Reliable sources of news and information.

Local news

• Kansas Reflector
• KMAN
• Manhattan Mercury

Independent Media

• The Guardian (UK)
• Mother Jones
• ProPublica
• Wired

Newsletters

• Dispatches from a Collapsing State. A former Associate Professor of English, Jared Yates Sexton is now a journalist, and is the author of American Rule: How a Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People (2020), among other titles.
• Letters from an American. A historian, Heather Cox Richardson writes a daily newsletter, often placing the present in historical context.
• Lucid. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is also an historian; her expertise is fascism, authoritarianism, and propaganda. The newsletter typically publishes about twice a week.
• Meditations in an Emergency. Rebecca Solnit is an historian, activist, and the author of Hope in the Dark
• Popular Information. Judd Legum is founder and editor of ThinkProgress, and was the Research Director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
• The Power. An investigative journalist, Carole Cadwalladr was nominated for a Pulitzer for her work in breaking the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook story.
• Robert Reich’s Substack. Reich is the author, educator and former Secretary of Labor.
• Sherrilyn’s Newsletter. Sherrilyn Ifill is President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
• Thinking About. A leading scholar of Eastern Europe and expert on authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder is the author of the indispensable books On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) and On Freedom (2024).

Trackers

• The Impact Project: Mapping how and where the federal cuts are hitting. As the site says, it provides “objective, transparent, and open-source data to help explain how federal policies, funding, and workforce changes affect our communities”
• Project 2025 Tracker: Monitoring Project 2025.
• Gov Track US: Tracks activities of US Congress.
• Tracking Anticipated Deaths from USAID Funding Cuts: from Brooke Nichols (BU School of Public Health), “tracking tools that capture estimated increases in mortality and disease spread for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases as a result of the near-total freeze in US foreign aid funding and programming”
• Education
  • AAUP’s Political Attacks on Higher Education
  • Education Law Center’s Trump 2.0 Federal Revenue Tool: “How much federal education aid could your state lose?”
  • NEA’s Education bills in congress

General Resources

• American Autocracy Threat Tracker. “A Comprehensive Catalog Based on Donald Trump and His Associates’ Plans, Promises, and Propositions.”
• Protect Democracy. “The 250-year American experiment in self-government is threatened by a global rise in authoritarianism. Together, we can preserve democracy for future generations.”
• Stop Project 2025 Comic. Comics artists explain “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” aka Project 2025
• How to Stop Autocrats: Guidance from History
  • David Corn, “Can a Democracy Reverse a Slide Toward Authoritarianism?” Mother Jones, 13 Nov. 2024.
  • David Robson, “The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world.” BBC, 13 May 2019
  • Erica Chenoweth, “The success of nonviolent civil resistance,” TEDx Talk, 4 Nov. 2013.
• Carole Cadwalladr, “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like,” TED Talk, 9 Apr. 2025.