🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

in this video in like 4 different ways and I hate that

One of the hardest things about raising kids (esp girls) is instilling a sufficiently high level of wariness in them about the world and people around them without sliding into paranoia

When researchers asked LLMs whether they should switch between religions, LLMs tended to encourage becoming Catholic & shedding atheist & Jehovah's Witness identities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22975

Gender studies remains the most vindicated major of all time

* Abolish DHS and split its functions up so that immigration is located under the department of labor; rewrite immigration law so that it is just and fair and makes sure that every worker in this country has the status to work with dignity and fairness.

the reason we don’t have discourse about a crisis of femininity is that any attempt to construct one would collapse under the absurdity of its outmoded gender essentialism, suggesting that masculinity is not so much in crisis as the uncritical belief that masculinity even exists is itself the crisis

It's wild to me that Mike Lee thinks he can ally with Christian nationalists to make an apostate out of James Talarico (a Presbyterian) while avoiding the same date for himself, a Mormon.

Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.

In his keynote speech to Harvard graduates this week, @thedailyshow.com host Ronny Chieng said "Fuck AI!" Turns out you can talk about AI in a grad speech and not get booed. Watch our episode on these AI grad speeches: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE0E...

This is what happens when queer people hate your party. There’s no one there to plan one.

After a Wisconsin town did this, the mayor said: “The fact that they didn’t take the cameras down shows that we are the product. They were never really selling to us in the first place. They're selling to much bigger agencies the ability to spy on a ton of people.” (via boltsmag.org/verona-wisco...)

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

Whoa, new X-Men 97 trailer

It's funny because in my current job, all the women on my team play fantasy football, attend games, and know the players/coaches while the men don't follow sports much at all.

Wrong to the point of malpractice

A President ordering the Justice Department to criminally investigate a woman who won a sexual assault lawsuit against him makes Watergate look like an unpaid parking ticket.

Pneumococcal pneumonia is vaccine-preventable If you're over 50, or younger than 50 and have risk factors like COPD, asthma, diabetes, kidney or liver disease, or if you smoke, like Kyle Busch, get the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. Available at most pharmacies and covered by most insurance plans

Solidarity with E. Jean Carroll and all survivors who face legal retaliation and criminal prosecution for speaking the truth. This is both remarkable and utterly unsurprising. Survivors have been jailed, retraumatized, harassed, and sued into silence for far too long.

MIT closing three of its four libraries is shocking and appalling and underscores that the source of so much of the crisis in higher education comes not from attacks from the far right or the collapse of public trust, but rather from the university administrative class itself.

I was moved by the concluding two paragraphs of this excellent essay by @harshawalia.bsky.social. I recommend reading it. www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

A small dip in enforcement followed the Minneapolis killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026. The DDP data shows it was real but modest, it didn't fundamentally change the trajectory of ICE street arrests, raids, and other aggressive enforcement tactics.

What stands out is that voluntary departures and returns increased 28-fold. That means large numbers of people chose to leave rather than fight their cases, partly bc they don’t want to spend months sitting in detention.

ICE increased detention beds for interior arrests 4.5x. Release within 60 days of arrest (under Biden ppl w/out crim. records = 35%), dropped to 7% under Trump. Lower release rates drive numbers up, which means ICE isn’t just arresting more ppl, it’s holding them longer.

The pattern that gets less attention than the raw totals are the arrests of people with no criminal convictions, which has increased more than eightfold. The primary mechanism is aggressive enforcement of people with no convictions.

Interior deportations increased fivefold in the first year of the second Trump administration. ICE street arrests, outside jails and prisons, went up by a factor of eleven. These numbers come from ICE's own data, obtained via FOIA and analyzed by the Deportation Data Project.

This is the most recent letter from hunger/labor striking prisoners at Delaney Hall ICE facility in Newark, NJ. "We appreciate the support of everyone who is protesting outside the facility. We want you to know that you give us the strength and determination to keep going. Please, DON’T GIVE UP!"

Was just going to say this. All kinds of things are possible for these people. It’s like they’ve been fired with months’ notice and no one has taken away their access to the company info and vault. Whether or not they want to caucus with Dem there is plenty of damage to be done - for those willing.

Thread

My final piece on Graham Platner and the US Senate race. At almost 5000 words, it's long but based on several meetings with Platner and others. I'm not arguing with people online, so there are no comments. Life is too short to be stressed. open.substack.com/pub/shaystew...

I know people don’t say this anymore but: protect this girl at all costs

in support of this post, alt text so everyone can see how much of a badass Senator Kim is: "I ran up and put myself between the ICE officers and the crowd, and that's when they started to shoot at us with the pepper balls--as well as using the pepper spray--and were tackling people."

ICE agents pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey.

One thing about getting older- you start liking grapefruit juice.

Ya'll. I am shook. In a good way. Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing Slavery

Let your kids be weird and non-conformist. Let them have private diaries and keep secrets. Don't let the car be their only form of transportation. Treat them like adults-in-training.

Give your kid all the freedom you feel comfortable with, then a little more

A lot of international parenting practices will horrify middle-class Western parents and that's ok

No it the fuck was not.

NPR forgets that some of us were there, or know this thing called history. One day, suggesting the DHS was "conceived in the interest of unity and harmony" will be taught as an example of a once-trusted independent US news outlet pivoting with alacrity to propaganda greasing the slide toward fascism

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

Another reason to hate AI

The kid calculus of what's fun to them is so precise: it's like a dial where one side is Boring and the other side is Terrifying, and the fun zone is the exact line that separates the two halves

This is astonishingly evil and cruel. It targets the people who have come here lawfully, done everything right, and qualify for a path to citizenship. It means they must leave the families who live here and the jobs that are the very reason they can work here. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

One element to this I think is worth mentioning - and the one that has caused me the most general anger toward my colleagues at the DoD - is that this dishonor of women and servicemembers of color may have started with Hegseth, but it is maintained principally by active duty and civil servants. /

I have an answer! It’s because they find black men and black bodies erotic. Cuck porn isn’t about the woman, it’s about being attracted to the man through the woman. It’s a desire to be submissive through hierarchy — the military, sports, gangs, all show this drive. And naturally it shows up in sex

The winning entry (as voted on by fair fans) of the Iowa State Fair T-shirt design is an AI slop abomination

Because this country likes to forget what it’s capable of, I take it as a duty to remind us. We sit at the brink of the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction — a Second Redemption. And the end of Black political power means the end of democracy itself.

Me cheering on the lawsuits to destroy the fascist slush fund