A super interesting study on how ants alter their nest networks to prevent epidemics! Network topology metrics were used to measure the effect on disease transmission. www.science.org/doi/full/10....

New @nberpubs: "The Economic Impact of Brexit" www.nber.org/papers/w34459 "by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time." 😲

David Gale’s work was diverse and impactful in math and econ #econsky

US leadership in science and technology under a self-inflicted threat. www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

Humphrey School at Minnesota is hiring an associate professor in "water resources, sustainable agriculture, or the nexus of food-energy-water issues." Come join me in the frozen north! hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/370...

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

The five biggest meat and dairy producers are generating more methane than the largest oil and gas firms, according to a new report.

Ah! Good morning, reality. And welcome. We’ve been expecting you…

More measles in South Carolina as US nears 1,600 confirmed cases South Carolina officials said all new case-patients were in quarantine before they contracted the disease. www.cidrap.umn.edu/m...

Paper for next weeks Biodiversity COP in AbuDhabi. Special issue of IUCN Parks. We need a UN Global Convention on Freshwater for humanity and biodiversity. Parksjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/5.-DOBSON.PDF

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

CIDRAP is hiring a Deputy Director, who, in addition to other duties, will serve as a liaison between CIDRAP and other areas of UMN, so must either live in the Twin Cities area or have the ability to relocate upon accepting the position. Apply today! hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/...

Trump’s reelection was the tipping point. In April, Matthias Doepke sold his house and permanently moved his family to England to teach at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

🚨 JOB ALERT! Our group is recruiting a postdoc to develop novel methodologies for early outbreak detection and inference using AI/ML, modeling, and data science. This is a multi-year position providing stable research support. Welcome to apply and share with others! 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173722

Awesome faculty position alert! Tenure-track assistant professor position in Evolutionary Biology, with a focus on organismal responses to environmental change. Please help spread the word! apply.interfolio.com/173889

Kidney exchange has given rise to work not only in medicine but in economics, computer science and operations research. #econsky #operations marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/09/kidn...

RFK Jr. went on Fox News today to claim that HHS has had “no successes” in the past 40 years. I beg to differ. Figure from Lei et al., NEJM 2020. Link below.

Beatiful article @tobykiers.bsky.social ! Source: NPR search.app/tP7Ep

What an unprecedented and strong bipartisan voice to sound this alarm. Will the Republican Congress wake up and stop playing politics with the health of the American people?

This firefighter arrived in the US at age 4, has been here for 19 years, was on track to legal status, and was on a crew trying to contain a major blaze (in Washington state, vs Oregon, fwiw.) h/t @joshuajfriedman.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I have an unusual problem with the elimination of the "de minimis" tariff exemption. When I give talks abroad, the host often offers a lovely but awkward gift — say, a 20 lb coffee table book on the history of their city. So I ask them to mail it. No more. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

An op-ed from the world’s most distinguished active mathematician

JAMA reports on the latest estimates of COVID vaccine effectiveness “COVID-19 vaccinations averted 2.5 million deaths during 2020-2024… but this benefit was mostly limited to a minority of the population of older individuals." #vaccine #covid #medicine marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/08/covi...

Trump's nominee for BLS commissioner, EJ Antoni, is disastrously terrible. He's a 1200%, 1300% maybe 1400% in-the-tank Trumper, with few credentials beyond a history of misrepresenting or misunderstanding economic statistics. He has shown no commitment to truth www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Let's focus on qualifications: Antoni finished grad school 5 years ago at Northern Illinois with no distinction. Dissertation: No focus on labor or data collection. Zero publications. One lifetime citation (by a former colleague). This record would not earn you a job as junior economist at BLS.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years. Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

RFK Jr and his GOP enablers are determined to undermine safe, effective mRNA vaccine technology that offers our best defense against future pandemics.

Only a flop nation fails to support its brilliant, world-leading mathematicians.

Firing the BLS Commissioner — the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality — is an authoritarian four alarm fire. It will also backfire: You can't bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.

Unbelievable…

NEW The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year Chokes off billions in research funding Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

An instant post about that Japan deal. It's basically a joke paulkrugman.substack.com/p/about-that...

Trump is working on regime change in Europe My latest for @euobserver.com euobserver.com/eu-and-the-w...

The Egan lab at #RiceUniversity is presenting work at @evolmtg.bsky.social! Come see Maryam Faghihi give a talk on resource variation & sexual size dimorphism in wasps today at 11am and Michaela Butler give a poster tomorrow on how oak hybridization influences soil microbial communities! #Evol2025

Richard is a metastatic cancer patient whose life could be saved by a custom cell therapy — one that is currently sitting unused in a freezer because of Trump's NIH cuts.
 Yet another example of the real impacts of the Trump Admin's attacks on science and our federal workforce.

Every machine in a Hospital that diagnoses your body without cutting you open is based on a principle of Physics, discovered by a Physicist who had no interest in Medicine. If you think the world doesn’t need Basic Science, or that somehow Science has failed you, think again.

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬: 𝐀𝐧 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐔𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐑 (MIT Press) has an official publication date of November 25, 2025! Instructors interested in using the book for free in the fall can comment or send me a message. Great resources available. #econsky probstats4econ.com

I was interviewed on @wbur.org's On Point this morning about the state of institutions and corruption under the Trump administration. The full audio is available here. www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025...

Please join us for the 4-lecture mini course I will give on minimalist market design at University of StGallen this week. The course is open to all and available both in person and via zoom. See below for the registration info and the link in the next comment for the course slides.

"I'm still in shock. I know that there have been political issues around Harvard in recent weeks, but antibiotic resistance isn't one of them." My conversation with Harvard microbiologist @baym.lol, one of many researchers there who just lost millions in fed. grants. www.wbur.org/news/2025/05...

Under 65 years old? No Novovax COVID vaccine for you this year. As expected, the Republicans have enabled RFK Jr. and his coterie of antivax grifters to take away your right to make your own medical decisions in consultation with your doctor. Gift Link: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/h...

I arrived home yesterday after an interesting visit to Europe, starting in Prague. (Beer, economists, and kidney exchange are good there...) #econsky marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/05/note...

Come join our research community at UCSB's emLab! We're hiring a pre-doc for our energy and climate program to work on a variety of active climate policy issues. #econsky #climatesky #energysky

Ok you all know how sometimes I get choked up thinking about what an astonishing miracle penicillin was when it came out, *literally* a miracle. Yeah so I’m crying at the idea we could cure autoimmune diseases because that would ALSO be a miracle.