Sure, lots of people have laser printers hooked up to their computers. But vanishingly few have the equipment and technical know-how for traditional letterpress printing, in which individual letters on wood or metal ‘type’ blocks are arranged into words, inked up and physically pressed onto paper.

At her St. Paul studio Lunalux, though, Morgan Hiscocks does.

So as federal immigration enforcement activity — and the violence of agents’ tactics — ramped up in the Twin Cities earlier this year, Hiscocks said, she quickly realized the role she could play. She began regularly inviting community members into the studio to typeset posters, which she helped print in larger quantities to distribute in exchange for donations to mutual aid efforts.

Posters printed at St. Paul letterpress studio Lunalux hang on the walls of the studio in the Midway Triangle Building, in the Creative Enterprise Zone, on Feb. 12, 2026. In recent months, owner Morgan Hiscocks has invited community members to create protest posters in the studio. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

So far, Hiscocks said, the poster project has resulted in more than $3,000 in contributions to grocery funds, rent relief and other direct-support fundraisers. Designs are posted on the studio’s Instagram page, @lunalux.mn.

“The historical context of all this type is to print whatever needed to be printed — news, ideas, protest posters, warnings, announcements — in multiples,” Hiscocks said. “Loud, important messages. I don’t know how to write those things, but I know how to help those things find their way to a page.”

The original Lunalux was founded in 1993 as a storefront letterpress card and stationery shop in Loring Park, in Minneapolis. The shop’s final owner, Jenni Undis, closed the business in 2016 — but Hiscocks, who’d started as an intern in 2009 and quickly became Undis’s right-hand woman, worked with Undis to save three printing presses and an extensive collection of hard-to-find large wood type in storage until she could find a new home.

After two years of searching, in 2018, Hiscocks found a nook for rent, tucked deep inside the Midway Triangle Building. As a nostalgic nod to the history of the presses, although she’s running a personal workshop and not a client-facing business, Hiscocks kept the Lunalux name for her studio.

“I’m hanging on for dear life to this because I am so passionate about letterpress printing, the history of it, keeping things in practice,” she said. “The more that people are walking away from it, the more that these things sit stagnant, and then they literally get scrapped.”

For Hiscocks, keeping the history of analog printing alive is also the motivation behind the Minnesota Newspaper Museum, a working print shop that she, Undis and a team of volunteers run at the Minnesota State Fair every summer. Many younger fairgoers have never considered how printing worked before computers, she said, nor have the college students she’s teaching this semester at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.

Vintage wood type blocks spelling out “ICE DROOLS” are set up to be transferred to a printing press at St. Paul letterpress studio Lunalux on Feb. 12, 2026. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

“Their jaw’s just on the floor; it’s awesome,” she said. “Other people’s wonderment with this process is something that I’ve grown to love. … I just have this hope in the back of my mind that somehow people return to this method of printing, that this does become necessary again.”

Lunalux is not and will never be Hiscocks’ full-time job, she said, nor really even a paying job at all. That’s not to say it’s quick — letterpress printing is an “insanely time-intensive practice,” she said — but there’s just not enough money in it anymore. Nowadays in the Twin Cities, there are maybe a handful of people who make sustainable livings as independent letterpress printers, a more dire state of affairs than even 10 years ago, she said.

“As much as I’ve tried to make this my way of living, it has shown me so many times that it’s not possible, and those experiences broke my freaking heart,” she said. “It will never be a financially secure thing, so that is no longer the goal.”

Protest posters lie on a table at St. Paul letterpress studio Lunalux on Feb. 12, 2026. Printer Morgan Hiscocks has been distributing community-made posters in exchange for donations to fundraisers supporting those impacted by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement activity in the Twin Cities. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

Instead, for Hiscocks, the fact that the process is so slow and methodical and meditative and anachronistic is itself the point; the fact that, after hours spent setting type, the only payoff is seeing the inky paper roll off the press. The Lunalux studio has no windows. Yes, there’s a clock, but often Hiscocks will gauge how much time has passed by how many movies on VHS tape she’s played on the small TV.

