Today I spoke with Greg Bovino, a top U.S. Border Patrol chief, as he led dozens of feds in military gear through downtown Chicago. He said they were arresting folks based on “how they look.” “How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said, referring to me. chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

Another important factor is that aside from citations and patents the NIH funds training opportunities. While much harder to quantify, NIH funding of PhD students and postdocs gives pharma the talent needed to perform drug development.

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity. And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

Claude is pretty funny: “Give me 10 brilliant ideas for a science fiction short short story, pick the most brilliant and execute it terribly” It picked: “People start receiving Amazon packages from parallel universes where they made different life choices.” And it was terrible

Assuming CDC formally adopts ACIP's recommendations, CVS tells me it will provide Covid vaccines without a prescription in all 50 states and won't require even self-attestation of a qualifying condition — "it’s up to the individual patient." No confirmation from Walgreens or Walmart yet.

How to delete your account without agreeing to the new TOS: In the dialogue box asking you to agree, DO NOT click agree. Instead, click on the TOS link which will open another tab. In the top right of that tab you can go to your account settings and delete your account.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

I recommend everyone watches this

Today in the @jewishinsider.com: A person who blamed "Jewish dollars" for funding "Marxist culture" and decried Jewish control of Hollywood, nonprofits, and the media, to be remembered as bulwark against antisemitism.

Mainstream pundits have instantly sanitized and ignored Charlie Kirk's core political project and its impacts. He has been remembered by the mainstream press as someone they merely disagreed with, a debate me-guy whose words and actions had zero consequences: www.404media.co/charlie-kirk...

This is not at all an exaggeration. Elon Musk, a single deranged billionaire, killed USAID and thus will kill millions globally.

Democrats can demand a rollback of the Supreme Court ICE racial profiling case. It’s a trivial legislative fix. It poses virtually no political risk for them. It protects 68 million people from open government persecution. It protects basic constitutional values. No government funding without this.

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

Yes, do this. "You cannot arrest someone because they are Hispanic" is worth fighting for. It's worth shutting down the government for. And it's worth attracting attention to.

I saw this with gay marriage in my teens and 20s. The Democrats tied themselves in knots with “I don’t support gay marriage but I do support civil unions” business. These positions only served to alienate a core constituency and didn’t convince anybody that was uneasy about gays and lesbians 2/x

> "41% of Millennial and Gen Z employees admit they’re sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, for example by refusing to use AI tools or outputs translation: workers who know how to do work correctly keep the business on rails in spite of the bosses who can't tell answer-shaped output from answers

Krasner: So, if what you have is a group of ICE agents, or even the military, coming into Philadelphia and committing crimes—assaults that are illegal, kidnapping, unlawful restraint, obstruction of the administration of justice—they can be prosecuted.

reposted this today because the inverse is also true: if you abandon trans people right now, you are abandoning civil rights period. if you can't stand up for trans people when it matters, no one should, or will, ever trust you when the bullseye moves to the next target.

Today I wrote about a general tendency to accept atrocious premises, and the need to reject fascism's false choices in order to find expansive and imaginative paths forward. Breaking the premise, embracing the obstacles, pursing everything. www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...

Few movements have so thoroughly discredited themselves so quickly through the actions of their leaders and most famous adherents as effective altruism

Experimental philosophy

The #1 thing that blows my mind about how most people use LLMs: they believe if they ask the LLM a question about how it works or how accurate it is, the LLM will truthfully answer them. I have seen SO many seemingly-smart people do this.

Wait, sorry, the idea is that they're fighting antisemitism by (among other things) mandating exposure to Hellenistic culture?

Somebody on LinkedIn said what we're all thinking.

Well, this is a huge Executive Order power grab... www.whitehouse.gov/presidential... 1/3

This is interesting: people are going after AI-enabled hiring software, alleging it discriminates against people over 40. www.hrdive.com/news/workday...

Whole body controller from my team. Lean on it, push it, robot doesn't fall. Important to watch the feet: it smartly changes its posture as Jonah pushes down on it.

In preparation of today's mark-up of the NIH appropriations bill in the Senate and other activities, I sent this note to Senator Susan Collins' office. 1/2

NEW: ChatGPT allows Google to index chats users share using the Share functionality - presumably misinterpreting "make this chat discoverable". The result? Frank admissions about sex lives and drug dependencies. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91376687/goo... tip @techmeme.com

I've been in an ongoing conversation with several other demographers about birth rate panic and what we can do about it. We've written this, with @karenguzzo.bsky.social and Shelley Clark. More to come! theconversation.com/fears-that-f...

Why call? Why sign letters? Why protest? What does it do?? It. Adds. Up. And PRESSURE WORKS! Keep it up, Dorks! #StandUpForScience www.politico.com/news/2025/07... 14 Republican senators urge White House to release delayed NIH funds - POLITICO

The mass starvation & killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli gov’t is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God. Jewish leaders who criticized Zohran Mamdani for three words he doesn’t use should raise their voices loudly here as well. forward.com/opinion/7575...

We need to amplify the good news, the stories where communities come together, where ordinary people learn to fight back, where politicians and judges do what is right. If this ship can be saved, it will be up to all of us to not give up the fight.

🚨 On 7/3, 139 EPA employees who signed the #DeclarationofDissent were placed on administrative leave while being investigated. We'ew holding a press briefing TOMORROW (July 8th) to update the press & public on the retaliation faced by the #EPA139 . 📍Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

“Penn’s acquiescence here is troubling…not least of which is condoning the scapegoating, revisionism, & transphobia…also bc it adds credence to an interpretation of biological sex that flies in the face of current science.” @philadelphiascienceaction.substack.com open.substack.com/pub/philadel...

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

I am once again pitching my romantic comedy: - two academics start dating - discover they are each other's terrible reviewer - hijinks ensue Working title: Love is Double-Blind

jfc Lander, as he's being cuffed: "You don't have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens. You don't have the — I'm not obstructing; I'm standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant. [...] You don't have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens asking for a judicial warrant."

This is fascism—there are no checks & balances if legislators are arrested for questioning a member of the executive branch. I struggle to understand how to best operate in this reality. I'm making incredible progress in my state, but uprooting this kind of evil feels beyond the scope of my office.

It's not going to be enough to abolish ICE. There are going to need to be prosecutions.

Interesting take. I’ll add an additional wrinkle: the proliferation of higher education might have made this worse, not better. You don’t feel status anxiety over positional goods that seem impossible to get: you feel status anxiety over ones that near-peers have that you don’t. 1/3rd have a degree…

⬇️⬇️⬇️ forward.com/opinion/7218...

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants. Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."

Looks great Gavin!

There are lots of things that warrant discussion & debate about AI, but "it uses too much energy" is a short-sighted critique that will appear silly in retrospect.