Jayne Cravens

08/03/2026

Afghanistan: 5 Years Under Taliban Rule.
A Human Rights Crisis, a Humanitarian Crisis.
The Taliban’s increasingly draconian policies have made the country one of the world’s gravest human rights crises, particularly for women and girls.

August 15, 2026 will mark five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. Over the last five years, the Taliban’s increasingly draconian policies have made Afghanistan one of the world’s gravest human rights crises, particularly for women and girls.

08/01/2026

Nick Adams, a self-described “alpha male,” is a big MAGA influencer. Not only does he have millions of followers across X and Facebook, President Trump even appointed him to be ambassador of Malaysia last year (a nomination that ultimately stalled).

Adams is also the founder of a nonprofit, “The Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness,” that promises to bring civics education into U.S. classrooms. It’s raised $7.7 million since 2016, largely via a sweepstakes operation offering donors a chance to win up to $1 million.

But we found that very little goes to the K-12 kids it claims to reach. The sweepstakes operation appears to never have been paid out to the donors, either. Instead, a lot of money went to Nick Adams…and his mom.

Read our full investigation: https://propub.li/45FSBNr

ProPublica asked Nick Adams and his mother for comment. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

08/01/2026

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at ‌a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.

08/01/2026

I admire him SO much. In my first year at UNV, we held an event with CERN in Geneva - and I stayed behind in Bonn to run the online activities associated with such. At one point, Sir Tim did a live video call into the event, and the head of UNV talked to him about me and virtual volunteering, and Sir Tim started symbolically applauding. I'd give just about anything to have that video clip - but at the time, CERN outsourced such video services, and the company went under, and thus, two myths died at once ("nothing goes away on the Internet" and "CERN is all powerful").

🌐 Happy World Wide Web Day!

Created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the World Wide Web transformed how we share knowledge online. In 2025, Sir Tim was honored as an Internet Archive Hero Award recipient for his lasting impact on the web.

Learn more 👇
https://blog.archive.org/2025/11/05/celebrating-sir-tim-berners-lee-2025-internet-archive-hero-award-recipient/

07/30/2026

Today's A Mighty Girl Community Pick: "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" by Caroline Criado Perez. The office is set to a temperature calibrated to men's resting metabolic rate, and she is cold. Her car's crash-test dummy was modeled on a male body, and if she is in an accident, she is 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured. Her heart attack looks nothing like the ones her doctor learned to recognize in medical school, because the studies were done on men, and it may be dismissed as anxiety.

This landmark work of investigative journalism brings together hundreds of studies, court cases, and government reports from around the world to demonstrate a single quiet truth: that in almost every domain that shapes modern life -- from medicine and technology to urban planning and disaster response -- the "default human" behind the data has been assumed to be a man, and women have been paying the cost.

Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, "Invisible Women" is remarkable less for its outrage than for its rigor. Criado Perez, who led the campaigns to place Jane Austen on the British ten-pound note and to erect the first statue of a woman -- suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett -- in London's Parliament Square, builds her argument the way a prosecutor irrefutably builds a case: study by study, industry by industry. Translated into more than thirty languages and cited by policymakers, engineers, and physicians around the world, the book has become the reference text for anyone trying to understand why a world nominally committed to equality still keeps failing women in ways so ordinary they are almost impossible to see. Highly recommended for adult readers.

"Invisible Women" is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781419735219 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/45wXzMu (Amazon)

For Elinor Cleghorn's history of two thousand years of medical dismissal of women's pain, from ancient theories of "wandering wombs" to modern misdiagnoses of endometriosis and autoimmune disease, we recommend "Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593182970 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4g3sgyQ (Amazon)

For breast cancer oncologist Elizabeth Comen's bestselling history of medicine's centuries of dismissal, mistreatment, and misunderstanding of women's bodies, told through the eleven systems of the body, we recommend "All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780063293014 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4lKkRoO (Amazon)

For Rebecca Solnit's essay collection that gave the modern era its vocabulary for a certain kind of gendered condescension and turned it into a global conversation, we recommend "Men Explain Things to Me" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781608464661 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4x9onhA (Amazon)

07/30/2026

After the earthquakes, developers and citizens used AI to build websites and apps to help locate missing persons and coordinate relief efforts amid a slow government response.

07/27/2026

Sandy Weiswasser is a retired sixth grade teacher and, for 18 years, she's been a volunteer the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She has given hundreds of people tours of the facility. And she keeps reporting for duty even now, "in a dogged demonstration of love and loyalty for an institution that has elevated life for her and millions of visitors."

"there is an empty orchestra pit scattered with trash. On the grand terrace overlooking the Potomac River, the flower beds are wilting and weedy. In the corridors and lounges, artwork has disappeared... Ms. Weiswasser keeps coming to give tours, she said, to bear witness, to tell her dwindling visitors that the shabby emptiness they see is not what the Kennedy Center was. For more than half a century it was a grand democratic project, she tells them, bringing the beauty and inspiration of the arts to everyone."

THIS is the power of volunteers. Not the number of hours served. Not a monetary value given to those hours.

What an incredible act of love and resistance.

From the New York Times (hope the gift link works).

In a dogged demonstration of love for a Washington institution, Sandy Weiswasser is among a few dozen volunteers still showing dwindling visitors a hollowed-out building.

07/27/2026

Earlier this year, our research highlighted the industrial-scale harm caused by xAI’s Grok. We found that the AI tool generated an estimated 3 MILLION sexualized images over just an 11-day period.

One of the people impacted was UK MP Jess Asato, who was targeted after speaking out about X. Grok generated sexualized images of her in a bikini and of her being sexually assaulted. Now, she's pursuing legal action.

Lawmakers must demand AI companies implement safeguards to protect women on their platforms. We can’t keep letting billion-dollar companies and their greedy owners escape accountability.

It only takes a minute to use your voice and stand up to Big Tech. Add your name: https://act.counterhate.com/page/152823/petition/1?ea.tracking.id=fb_organic

07/27/2026

Survey Says: The results are in for an informal survey asking our readers to submit what they considered the most important question they would ask the current UN secretary-general candidates. The anonymous responses, collected July 19-21, reveal a portrait of an institution under strain and a public demanding that the organization prove its worth.

Read the full parsed results here: https://passblue.com/2026/07/22/the-most-important-question-for-un-secretary-general-candidates-our-survey-results/

07/23/2026

It is fascinating how, in some online arguments, the person disagreeing with me will say something along the lines of, "Well, the only reason you are online is to promote yourself!"
Um... well, when it comes to me, as a professional, yes, that's a big reason I'm active across so many online communities. And?
I've been moderating & facilitating online communities since the 1990s. Doing so has landed me both short-term consulting & long-term employment - it's how I got my first job offer from the United Nations. I even blogged about how other professionals should be doing the same.
What a silly day I'm having.

I see lots of young people online who are wondering how to build up their skills and résumés in this time of COVID-19, or to explore careers with so many onsite experiences closed to them. I want t…