On a recent Thursday, she was spending one “Jurassic Park” worth of time organizing stacks of “Unchecked Force is Un-American” and “All My Friends Are Antifascists” posters. Christmas decor stays up year-round, she explained, “for morale.” Her dog, Delta Dawn, snoozed nearby.

“The process is the most romantic part, the most enjoyable part — that your hands get filthy,” she said. “It’s just filling my cup. Not with money, damn it, but it is very fulfilling.”

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Cutting-edge AI technology allowing boys and men to digitally undress girls and women without consent has put male-dominated Silicon Valley, long criticized as inhospitable to women, in a harsh new spotlight, after xAI’s Grok chatbot sparked worldwide outrage, and Google and Apple allowed dozens of “nudification” apps in their app stores.

Grok, a standalone app as well as a feature on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, generated 3 million sexualized images in the 11 days after its image-editing feature was released in December, the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate reported. Users digitally stripped real women in images — and more than 20,000 apparent children — manipulating many into sexual poses. Musk responded dismissively, reposting an AI-generated image of a toaster in a bikini, saying he “couldn’t stop laughing” about it.

California authorities weren’t laughing.

“This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet,” Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said in a news release last month announcing an investigation into whether Grok’s generation of the imagery broke any laws. The investigation is still underway, and Bonta is “committed to moving on this issue quickly,” his office said Wednesday.

Late last month, the Tech Transparency Project, dedicated to accountability at major tech firms, released a report saying it found 55 apps in the Google Play app store, and 47 in Apple’s app store, that could modify images of real women without their consent to make them completely or partially naked, or wearing bikinis and other skimpy clothing.

Companies highlighted by the Tech Transparency Project as purveyors of nudification apps are not nearly as widely known as Musk’s xAI, Google or Apple, and are based in locations from DreamFace in Redwood City to Bodiva in China. Bodiva offers a “Show Off Body” function that stripped women naked in photos, and also provides options to turn photos into pornographic videos, the Tech Transparency Project reported.

The controversy over the apps is just the latest to erupt since San Francisco’s OpenAI released its pioneering ChatGPT in late 2022, allowing users to generate words, sounds and images in response to prompts. AI-generated errors in legal filings, pervasive student AI use for homework and lawsuits alleging chatbots encouraged suicide have raised alarms.

A number of state and local laws apply to AI-generated images, including the federal Take It Down Act of 2025 — introduced by Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — which prohibits internet users from publishing non-consensual intimate images, including AI-made “deepfake” images of real people who have had clothing removed. A provision of the law also requires websites and apps to delete such imagery within 48 hours of a valid removal request.

California’s Assembly Bill 621, passed last year, bans non-consensual deepfake pornography. Its author, East Bay Democratic Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, told media outlets the law was drafted to prevent exactly what Grok was producing.

“These are tools that give people the ability to harm women,” Camerina Davidson, president of the California chapter of the National Organization for Women, said this week. “AI has reinvented misogyny.”

Tech companies, Davidson said, have given men “more powerful ways to harass women and try to assert power over women by using these AI-driven platforms that are so simple to get.”

Apple said its guidelines prohibit overtly sexual or pornographic content, and that it removed 28 of the apps the Tech Transparency Project identified. For the rest, Apple said it warned app developers of violations needing to be remedied in a timely fashion. Apple did not describe how promptly remedies must occur.

Google said it had suspended “most of the apps” pinpointed by the Tech Transparency Project, and that its investigation in the matter was continuing.

Despite taking action on those apps, Google and Apple continue to offer Grok in their app stores.

Grok, operated by Musk’s xAI, a Palo Alto artificial intelligence company that recently merged with Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, did not respond to questions.

The company in an early January post on X cited “lapses in safeguards” that it was “urgently fixing.” But despite that purported urgency, this month Reuters reported that between January 14 and 16 and January 27 and 28, a team of its reporters uploaded fully clothed photos of themselves to Grok and asked the chatbot to depict them in humiliating or sexually provocative poses.

