Roshaun Higgins

Freelance reporter, formerly local weather and environment for @NOLAnews, local govt for @PostCrescent. I try to make jokes sometimes

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

Ah yes, May in New Orleans. I love this season! When you get drenched in sweat from walking outside for 5 minutes 🤗

[ONLY POEMS @onlypoemsmag]

How much sorrow can I hold? That's how much gratitude I can give.

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients.

The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show.

In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views.

“On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown.

“Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”

Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: https://t.co/hlcdfSmzPc

[Alex Lubben @alexlubben]

Louisiana hosts 20 facilities exempted from Clean Air Act rules by the Trump administration. For many, all they had to do was drop an email to the Trump administration asking to be exempted.

https://t.co/2W8uH4wUYN

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

I decided to start posting essays on substack!! This is my first, and a sort of preview for the types of essays I plan to publish there. It's only a 5-minute read, so give it a gander and follow me for more!
https://t.co/vTeQ3SAzoy

[g. @GeauxGabrielle]

#LOUISIANA Today is the FIRST day of early voting.

We HAVE to vote today and we have to vote NO on EVERY AMENDMENT. We have to tell Jeff Landry he CANNOT rewrite our state constitution.

Jeff Landry cant have Louisiana https://t.co/h59g8BHpdc

[Prof Zenkus @anthonyzenkus]

This reminds me of the time when those two whistleblowers were definitely not killed by Boeing a little while back

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

Literally sick to my stomach reading about this. RIP Nuno Loureiro, it's reprehensive and appalling that someone be assassinated for doing good work

[Bob Mumgaard @BobMumgaard]

It's an extremely sad day in fusion today with the death of MIT’s Nuno Loureiro. The big machines, extreme conditions, geostrategy, funding, or beautifying physics often take center stage. This is unfortunate because it is the PEOPLE who make progress happen. In fusion it's a small group of them, and any one of them makes a huge difference. We lost one of the best ones today.

Nuno was an insightful physicist, a far-seeing leader, a mentor, and most of all a great person to sit down with and talk about anything hard and nuanced and important and impactful. I and many others will miss this. My heart goes out to his family and colleagues across the many areas he made a difference.

https://t.co/W0EWgBQlHX

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

Lady Gaga once said...

[Sam Karlin @samkarlin]

Story from @NewsieDave https://t.co/alGuAnECaP

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

Our short memories truly will be the death of us. Because why have prices for everything increased by like 300% in the past couple of generations?

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

This was one of my favorite HS Lit books so I have to watch, but like what?! 😭

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

So basically Emerald Fennel wrote Wuthering Heights fanfiction then had the gall to call it an actual adaptation 😭😭😭

[WutheringHeightsMovie @wuthering_hts]

Drive me mad. “Wuthering Heights” comes to theaters Valentine’s Day.

[Climate Dad @ClimateDad77]

AMOC collapse will make refugees of us all.

And it could happen in our lifetimes.

We use this precious, fleeting moment to fight for a sustainable, resilient, compassionate world.

Or we end up with no world at all.

[Rolling Stone @RollingStone]

Donald Trump is waging a fascist takeover of the United States.

Democrats are responding the only way they know how: by heeding the advice of the wonks who helped get them into this situation — and whose advice is to avoid discussing what Trump is doing.

More: https://t.co/FoHiqNjDQj

[TIMES OF GAZA @Timesofgaza]

Two journalists have been killed today in Gaza; Mohammed Mansour and Hossam Shabat.

[Jon Bois @jon_bois]

here's someone who's taken as much grief from as many sides as anybody and just won again because she's ideologically consistent and her voters know exactly who she is

[Roshaun Higgins @row_yr_boat]

Hope everyone goes to vote today if they haven't already!

[Carlie Kollath Wells @carlie_kollath]

Thanks, @rjamesfinn! My full story about how the mayoral race is shaping up: https://t.co/WAIP7UP5MF