The district court injunction that prevented NIH from capping indirects at 15% was upheld today on appeal! www.reuters.com/world/trump-...

Let me be very clear: tomorrow morning and EVERY DAY THIS WEEK, call your Reps and Senators whether Dem, Republican or Independent. Express your outrage at Trump’s imperial and illegal actions against sovereign nations. TELL THEM to convene. To hold up everything. Hold up $. 202-224-3121

New year's day celebration in Woods Hole: About 50 people and many dogs meet in the middle of town and walk around Eel Pond in the snow and wind making a variety of noises (e.g. blowing on a long brass horn). A toast is made, sparkling cider is served, and a cannon is fired. I love my home town.

Happy New Year from Sippewissett! May we begin this year to slow and reverse the devastation wrought in 2025.

Devastating:

Meta, parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has introduced a new feature that lets you take control of your algorithm by suggesting topics you want to see more posts about. Look what happens when journalist @AymanM (X) tries adding ‘Gaza’ and ‘Palestine’ to his algo. 👇

An extra benefit of a wealth tax!: "Billionaires including Peter Thiel and Larry Page are considering cutting or reducing their ties to California by the end of the year because of a proposed ballot measure that could tax the state’s wealthiest residents" www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/t...

Thank you @michellegoldberg.bsky.social for this encouraging piece. Let's fight harder everyone in 2026 and get rid of this menace! www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/o...

Merry Christmas @bjbalas.bsky.social ! I think we have one in the pantry :-) I'll get it out for tonight!

Palestinian Christians in Gaza are celebrating another year of surviving genocide, while Palestinians in the birthplace of Jesus are under brutal Israeli military occupation. Israel has bombed, demolished, crushed and killed hundereds of thousands of Palestinians in the Holy Land.

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

Doctors Without Borders urges Israel to let critical aid into Gaza as children freeze to death. "At least 13 people, including two-week-old and one-month-old babies, have died from winter weather and a lack of adequate shelter and aid – blocked by Israel" www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

Two thirds or more of both Republicans and Democrats say that the label "antisemitism" is used frequently/sometimes to delegitimize critics of Israel and political opponents: sadat.umd.edu/sites/sadat....

This is an unacceptable way to treat the brilliant international scientists who run American science!

“Once-unthinkable” here should be “in wild and blatant violation of the law and the US Constitution.” At NIH alone: The RIFs were illegal (as a judge, Illston, ruled). The grant terminations were illegal (Young ruling). The probationary firings were illegal (Alsop ruling). We must say this. 1/

Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports 90% of Gazans lost their homes since October 2023, with the average resident displaced six times. www.haaretz.com/gaza/2025-12...

Looking forward to reading the NYTimes public editor’s reaction to David Brooks’ failure to disclose his connection to Jeffrey Epstein when he wrote a column saying the case was unimportant. Oh wait: they don’t have a public editor anymore. Never mind.

Minnesota’s Indivisible Two Harbors is so committed to fighting for our democracy that they rally every Saturday morning — even when it’s dangerously cold outside: “Dress warm and join us!" Find your local organizers: indivisible.org/groups

Important caveat on simplistic one-gene alterations as explanations for the mergence of human cognition.

We grieve the loss of life in Sydney, Australia, where gunmen attacked a celebration of the first night of Hanukkah, killing at least 11 people. This was a terrifying incident of hate-fueled violence that no community should face.

A magical first snow of the year in Sippewissett.

READ: Dr. Nahla Al-Sarraj gained hundreds of thousands of social media followers by discussing the Gaza genocide. She was fired after a pressure campaign from Israel lobby groups that she believes aimed to silence her. Despite this, she remains unbowed. mondoweiss.net/2025/12/pro-...

Always worth listening to the great moral giant of our time Ta-Nahisi Coates:

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

Yup I realized that when one of his New Yorker articles discussed his great idea that the brain might have a special region for face recognition, all presented as his idea long after this had been widely published.

Weird to be quoting Goerge Will, but he got this bit right: "Watching today's politics toy with an institution of MIT's complexity and importance is like watching a toddler play with Sèvres porcelain." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Natural disaster amplifies Israeli-made catastrophe: At least 12 people dead or missing with at least 13 buildings collapsed and 27,000 tents flooded in Gaza as devastation from floods spreads. www.cbc.ca/news/world/g...

socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-... An inspiring story about Mexico City's UTOPIAs (Units for Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony) that provided needed services and transform lives. We could do these here in the US!

‪@neuranna.bsky.social‬ and @evfedorenko.bsky.social tackle with neuroimaging a phenomenon identified in the 1970s by the pioneering work of the great Molly Potter: conceptual information processing common to pictorial and verbal input. Thrilled to have played a small part in this exciting work.

Just heard from a brilliant young university student I know who is living in a tent in Gaza. She says the rain and thunder is extreme and she is worried her whole tent will be whipped away in the storm. How dare we allow this to happen?

Go, Doris! astera.org/neuroscienti...

Nearly half of Americans said they find groceries, utility bills, health care, housing and transportation difficult to afford, according to The POLITICO Poll conducted last month by Public First. www.politico.com/news/2025/12... more exerpts follow...

Private equity’s latest victim? Your grandma’s nursing home.

I know that the formal secession thing was discussed in a full and frank exchange from 1861-1865. But as the judicial coup seizing control of the federal gov't continues to expand, I wonder what levers exist for "soft-secession"--the minimizing of federal reach into individual states...1/

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

An incredible piece of writing, a gift of a sort I had not known it was possible to receive

i’m at the brooklyn training. amazing energy.

NEW ORLEANS OFFICIALS: “We insist (Trump’s ICE goons) clearly ID themselves… there is no precedent for masked law enforcement… they have ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY… citizens are being racially profiled, chased, hunted… the chaos and lack of professionalism is ALARMING…”

Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”

Thank you Ben Rhodes for this important column: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/o... Some exerpts: "If you believe a Palestinian child is equal in dignity and worth to an Israeli or American child, it is no longer possible to support this Israeli government while hiding behind platitudes about peace. ...

UNACCEPTABLE: S college kid in Boston boards a DOMESTIC flight to Texas see her family for Thanksgiving, is surrounded at Logan airport by ICE agents and abruptly deported to Honduras. This insanity must stop. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/u...

Former US military lawyers speak out: "The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both." Statement on Media Reports of Pentagon “No Quarter” Orders in Caribbean Boat Strikes 1/2

Abolish ICE. Call your representatives, and ask if they agree that they must be destroyed. Let them know you’ll volunteer, donate to, and vote for their primary opponents if they refuse to help dismantle and prosecute Trump’s SS.

Neuroscience of language has a dilemma: how do we reconcile extensive patient and imaging evidence for **language-specific** processing with the fact that naturalistic language evokes extensive activity all over the brain? We propose a framework that accounts for both.

What a privilege and a delight to work with @coltoncasto.bsky.social @ev_fedorenko and @neuranna on this new speculative piece on What it means to understand language, nicely summarized in this Tweeprint from @coltoncasto.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757

Know hope: www.politico.com/news/2025/11...

This is the face of an American child. Israel has jailed him for 9 months without a charge. Without a protest from the US gov. Without a scandal in Western media. Of course, this would've been front-page news daily had another country done this to an American child. www.bbc.com/news/article...

whenever a new video-generation model comes out I check if it can create centaurs from the prompt 'half-man, half-horse'. The answer is almost always 'no'. This is Veo 3.1's response to "a half-man, half-horse creature running along the beach"

Applications due December 1st! Come work with us!