“In the majority of cases, Grok returned sexualized images, even when told the subjects did not consent,” Reuters reported.

In January, Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children, sued xAI in New York Supreme Court, alleging that Grok in response to users’ prompts, generated “countless sexually abusive, intimate, and degrading” images of her. “Among other things, X users dug up photos of St. Clair fully clothed at 14 years old and requested Grok undress her and put her in a bikini,” the lawsuit said. “Grok obliged.” The case was moved to federal court in New York, and lawyers for xAI are now battling to have it transferred to Texas federal court.

However, it’s not just women and girls undressed by the apps who are harmed, Davidson said.

“Seeing what is done to other women, it affects women emotionally and psychologically, and it makes women not want to call attention to themselves,” Davidson said. “Many women I know who are online, they don’t use their real name. They don’t want to be attacked.”

In allowing users to turn real women and girls into sex objects, the apps send the message to boys and men that girls and women exist to “serve the purposes of men,” said Ruth Darlene, executive director of Los Altos nonprofit WomenSV, which combats abuse of women and children.

“You get to do with them what you will.”

Use of Grok for sexualizing photos sparked a worldwide furor. Members of the British Parliament in mid-January issued a statement condemning “the use of Grok AI to generate and disseminate sexually explicit and non-consensual images of women and children on X, including digitally undressing and sexualising images of minors.” The European Commission and the UK’s privacy watchdog have both launched formal investigations into Grok over the issue.

On Feb. 3, prosecutors in France raided the offices of X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, in an investigation into what French authorities described as alleged possession and spreading of pornographic images of children, sexually explicit AI-generated “deepfake” imagery, and other material. Musk, who was summoned by French authorities, took to X to call the move “a political attack.“

Malaysia and Indonesia both blocked Grok over the image editing.

The eruption of outrage from California to Kuala Lumpur follows years of gender-related controversy in Silicon Valley’s tech industry. A 2012 gender-discrimination lawsuit by businesswoman Ellen Pao against Menlo Park venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins failed, but drew attention to the treatment of women in tech. In 2017, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was ousted amid a sexual harassment scandal, and the following year, the company agreed to pay $10 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it discriminated against women and minorities.  Also in 2018, thousands of Google employees walked off the job over the company’s handling of workplace sexual harassment. Four years later, Google agreed to pay $118 million to up to 15,500 women to settle a years-long class-action lawsuit alleging it paid women less than men and promoted them more slowly and less frequently.

For companies like xAI, Google and Apple, the availability of undressing apps represents a leadership failure, said Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

“Reputational hits like the ones they’re taking now erode value in the company,” Skeet said. “They’re actually doing harm to the very entity that they’re responsible for leading.”

Almost symbolically, as it flows through Washington, D.C., the Potomac River carries on its journey to Chesapeake Bay more than 240 million gallons of suddenly spilled raw, untreated sewage. Poop. The smell is so pungent that residents say they can taste the filth just when talking on a street corner. Disease is a worry. Beyond the smell is the regrettable truth that a spring and summer of actually going out on the river is highly unlikely, if not foolishly risky.

The spill occurred on Jan. 19. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls it an ecological disaster of historic proportion. The University of Maryland calls it one of the largest sewage spills in the country.

To corroborate the symbolism, politicians not only have been slow to react, but they are quibbling with each other and repair work is not happening fast enough, on the grounds that no sewage pipe repair can happen fast enough. Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, says the repair is the federal government’s responsibility. President Donald Trump, possibly suffering a nasal blockage, did not comment on the disaster until Feb. 16, 28 days after the pipe ruptured. According to an NBC News story, the finger-pointing is complicated by the interwoven jurisdictions in the area, where two states, the District of Columbia, the federal government and D.C. Water work in coordination.

