October 8, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by Josh Wallaert
A mapping workshop with refugees from Homs, Syria, asked participants to draw their neighborhoods from memory, bridging gaps between houses to generate a shared image of a city destroyed by war. To rebuild justly, residents will need to understand this pluralist city as others have lived within it.
Memory Maps of Homs, Syria
A mapping workshop with refugees from Homs, Syria, illuminates the complexity of rebuilding after war.
placesjournal.org
October 7, 2025 at 8:54 PM
"Newsom has yet to publicly acknowledge what’s now California’s seventh and largest ICE detention facility."
ICE began shipping immigrants to this tiny California town. Chaos has reigned ever since
ICE began sending immigrants to a new California detention center in small town in August. Since then, it has been inundated with activists, desperate families and utter confusion.
www.sfchronicle.com
September 26, 2025 at 4:04 PM