A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

Thanks for sharing this document, @rweingarten.bsky.social. I read it, and I believe it's inexcusably inadequate and will not prepare teachers or schools to confront the very real dangers of the "A.i." products pushed by your partners, including OpenAI. A few thoughts for your consideration...

Trans healthcare is literally lifesaving. The push to dismantle it is openly genocidal. www.npr.org/sections/sho...

This really is, as Sara says, INSANE memory-holing: Minutes after FCC Chairman Carr told Congress that the FCC "is not" an independent agency (see video below via @atrupar.com), the FCC website started getting scrubbed to remove that description.

There is no difference between this and the Tuskegee syphilis study. A shameful part of the history of medicine in America.

Thinking of this headline for no particular reason this morning.

People are going to die because of the pending insurance premium hikes. I know the terrain of discourse is inconsistent and goes through a tumble cycle every 24 hours, but I really think we need to hone in on this reality and drive it home for people.

Without Birthright Citizenship, you too could be ripped from your home in the middle of the night. Without the Equal Protection, the Privilege and Immunities and the Due Process Clauses, you and everyone you love could be declared subhuman and stripped of your most basic and fundamental freedoms.

Wishing people would stop writing amazing things I want to click on at the transphobic, pro-Nazi Substack platform

Bottom line: ALL of the strikes are extrajudicial killings under international law, murder under domestic law. That's true of a first strike on any of these boats, & also of Sept 2 strike killing shipwrecked survivors (which would *also* be illegal in an armed conflict, but the US isn't in one).

Anyone calling for a return to normalcy without consequence needs to have their career ended immediately so we can get people in office willing to do what is needed, which is to build a new and better normal, having disarmed and defunded the corporatist fascist occupation of our government.

“The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” The CDC’s new autism page reads like an anti-vax blog, and the agency's employees are not happy about it.

Calling something "scientific orthodoxy" rather than "established fact" or even "scientific consensus" is so incredibly damaging.

The extent of the damage done to public health, biomedical science, and healthcare in the US in less than a year will take a generation or more to repair. This is the scale of the destruction. Let that sink in. A new president, Congress won't be enough to reverse things fully. It's that bad.

The U.S. government is now inarguably spreading medical disinformation that is going to kill babies preferentially. Period. This is an INTOLERABLE. UNPRECEDENTED. DANGEROUS. ATTACK. ON ALL OF US.

CDC has overhauled its website to assert that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim”

So Harvard is keeping this guy, but Claudine Gay had to step down over ginned up plagiarism accusations and bad-faith accusations of anti-Semitism. Got it.

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)??!?!?!?!?!

"Could it not be..."? Well, since you're not willing to claim that it IS because of her content - an incredibly easy and low-stakes thing to clarify if it is so - then it obviously is NOT because of her content. So why'd you suspend Sarah Kendzior?

Pretty disingenuous to ask, "Could it not be...?" Sure, it could. But in a time of relentlessly rising, violent govt crackdowns on civilian populations (waves from Chicago where they've teargassed elementary schools, pepper sprayed toddlers, broken ribs & killed people) this ban is a huge red flag.

Gonna be pretty hard to take you people seriously when you’re banning journalists. Good work undermining yourselves.

Submitted for your consideration, for use re: the AI/LLM boom and tech utopianism in general… “Beware geeks bearing grifts.”

Schumer seems to think that politics is something that just *happens* to politicians, like the weather — rather than something that *politicians actively engage in and shape.*

I just want everyone to have the experience of living in dignity with access to sufficient food, safe housing, needed medical care, high quality education, and time to engage with what sparks their curiosity and spirit this should not be controversial 🫠

“Why don’t people trust the media?” Because they hedge so much that they look like liars. They could say that he’s asleep, but instead they are double hedging, saying that he merely *appears* to be closing his eyes. We can see the picture! His eyes are closed!

Submitted for your consideration, for use re: the AI/LLM boom and tech utopianism in general… “Beware geeks bearing grifts.”