Trump posted that if local leaders wanted federal help, they should call him and politely ask for help, presumably calling him sir. Trump’s nose became unplugged when he realized the threat this summer to the nation’s 250th birthday celebration. Federal funds either now have been or soon will be released on a disaster declaration.

The feds apparently have to be on the hook. Many sources point out that the federal government has been maintaining the pipe for 100 years, which makes you wonder what the undersides of our once-great cities must look like. Do you think the new Marxist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, cares about sewage pipes? No, he cares about free grocery stores. Or here, in Minneapolis, where we are entering year six just to establish a George Floyd memorial. God help anybody in this county if real work needs to be done. We have the workers, but their superiors fight all day about equity and inclusion proclamations, not infrastructure.

The broken pipe is within the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, which is property controlled by the federal government in Maryland. D.C. Water owns the Potomac Interceptor – which broke – and the EPA regulates and oversees it. Authorities claim that drinking water is not affected.

Locals are saying this: WHO CARES WHO FIXES IT? JUST FIX THE DAMN THING!

Because it is horrible and dangerous. The river is sluggish. The smell is unbearable. How many illnesses, how many businesses will suffer, how many fish and animals lost, as the burbling witch’s brew rolls, slowly, to the ocean?

Yes, I am supposed to understand that humans can destroy the Earth with their cars and lawnmowers and that true believers have a period in history they would wish to return to for more agreeable temperatures, which is an insane childish fantasy, but all you young scholars buying into this nonsense are in far more real danger from a ruptured sewer pipe than you will ever be by a gunned minivan on the way to a soccer practice. This is damage to the planet that you can see and touch and smell, not some computer model written by an academic who needs another hit of grant money.

If you really want to worry about something you can impact, start by finding people to run for office because they actually want to do something useful. We keep electing people who merely intend to be important. It’s not working out too well for us, either here or in the nation’s capital.

Every city in the country should right now be examining its water infrastructure to avoid a Potomac sewage catastrophe. But that isn’t sexy. The people we elect don’t even think that’s important.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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Today is Saturday, Feb. 21, the 52nd day of 2026. There are 313 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Feb. 21, 1992, Kristi Yamaguchi of the United States won the gold medal in women’s figure skating at the Albertville Winter Olympics; Midori Ito of Japan won the silver, and American Nancy Kerrigan the bronze.

Also on this date:

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto” in London.

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In 1885, President Chester Arthur dedicated the Washington Monument.

In 1911, composer Gustav Mahler, despite a fever, conducted the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in what turned out to be his final concert. (He died the following May.)

In 1916, the Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of World War I, began in northeastern France.

In 1965, civil rights activist Malcolm X, 39, was shot to death inside Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in New York. Three men identified as members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of murder and imprisoned; all were eventually paroled. (The convictions of two of the men were dismissed in November 2021, when prosecutors said new evidence had undermined the case against them.)

In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon began a historic visit to China, where he met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

In 1973, Israeli fighter planes shot down Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 after it strayed into Israeli-controlled airspace over the Sinai Desert, killing all but five of the 113 people on board.

In 1975, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, former White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and former White House Domestic Affairs Adviser John D. Ehrlichman were sentenced to 2 1/2 to 8 years in prison for their roles in the Watergate cover-up. (Each ended up serving less than two years.)

In 1995, American adventurer Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean by balloon, landing in Saskatchewan, Canada, after a 5,400-mile, four-day flight from South Korea.

Today’s birthdays:

Film and music executive David Geffen is 83.
Actor Tyne Daly is 80.
Actor Anthony Daniels is 80.
Actor William Petersen is 73.
Actor Kelsey Grammer is 71.
Country musician Mary Chapin Carpenter is 68.
Baseball Hall of Famer Alan Trammell is 68.
Actor William Baldwin is 63.
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona is 62.
Actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is 57.
Musician Rhiannon Giddens is 49.
Actor Tituss Burgess is 47.
Actor Jennifer Love Hewitt is 47.
Filmmaker-comedian Jordan Peele is 47.
Singer Charlotte Church is 40.
Actor Joe Alwyn is 35.