Keenan Chen

Why Biden-era clean energy investment policies had limited political returns | PNAS The Biden Administration enacted the largest federal policy framework to incentivize clean energy and decarbonization in U.S. history. We examine w...

Fascinating new research paper asks: why did Biden receive so little political credit for his enormous investments in manufacturing? Turns out people give all the credit to governors (ironically, in this case, mostly red-state governors who were hostile to the policy!).

Here's a video about my recent investigation into more than two dozen accounts using AI-generated doctors and health professionals to push dubious advice and sell products on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube: indicator.media/p/ai-generat...

How We Unpacked Tennessee’s Cooperation with ICE Combining bodycam footage, police reports, and more than a million ICE records, this is how we investigated Tennessee Highway Patrol's collaboration with ICE

This investigation was a collaboration with
@motherjones.com, @nashvillebanner.bsky.social, News Channel 5, Nashville Noticias, and the Institute for Public Service Reporting - Memphis

You can find links to stories here + our methodology write-up:

www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/...

“Crying girls will make you rich”: How marketers trick users with mass-produced "organic" content Indicator analyzed UGC campaigns that generated over 2 billion TikTok views and found rampant violations of disclosure rules.

"Crying girls will make you rich."

That's the actual pitch from a marketer selling packages of emotional videos that brands use to flood TikTok with undisclosed ads.

I just published an investigation into industrial UGC campaigns. What I found is troubling. 🧵 indicator.media/p/crying-gir...

Since PlowNYC is currently offline, I decided to take matters into my own hands and built a map to track snow removal efforts by DSNY using the department’s extensive GPS data from its fleet of snow removal vehicles.

You can find the tracker at kcinbk.github.io/SnowDay_NYC/

Chart: Clean energy remains dominant in the US — despite Trump Trump spent much of 2025 boosting fossil fuels and blocking renewables, but 92% of new power additions through November were solar, wind, or batteries.

Clean energy went through a lot this year, but it still managed to dominate new power deployment in the U.S.

Thanks to @akashmehta.bsky.social shmehta.bsky.social and @alykatzz.bsky.social for editing this piece.

The overtime payroll spike is largely driven by the city’s austerity-focused fiscal policies aimed at cutting short-term costs. The result? Delays and errors surged, directly impacting some of the city’s most vulnerable residents.

For @nysfocus.bsky.social and @thecity.nyc , I took a deep-dive into NYC’s Department of Social Services.

OT spending has soared while frontline positions processing SNAP and Cash Assistance applicants remain unfilled, impacting the city’s most vulnerable residents (with @reuvenblau.bsky.social)

You can actually see the changes—the removal of human causes of climate change—side-by-side on the Internet Archive.

web.archive.org/web/diff/202...

I was sent some screenshots of HTML sites around the 1994 election cycle, one of the really rare to find examples of websites playing a part in politics so early. I'll get them on the archive but now you get them too.

Refugees feeding refugees: Sudanese families fleeing violence find little aid at Chad border At a transit camp here on the Chad-Sudan border, Najwa Isa Adam, 32, hands out bowls of pasta and meat to orphaned Sudanese children from al-Fashir, the site of a recent violent takeover by paramilitary forces in Sudan.

Refugees feeding refugees: Sudanese families fleeing violence find little aid at Chad border reut.rs/3M7Wvs9

Made a precinct-level map on the results of the NYC six ballot measures.

- A majority of voters in almost every single precinct on Staten Island voted against all of these proposals.

- Affordable housing–related measures proved popular even in some affluent neighborhoods and also outer borough.

Not all misinformation requires sophisticated tech or AI.

For @craigsilverman.bsky.social's @indicator.media, I deep-dived into these accounts generated millions of views—and potentially handsome profits—with a little clever editing and an understanding of how strong emotions drive clicks.

More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...

Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen...they promptly let the individual go."

The reality: Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents.

A must read from the very talented @nicolefoy.bsky.social:

Many thanks to @montgomery.bsky.social for the edit.

Merch sellers cash in on Kirk’s killing with flood of social media ads Foreign brands not linked to Kirk’s Turning Point USA sell patriotic gear with unclear promises to donate profits

I wrote about how foreign apparel sellers rushed to cash in on Charlie Kirk’s death. Within hours, these astroturf accounts started flooding Facebook and Instagram with merch ads. Some of these paid posts even claimed “100% of the profits” would go to his orgs and family.

tinyurl.com/4x253yn7

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are walking and driving south to escape Israel's Gaza City offensive.
https://wapo.st/4pwffkf

Jarvis: I hate to say this to my friends here at CNN, mass media is dying, so they're taking the last of these vestiges of institutions that matter and they're trying to turn them into propaganda organs under threat from the head of the FCC

Israel Says It Will Defund Film Awards After Palestinian Win A drama about a Palestinian boy who sneaks into Israel won the top prize at Israel’s version of the Oscars. The country’s culture minister called the ceremony “shameful.”

Israel’s minister of culture announced plans to cancel the funding for the country’s top film award ceremony after a 90-minute drama about a Palestinian boy won best feature on Tuesday night. nyti.ms/4mla5oe

Conservative voices are now coalescing around the idea of “online radicalization,” claiming Kirk’s suspected shooter, a white, Christian male, was groomed into a violent leftist.

Quite a surprising turn, given their past hostility to the concept rigorously researched by academics and journalists.

If the federal show of force in Washington has had a deterrent effect on crime, it appears to have deterred entirely normal aspects of city life, too.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/u...

US tech companies enabled the surveillance and detention of hundreds of thousands in China U.S. technology firms such as IBM, Dell and Cisco largely designed and built China’s surveillance state, an AP investigation finds. The tech companies deny wrongdoing.

An AP investigation finds that Silicon Valley companies sold surveillance technology to Chinese police and security contractors, ignoring warnings that the tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.

Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up.

NYT just covered it. 1/n

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

Thanks for reading! And congrats on the latest piece. Really well researched and well reported.

The CEO told @nytimes.com it’s fine for reporters to take cash to cover their expenses.

That’s just false. Like any newsroom, the paper barred editorial staff from taking cash. And if he’s worried about fair comp for his reporters, give them a raise instead of paying barely minimum wages.

A former insider on NYC's “Red Envelope Gate” I had anxiety whenever I saw these "red envelopes."

When I reported for a leading Chinese-language newspaper in NYC years ago, I often had to explain: “No, I can’t take your red envelopes.” Even now, seeing them still give me anxiety.

I wrote about my personal experience on my SubStack.

kcinbk.substack.com/p/a-former-i...

(Full disclosure: I'm not a real estate analyst, so take my analysis with a grain of salt)

And when you factor in regulated rental units across New York City, the overall effect of the ban appears even more limited.

While it's always tricky to draw direct correlations, less than 10% of the market-rate rental listings on StreetEasy have increased asking rents immediately following the news of the ban on June 10.