I have purchased a mid-sized cat tower so that Ariel can sit next to me at my desk and get scritches while I am writing. Everyone wins here.

Grateful to have discovered the impactful thinking and activism of @astra.bsky.social through the CBC 2023 Massey Lectures, "The Age of Insecurity." Turning to her 2019 text "Democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone" to help think carefully about global current affairs.

Izquierda Derecha, by Juan Genovés, 1967, 📸 via @beysicc

Go birds

Both physics profs who consult for superhero movies and writers of superhero comic books who know their physics enjoy my new book THE PHYSICS OF SUPERHEROES GOES HOLLYWOOD. Bringing people together - it's what I do!😉

Growing up near Philadelphia in the 70s, maybe the most common bumper sticker to see was: "Only the Lord Saves More than Bernie Parent." RIP.

I mostly resist the temptation to attribute any cleverness to Trump. He is a bumbling doofus whose amorality and ruthlessness have allowed him to accidentally succeed. But the idea of doing so many blatantly wrong things, so out in the open, that nothing is an actionable revelation? Kind of genius.

No we shouldn’t accept. And we should all delete our academia accounts. Now! Thanks to @danielmartinfeige.bsky.social for the alert.

In 2022, we were very excited to see 3.6sigma evidence of Cosmic Birefringence in Planck+WMAP. We've been waiting for confirmation from other experiments since, and now we are slowly getting it! New paper is finding 2.9sigma evidence in ACT DR6. This is getting serious! arxiv.org/abs/2509.13654

Today, Maryland took additional actions to protect COVID access: - Issued a standing order so vaccines can be administered based on guidance developed by medical professional societies instead of the federal government - Confirmed they have joined the Northeast Public Health Collaborative

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I wonder how much of this is not even especially political. A lot of these guys have been buying gear and dressing up for years, but the apocalypse hasn’t come. Now they get an excuse to act out the scenes playing in their heads, and (contrary to the fantasy) the government is even on their side.

Sprawling Mural in Support of Immigrants Unveiled in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. <fangirl mode>It's my friend Adam Cvijanovic's work! I, like, KNOW him!" <fangirl off> It looks beautiful.... hyperallergic.com/1043132/spra...

Certainly rooting for this particular cosmological anomaly to hold up...

Locality and causality! Very important ideas in physics, but not things that usually get the podcast treatment. I hop on @danielwhiteson.bsky.social and @weinersmith.bsky.social's Extraordinary Universe to do something different.

Stand up and fight for democracy and human rights, damn it. People will respect you for it.

Give money to @liberalcurrents.com you cowards!

I haven’t seen nearly enough clips from The Sting being shared around here. youtu.be/BAF9OAO4TtA?...

Karina Villa protecting her constituents by literally running ICE off the streets in West Chicago and yelling to residents to stay inside their homes.

The passing of Paul Newman (2008), Sean Connery (2020), Sidney Poitier (2022), and now Robert Redford (2025) signals the slow disappearance of a certain type of 20th century figure: men who embodied classic style in a way that reflected their taste, rather than a professional stylist.

The Philosophy of Science Association makes experts on various topics available for conversation with graduate students anywhere with its "Office Hour" program. Other associations should consider doing this.

"Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war." h/t @ziyatong.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2004...

If you’ve never seen All The President’s Men, this extended scene of a guy on the phone is a great distillation of why that movie is so thrilling to so many of us.

This might seem bad, but have you considered the threat posed by Blueskyism?

After a long break, my podcast 'Why This Universe?' is starting up again! In our first episode of the season, Nobel prize-winner Adam Riess shares his story of the discovery that dark energy is powering the expansion of space. Listen to the whole episode here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9...

Pay attention. Something dark might be coming. The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent. 1/ Here's what's happening.

Pretty clear that some places are just using current events as an excuse to get rid of people they weren't comfortable having around anyway. Darkness is coming, democracy is dying.

Mindscape 328 | Mary Roach @maryroach.bsky.social on Replacing Parts of Our Bodies. Noses, teeth, limbs, bones, hearts & more. #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...

Learned about tonnato sauce from the latest Home Cooking and...so that's basically Churu for people?? my head says "nope" but my heart says "I would eat and like that"

Calling out political extremists for being hypocritical (“they claim to value free speech, but actually try to censor speech they don’t like!”) is like calling out a football team for playing both offense and defense. They’re not trying to embody fixed standards, they’re just trying to win.

An appeal to help preserve a unique archive of recorded scientific talks.

* Honest, open dialogue between differing perspectives is a core value worth preserving. * The form of such dialogue, without the honesty or openness, has been co-opted by bad-faith actors as a cynical strategy to garner respectability. * There are plenty of suckers eager to fall for the ruse.

Official answer: The Residence Secret answer: Teenage Bounty Hunters

Here's a free version of that Wall Street Journal essay: archive.is/ADjdy

Being a professor is so weird. You are constantly having to act like you know things.

Outrageous! "Just another" corrupt establishment? Theoretical physics is clearly the coolest corrupt establishment we have. (More seriously, it is true that physicists are going to have to do a better job in educating people about what they do and how they operate.)

Admittedly I have no experience as the commissioner of a major sports league, but it seems like a bad sign when one such commissioner thinks it's not important to watch games because you can just watch highlights on TikTok. sports.yahoo.com/article/adam...

I think journal editors should be a wee bit more aggressive in desk-rejecting scientific papers that claim to find a "mistake" in standard equations that have been well-established for decades and appear in many textbooks. There is not a subtle math error in deriving the Friedmann equation, sorry.

Everyone with a platform right now should be condemning political violence of all stripes, and particularly from their own side. Fanning the flames here - on either side - is an act of encouraging further political violence. We have to stop this cycle, not feed it. RIP, Charlie Kirk.

This is horrible. Do not shoot people. Do make it less easy for people to get guns.

Intriguing data from the Perseverance rover on Mars, but too soon to attribute it to the existence of life. Science takes time, that's okay.

Apparently they are bringing new AI people to life, and also creating AI podcasts, presumably for them to listen to? No reason to bother the rest of us, really.

Remember, students, smash the four olds! Old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits! Report counterrevolutionary instructors who defy Our President's Laws to the proper authorities for reeducation!

Good insight here about interdisciplinarity. It's not just getting people from the right fields in the same room; it's about getting the right people, those who are honestly open to learning about the questions and methods of other fields. (Something @sfiscience.bsky.social is so good at.)

Postdoc job! I expect to have an opening at Johns Hopkins for a postdoctoral researcher working somewhere in the broad realms of physics, philosophy, and complexity. Apply at Academic Jobs Online: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30496

So glad ICE is in Chicago. The city is a lawless hell-scape. Blues musicians wrecking hundreds of police cars. High schoolers doing weird scientific sex experiments. Kids home alone during the holidays. Women killing their husbands and lovers and then SINGING about it sassily. This has to stop.

did you know gmail now has a subscriptions page where it lists all your subscriptions and you can unsubscribe from them????

As others have said, this is a great Ezra Klein piece on why the Democrats need to take drastic action and stop funding the government (gift link). Yes, other people made the argument long ago, but we have to focus on fixing things and not who gets credit for it. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/o...

Mindscape Ask Me Anything | September 2025. Entropic gravity, democratic equilibrium, discrete space, exorcising Laplace's Demon, and so much more. #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...