Keith Plocek
banner
keithplocek.com
Keith Plocek
@keithplocek.com
So here we are. Again
All hail @tessastuart.bsky.social for writing this magazine story, and I don't use that phrase lightly. Not longform. Not a feature. A magnificent magazine story.
The Radicalization of Ziz Lasota: How an AI Doomer Became an Accused Cult Leader

Lasota’s friends, colleagues, and family talk about how a NASA intern and Google employee wound up at the center of a bizarre string of murders across the country.

Feature: www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...
December 2, 2025 at 11:47 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
this is a stunning piece of data journalism/art/whatever.
November 21, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
Breaking: Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid, express regret kansasreflector.com/2025/11/11/m...
Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid, express regret • Kansas Reflector
A handful of county-level officials who were involved in a small-town Kansas newspaper raid in 2023 will pay a cumulative $3 million to three journalists and a city councilor.
kansasreflector.com
November 11, 2025 at 5:25 PM
USC is hosting a conference on the Philosophy of Breakups. Seems like a missed opportunity to not incorporate the Fight On slogan somehow. philevents.org/event/show/1...
November 8, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
LA needs to buy Memo Torres at @lataco.bsky.social all the beers. That man is TIRELESS. 🫡
November 5, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
November 4, 2025 at 6:26 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
November 3, 2025 at 10:04 AM
This game. This series. This game.
November 2, 2025 at 3:41 AM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
October 31, 2025 at 7:45 PM
The crazy thing about the “Kavanaugh stops” decision is he didn’t have to attach his name to it at all. Nobody else in the majority wrote anything. Nobody had to write anything. But he was all like, “Hold my beer.”
October 30, 2025 at 6:03 PM
MFA programs really killed the style of writing that basically went “Let me tell you my theory of friendship. [10,000 words that include references to Plato, Charlemagne and Ulysses S Grant] Paul was that kind of friend.”

Now it’s all “Paul handed me a beer. He knew I needed it.”
October 24, 2025 at 1:39 AM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
October 17, 2025 at 4:52 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
History department fulfilling its noble role as a place for football tailgating urinals
October 9, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
wizard frog is insane
October 4, 2025 at 10:24 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
The dedication to visually representing each of the 4,304 deliveries in the background scroll is admirable and conveys the loss to food banks.

The personal interviews and portraits are concise but powerfully relate these cuts’ impact on peoples' lives.

Everyone’s’ “must read” today.
NEW: ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detail the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the Trump administration’s cuts to an aid program.
Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived.
ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detail the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the administration’s cut...
projects.propublica.org
October 3, 2025 at 1:49 PM
instantly recognizable as that refinery in Carson off the 405
September 25, 2025 at 2:25 AM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
Robert Redford, RIP [The Village Voice, Jan 2, 1978]
September 16, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Heck yeah
September 15, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that
The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact
August 3, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.
June 7, 2025 at 11:22 AM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
Learning how to write 50-word versions of these when I was a stringer was worth the same as my masters degree
The loss of music listings is "the loss of a world," Gabriel Kahane writes. As a young musician in New York, they were his "bible, syllabus, and road map":
Why No One Knows What’s Happening Tonight
A love letter to music listings
bit.ly
July 28, 2025 at 1:55 AM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
July 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by Keith Plocek
Hanging out at Blockbuster Video at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. [Chico News and Review, Apr 1, 1993]
June 25, 2025 at 5:59 PM