Really appreciated this interview.

Theorists: this shouldn’t happen! Biology: bet.

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

I’ve been trying to come up with something to recap my 2025 but all that comes to mind is the screaming groundhog meme

Mood

Grim reporting from @propublica.org about starvation in one of the world's largest refugee camps and how newly-appointed U.S. officials discussed it uninterestedly over fancy dinner in Nairobi after cutting off aid. www.propublica.org/article/keny...

Really interesting research showing that while ultra-specialization in a single discipline might lead to better results early in one’s career, multi-discipline training and practice pays off big time in the long run. This applies to a range of professions from scientists to athletes and more

I've been telling people for almost 20 years to never, ever, ever give a third party total control over your content. It should always reside primarily on your own domain and served via self-hosted third party open source software (like WordPress, for example). And stop using Wix & shit!

If you’re wondering why I started an old fashioned blog rather than a substack…this is why.

Having an existential crisis because it’s my dog’s 5th birthday today. She is a larger breed and we will be lucky to have 10 years with her 🥹 Where did the time go?

I'd like to note that none of these cost $$$

This is the best piece I’ve read so far on why the Guinea-Bissau RCT, in which a proven life-saving vaccine will be deliberately WITHHELD, is unethical “When benefit is established, withholding an intervention is no longer neutral experimentation it becomes premeditated harm”

10/10. No notes.

Add to this the thousands of fed workers caught in admin leave purgatory 🤠

The media needs to stop writing headlines like “The CDC changes course on vaccines and autism” and “The CDC defends measles response”. NONE of this is coming from legitimate scientists at the CDC. ALL of it is coming from RFK Jr. Every such headline is causing further harm to public health.

I choose to take this as a positive omen. (As named and drawn by Paul Kidby, illustrator of Discworld.)

Monday 😮‍💨

Antisemitism is vile and should be condemned and rejected ALWAYS. No one should be targeted for their religious beliefs or because the belong to a particular ethnic group. What a horrible tragedy. apnews.com/photo-galler...

I rarely ask for things, but I will make an exception for my colleague and friend, Augustine Goba, who dedicated his life to saving others. Augustine was Director of the hemorrhagic fever lab in Kenema, Salone, and is struggling with PSP. Please consider donating. www.gofundme.com/f/augustine-...

I know about the dark web and all of that but I’m still pretty sure that LinkedIn is the most unhinged place online.

Some good context for why I say everything is not urgent. When I was in EIS, I had a friend and trained ER doc say “I’ve seen people die. This is not an emergency” re: people overworking themselves on important but not life/death public health tasks. Reduce urgency. Work like a human.

A snoot for you to boop this Friday

When this "AI" bubble pops, the men pretending they weren't pushing the hype, like "critics" whose position is "AGI is real but LLMs aren't the way," who were in eugenicist and "AI existential risk"🙄 circles, will get specials discussing what they saw coming, when its the women who told you so.

What's ominous is all of the trusted women of color who know a lot about AI are saying that a crash is on the way and the white guys are pretending they are taking it to the moon. This means that a crash is definitely on its way.

I don’t use ChatGPT. This slop is directly from my brain 🙂‍↕️

She didn’t have to call me out like this but I’m glad she did lol www.instagram.com/reel/DR97wjI...

Today, I got to work in a way that made me feel human. Working from home, weaving pockets of work between family time and chores. Not worrying about if my Teams icon was green. Bliss. Unfortunately this was only possible due to working on my day off

I've known a lot of people who work in very real, life threatening, acute crises. I've occasionally tagged along on MUCH less severe deployments. I've always been struck by how important active disengagement is. Time off is sacrosanct. It is mission critical to prevent burnout & operational failure

Timeline cleanse

If you're an expert in your field but still occasionally feel a tinge of imposter syndrome, just have a look at some of the current ACIP lineup.

My old employer 🥹

Organ perfusion is a helluva drug

Devastated to find out that a lot of my issues resolve when I actually drink enough water to be hydrated 😮‍💨

Promoting psychological safety in the workplace is essential to employee wellbeing and retention, especially during times of crisis—when, ironically, psychological safety is likeliest to dwindle, according to a study co-authored by Harvard Chan School’s Michaela Kerrissey. @harvardhpm.bsky.social

NASHVILLE Senator Charlane Oliver: “With 6 days until election day… An onslaught of right-wing attack ads by dark money groups shows cracks in the Tennessee Republican supermajority stronghold. Even Trump is panicking. I’m giddy about it TBH.” open.substack.com/pub/charlane...

Was asked by a supervisor to reflect on the past fiscal year

> @samsteindc.bsky.social

Excerpt from the blog:

This past week at work I had a couple of different people ask me about what they believed to be technical problems with Teams. ...they were actually dealing with human… http://remoteworkforhumans.com/2025/11/24/is-it-a-tech-issue-or-a-human-issue/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=jetpack_social

Getting back to why I actually started this page with a new blog post coming tomorrow morning. It only took me 8 or so weeks to get out of my doomscrolling haze 🫠

One Health ☺️

You are absolutely correct. Like, as a current fed now reading up on actual marketing vs. the science comms I’ve always relied on. Yes! One thing this admin is really good at is a LOT of repetition of a few ideas (bonus points if using language they have heard their base use). Marketing 101.

As I was saying 😬 www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/u...

This as a really clear example of the kind of top-down, suffocating, micromanaging that agencies and frontline staff are dealing with from their departments. Insult to moral injury. Also, as a former CDC-er, the bullet about HHS studies was a dead giveaway that frontline staff weren’t involved 🥲

Oh, so now it’s a crime to bring your whole self to work

Privileged to share a guest post today by a US veteran and intelligence analyst on the echoes they see between the regimes they used to monitor and today’s US. They asked to remain anonymous - itself a sign of how worrying things have become in America. christinapagel.substack.com/p/authoritar...

From @cnn.com: The US may be heading for a severe flu season, driven by the new variant that caused a rough summer in Australia & is now surging in the UK, Canada, & Japan. Vaccine skepticism from leaders of the HHS has injected chaos into the whole vaccination system. — @jennifernuzzo.bsky.social

I really did not enjoy Jay Bhattacharya & Matthew Memoli’s screed against pandemic & virology research for the flagship blog of a “free-market think tank." Instead of getting mad, I accepted @jeremyfaust.bsky.social's kind invitation to take a factual & scientific blowtorch to it.

Just a thread of fed workers talking about what they found in their inboxes after over 40 days of gov shutdown