The Washington Post editorial board articles about Mamdani are actually disgusting. It’s hard to surprise me but my jaw dropped when they referred to him as “generalissimo” in the first paragraph.

I know this opinion might get me canceled, but "more clear" sounds more correct to me than "clearer." I'm sorry, that's just how I feel about it.

I've seen this go by a few times on TikTok now and I have to say, I love this idea. We need a way to convince people to keep running even if they don't win, maybe building the loss into it as a troll move is the secret.

heads up to anyone who holds trans kids near: amy harmon from the nyt is searching for and having a hard time finding people to interview to find out exactly what trans kids are doing when their care is limited or cut off, and for purposes of community safety, please shut the fuck up around her.

A reminder, if you are anywhere in government or related industry/academia, science-related or otherwise, and you have anything you’d like to chat about or anything you think the public should know, Signal is davelevitan.26 and you can remain anonymous. My recent work here if you’re curious:

The USDA is the fail safe for SNAP. They have a contingency fund to ensure it’s covered in the event of a shutdown. They’re refusing. Grocery stores stepped up to try and help by offering discounts to any SNAP recipients and the USDA told them they had to stop. Starvation as a policy choice.

I really can't emphasize enough that OpenAI is, as Dr. Gilliard has described in the past, a social arsonist enabling racism, and I urge colleagues in education using OpenAI's products - including ed-tech platforms that incorporate its products like Khanmigo and MagicSchool - to stop.

This right here, this exact sentence, is THE problem in American political journalism. The IRA *was* cheap energy and good jobs! That was the whole bill! Democrats did precisely what political pundits are telling them to do and the pundits just ignore it.

$5 billion has been allotted to keep Americans from starving. Trump would rather starve them. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

This is the reality of Trump’s America: Your neighbors are being abducted, disappeared, and killed; free speech is an arrest-able offense; children and a FIFTH of the nation’s capitol are set to go hungry next month, and the president is busy demolishing the East Wing.

If I were running the DNC, there would be Democratic Party sponsored food relief banks across the country right now that specifically welcomed anyone regardless of party affiliation. Along with the food, there could be voter registration and links to runforsomething.net

i really resent the continued assertion that there’s so much anger on both sides, as if the causes of the anger are equally legitimate. we’re angry because masked maniacs are violently snatching our family and neighbors off the street, and they’re angry because we’re calling them out for it.

By the way if Platner was serious about his duty to the country and not just in it for the power, he'd have already stepped down. Republicans are gonna run "see they have Nazis too" ads in the general and he knows it and his team knows it but they don't care.

Boycott Home Depot. You can get anything there, somewhere else at pretty much the same price. Look what boycotts have done for Target and Tesla.

apparently it’s time for another reminder that straight white men also have identity politics, *even the ones on the left*, and we are seeing that very much in action with regards to the Pod Save America bros defending fellow bro Graham Platner

My lab has literally pioneered methods to measure health impacts of climate change that I can't get NIH grants to put into practice; meanwhile, this guy backchannels his way to being director of NIEHS? Folks: I'm going to become the joker about this one insideclimatenews.org/news/2110202...

I wrote an opinion piece about parental/family leave at UConn. I’m only ~75% happy with it but … something needed to be said. Many things actually. Loudly. Repeatedly. And with as many voices as possible. “This is UConn: Zero paid family leave for professors” ctmirror.org/2025/10/21/t...

RFK Jr. has shut down the Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, gutted funding, and derailed trials and studies.

seems that RFK is clearing the path for his CDC to do tuskegee syphillis experiments as a matter of course. in other news, RFK is a genuine monster who relishes in the pain and suffering of those he feels he has control or dominion over

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.

Lead front-page story in today's NYT Time-travel dept: -I don't remember front-page NYT stories "It's 1993, and GOP Is Still Running Against Clinton." That's what they did, for huge mid-term win. -Nor "It's 2009, and GOP Is Still Running Against Obama." Which they did, for huge win. Weird.

Reminder that relying on what an LLM tells you is…not a good idea.

I have friends everywhere. #NoKings