Jenna Norton, a vocal critic of Trump administration actions at the NIH, was abruptly placed on administrative leave this week. www.statnews.com/2025/11/14/n...

NEW: 2020 footage said to be in 2025. A neighbor who keeps reappearing in the same clip, said to be on different days & months. A broadcast from elsewhere suggested as Portland. How Fox News misled its viewership -- which may have included the president. www.propublica.org/article/port...

The coldest air on the planet - relative to normal - is over FL now! The cold pool is being forced south by overwhelming Arctic warmth. While FL won’t bear the brunt for much longer, the Arctic will become even more off-kilter over the coming weeks. That means weather shenanigans will abound!

Trump: “It’s not a big deal….”

This is an amazing (and infuriating) story, complete with Github repos of their analysis!

New College is paying more for worse educational outcomes. Hard to not see this as a potentially existential threat in the current higher-education environment. www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...

When did the norm become the Speaker of the House only addresses the press surrounded by a posse of awkward-looking white people in ill-fitting suits? Do you think R congress people have to draw straws to stand behind him as he professes to not know anything or dismiss clear red flags?

All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Nobody likes Andrew Cuomo. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Et tu, Rande?

The ICE boys must be soft af if a barefoot woman being dragged out of her car can injure two of them decked out in full tactical.

No more Black or trans staffers. No politics of any kind. The cowardice of mainstream media isn't just insulting, it's *boring.* Now TV is just like any other beauty rag. Why not just kill it quickly? Why the slow-motion pretense?

Devastating. Teen Vogue has been doing excellent work in political journalism the last few years, better than some major newspapers.

Is he paraphrasing Jesus here?

My wife teaches at a CSU and got her first papers this week for her Native American history class. Paper based on a widely-available online source. About half the papers had the exact same argument. Prose was different, but argument was the exact same. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/t...

I'm old enough to remember when performance reviews were about performance

I am begging people to have at least the basic moral judgment of The Joker when it comes to Nazism

A follow-up to yesterday's email to Director Bhattacharya... 1/12

Truly ICE is creating Meal Team Six. More than a third of recent recruits failed to successful perform 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes. This is not a high standard. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

My response to the NYT’s “moderate to win” argument: The data shows the strategy is tapped out. Being seen as moderate by voters doesn’t boost votes, replacing every progressive with moderates would net 0 seats, and the graveyard of defeated D incumbents if full of moderates, not progressives.

I think Speaker Johnson misspoke. What he meant to say is "we're fighting healthcare". These slip-ups do happen.

Very presidential.

Student media rules. They are lapping a lot of the spineless media orgs this year and showing how solidarity is the way.

With Stanford front-and-center!

Everyone wants to streamline bureaucracy, but maybe we'd get better results by making it *harder* for university admins to chase fads. Imagine the money we'd save with a mandatory cooling-off period before launching a "Center for Blockchain Studies" or dumping millions into the latest edtech toy.

Good for USC! Hopefully, others to follow! @stanfordaaup.bsky.social

I’ve joked before that Rationalism is to Silicon Valley as Scientology is to Hollywood. And that’s… not a joke, actually. The rationalist community is very influential and more than a little cult like. Eliezer Yudkowsky is the L. Ron Hubbard of rationalism. This book is his Battlefield Earth

A musician, Oriana Korol, was peacefully playing clarinet with her protest band outside ICE facilities in Portland, OR. When the band started playing “Ghostbusters,” ICE thugs suddenly poured outside, slammed her into the mud, arrested her and took her to a jail 9 miles away in Vancouver, WA.

We got $20 billion for Argentina though.

Our new theory of COUNTERADAPTATION with @juemos.bsky.social Preprint available here: osf.io/preprints/so...

Read it all. From one small section: Shortly after a man fired >500 rounds at CDC and killed a cop, the staff that safeguard employee, facility, and data security are gone. And the Office of Strategic Business Initiatives, that trains and supports risk management across the entire agency, is gone.

You see, it's the uniformity of thought that causes the two-hour faculty meetings with the follow-on quarterly retreats to write the one-paragraph description of the department.

Most of this laundry list of "overwhelming evidence" is tendentious. Let's go through them. 1) A big driver of high costs at public universities has been a decrease in state appropriations. Many public schools have been forced to act on a public/private model as a result..../1

This ain't profound or nothin', but, you know, we used to build great things. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Huh, I will admit I didn't have this one on my bingo card.

Well, this is a reassuring plot 😬 Concentration index of the S&P 500: average market value of top 10% of stocks compared with the median stock. Now at record highs, comparable to the Great Depression and Dot-com bubble peak. www.ft.com/content/d5d4...

US soybean farmers finding out the hard way that "America First" was a lie

ANDREESSEN: Even if AI ends up destroying all the jobs, “the result would be hyper-deflation of prices, which is the thing that people miss. .. Things that today cost a lot of money will all of a sudden be cheap or free.” @fortune.com fortune.com/2025/10/08/b...

A trio of cyclonic eddies in the Gulf of Mexico are creating record-high Ocean Heat Content values for the date. Absolutely something of importance during this part of hurricane season. @miamirosenstiel.bsky.social

Pretty incredible own goal by liberal institutions and many Democratic electeds to crush the exact type of protests in 2024 that would’ve been the most effective way to slow or stop ICE incursions into American cities in 2025

Student protests are basically a necessary condition for any democracy movement open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

The administration doing its level best to undermine actual law enforcement and national security in service of performative cruelty and chaos. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Trey Reed, a student at Delta State University in Mississippi, was found hanging from a noose. Mississippi police ruled the death a suicide. Now an autopsy reportedly concludes that he suffered extensive blunt force trauma across his body before he died, meaning he was beaten before he was lynched.

"The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year... In a way, then, America has become one big bet on AI."

As someone still reeling from a recent demonstration by a group of super-smart students of their highly restricted vision of the future of humanity (it's all Mad Max/Apocalypse), I can totally get behind this. Among other things, we need better and more diverse visions of the future!

This is a fantastic speech.

NEW: In newly unsealed testimony, a SpaceX insider revealed that Elon Musk’s company had directly received money from Chinese investors, raising questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States’ most important military contractors.

Epi Ellie, as usual, doing the Lord's work.

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong". Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!