Mary Carroll-Mason (she/her)

Sounds about right. I work on a contract for a component of NIH and NIH is hemorrhaging scientific staff.

PEPFAR, the program to stop hundreds of thousands of children and adults from dying of HIV/AIDS, was $6.5 billion a year.

Well, probably varies on your consumption but over the last 15 years, we’ve paid between $120-170/month for oil and then our electric and gas averages another $130/month. So overall, probably still more expensive but no big spikes like a lot of folks have gotten this winter.

Truly. It has made me glad I have oil heat this winter and--that's not great.

I am from a rural, conservative part of the world and--I had NEVER heard anyone express actual anti-military sentiment until I was an adult in college after I moved away.

The only reason my family doesn't have a history of service? I come from folks who have LONG standing issues with authority. 😂

Many things are true at once:
Refusing an illegal order can be the moral thing.
A lot of folks enlist out of idealism or dire need; A LOT of people never really encounter anything but pro-military propaganda.
Folks who will never face a moral decision of great consequence probably shouldn't judge.

And, you know, if you work for a known evil company or have ever used the excuse "no ethical consumption under capitalism" to make a wasteful purchase or to not spend a little more money to buy locally, maybe you should not be weighing in on what the average army grunt should be doing.

The graphic is a flyer for World IA Day Philadelphia. It says Meet our speakers. Mary Carroll-Mason, Sr. Content Strategist, Publicis Sapient. The talk title is Action Expresses Priorities: Information Architecture as an expression of organizational priorities. The event will be on March 7th, 2026 at Think Company, 1315 Walnut St. 2nd Floor. Tickets available on Eventbrite. There is a small professional headshot of Mary, she has red glasses and it smiling widely at the camera.

For WIAD Philadelphia, @mecm.bsky.social will illustrate how an IA project can help deeply siloed organizations clarify and align priorities. She'll take us through a case study with the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis. www.eventbrite.com/e/world-ia-d...

CHRIST this was a bitch to alt text (my phone camera is allergic to this font) but it was worth it so we could enjoy this scorching hot Catholic tea together

they just flat out said the SCOTUS Catholics are going to hell. which we knew, but maybe they’ll hear it from the bishops!

...and then, What Happened When That Agency Got DOGEd.
Based on (as you might guess) Real Life Recent Events.

oh, hey, everyone, I'm gonna be speaking at World IA Day in Philadelphia in a few weeks and registration is open now!

If you want a preview of my talk, the BlueSky Plain Language version is: How IA Decisions Helped a Super Siloed Division of a Federal Research Agency Figure Out Who They Are...

The corrupt high priest. It is all very biblical, is it not?

starting to feel like there's a direct relationship between the growing obsession with lifestyle hygeine (no drinking, no caffeine, no sex, obsessive working out and looksmaxxing) and the inability to meaningful moral stands on issues of actual import

you can help stock some Minneapolis street medics treating folks injured at protests

Fun fact: The divorce scene in the Kid Rock show was an actual divorce showing a wife leaving her conservative husband.

while I think this is 50-50 possible to be just a bad faith way to try to counter the reporting, I absolutely encounter this IRL--folks who refuse to believe a verifiable fact because it is counter to whatever their AI says, and treating the AI like it is a source itself.

and, while I will make a couple dinners over the weekend that hopefully give me some leftovers during the week (which are mostly my WFH lunches), I don't want to spend a good chunk of weekend meal or ingredient prepping and I don't want to eat sad prepped meals that are 4 days old.

I do use one of those services to cover most of my weekday dinners because meal planning for 5 or 6 dinners a week was kind of killing me and because those meals are ALWAYS faster than ordering from an app and prevent spontaneous takeout. But, I CAN cook (and do most weekends).

Many people's critical thinking skills and intellectual development never go past mere contrarianism.

CIA Fact Book was one of the first things you could get on the public internet! In the days before we had web browsers. You had to Gopher in.

there were, I'm sure, more than 5 people involved writing and editing this and this was the version that got the ok from Bezos.

It feels like to me that a lot of older Gen X folks in particular have a particularly bad case of nostalgia that colors their perception of modernity and doesn’t recognize that they don’t really remember the shitty parts of the 80s because they were literal children.

I have pretty much never gotten a job any other way.

Pretty much all of my jobs I have gotten that way. There have been a couple where I knew someone who had some influence, but never an actual decision maker.

if bovino is out and conservatives are turning on noem then there is a real opportunity to demand that miller resign too.

the real lesson to take away from this is that this administration will back down with pushback--so don't roll over. Make noise, find allies. Not a single thing they do is actually "popular" in the specifics. Make them have to actively defend every inch.

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

yeah, this seems like I would have guessed. glad there's data!

Maybe it's silly of me but it has been genuinely surprising to me to see how morally vacuous and cowardly, as well as servile, the average conservative seems to actually be, despite their big talk.