Really great piece, covering everything wrong with the far right's push to remake higher education, and more importantly with the media's coverage of those efforts.

This is the logical and inevitable conclusion of the last decade of elite media "free speech" discourse.

Happy 14th anniversary to this youtube video

“Clearly, the ever-widening gulf between you and your employees has blinded you to some basic facts about reindeer anatomy, so here’s a quick science lesson, boss man: shiny noses reflect light; they are not themselves sources of light.”

let’s just assume anyone worth over $100 million hung out with epstein and banish them from society

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

If you are in the US and you would like to send a message to your elected representative about the proposed dissolution of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, @agu.org makes it easy with a template here: agu.quorum.us/campaign/151... #AGU25

NEW: Colorado Sens Hickenlooper and Bennet announce they're putting a hold on the Senate appropriations package to demand funding for NCAR. Bennet said today that the Trump administration's move to dismantle the climate/weather lab is retaliation for Tina Peters' imprisonment.

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.

if i were a young person that survived multiple (!!!) school shootings at different schools and the big fancy media outlets interviewed me about it and all of that was to absolutely no effect that would really, really demoralize me

The same people who think we need to bring back real standards to academia also want to give all students a “suspend my professor” button if they don’t like how things are going

> @amysiskind.com

Trump threatened Indiana Republicans that if they didn't do what he wanted, he'd block all federal funds to their state but they ignored his threats and told him to pound sand. Take notes, college presidents.

With support from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, Running Tide billed itself as on the cutting edge of carbon removal. In the end, it resorted to dumping thousands of tons of wood chips in the sea. www.wired.com/story/how-th...

Indianapolis Star, November 22, 1918

'Let it Snow' with all the positive lines removed

I’m sure FIRE will be all over this

What’s remarkable about Scott is that her philanthropy isn’t an effort to offset the moral choices made in earning her fortune, as was the case for the Carnegies et al. As far I can tell, it’s just unadulterated beneficence.

Happy Stylish But Illegal Monkey In IKEA Day to all who celebrate!

Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

Both sides of a conflict are calling each other evil and corrupt, rendering me, a humble journalist, helpless to discern the truth. Best I can do is let you know that both sides are in fact saying those things. Hope this helps

New research suggests that air cleaners that oxidize VOCs may transform ethanol into by-products such as formaldehyde and acetaldehyde. cen.acs.org/environment/... #chemsky 🧪

In happy news, my home institution, MIT, just announced that the amazing Paula Hammond will be the next dean of the School of Engineering. That's great, but this is a pure flex: Not gonna lie: it's great working with so many folks so much smarter than me.

11 days until the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans.

Annual repost

why isn’t our kids learning vs how dare you educate our kids

I would rather have a world where we all trust each other and accept that a few people will take advantage of it than a world where folks have to perform disability constantly in order to get the help they need. Let kids have an extra 30 minutes on the test, jesus fucking christ

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

My dream is to have one of those college football coach jobs where a college administrator tells me that I’m fired but also they will pay me 50 million dollars as long as I promise not to come to work

Hopefully the New Yorker will someday run an article on atmospheric chemistry, just so we can read about the photoöxidation of cycloöctane

Does anyone want a survivorship bias shortbread

Hi everybody, It's Black Friday, a big day for us at The Onion, since we rely almost entirely on your memberships. Our goal for 2026? More print subscribers than the Washington Post. This is, somehow, feasible. So sign up! A year of print is $75 for the year today. Help us do a very funny thing.

I wish it didn’t feel so unusual and inspiring to see a leader treating everyone like they matter and saying that we have a responsibility to help each other

> @samsteindc.bsky.social

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Another terrifying article about Stardust, with (what I think is) some new info: - they claim they'll finally release info on their secret particles starting in early 2026 - they plan a first atmospheric test in 2027 - they've been funding academic research (with one PI named)

America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.

The party that promised "free speech on campus" has made sure there can be no free speech on campuses.

If you work on sources and impacts of VOCs (biogenic or anthropogenic) from measurement to modeling perspectives please submit an abstract to our atmospheric organics session at #EGU26! Our invited speakers are @dbm.bsky.social and @jacquirickard.bsky.social See you in Vienna! tinyurl.com/55vda8u7

#BREAKING: Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava report.

Postdoc opening: airborne NH3 measurements Join our team! The UMN atmospheric chemistry group is recruiting a postdoc to collect and analyze airborne NH3 measurements as part of NASA FarmFlux. See z.umn.edu/aw67 for details, & contact Julieta ([email protected]) and I ([email protected]) with questions!

A guy makes ONE tiny mistake (has a years-long friendship with the world's worst sex trafficker; brags about sexually harassing colleagues; is racist; says women are stupid) and his whole LIFE is blown up (does slightly fewer speaking engagements; keeps teaching at #1 university)??!?!?!?!?!

larry summers is genuinely, deeply misogynist in a way which is not even captured by his public contempt for women

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen. Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

“a shining example for all of us to emulate” www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/10/jhj-...

Boston ❤️ Nova Scotia

So we've been working through tariff-exemption paperwork so we can purchase a Swiss-manufactured instrument. The tariff (and hence the instrument cost) just went down by $13K ... because the Swiss basically bribed Trump. Yay?

please don't do this. MAGA hats are made from an acrylic blend, which will release toxic chemicals when set on fire, potentially harming you and downwind woodland creatures