“[F]racked gas companies are fully backed by the Trump administration, with its ideological dedication to fossil fuels and its cozy relationship with billionaire oil and gas donors. For its part, Big Tech is going along, largely sidelining its purported commitments to renewable energy."

Happy New Year! We spent the first afternoon of 2026 strolling through a favorite: Buffalo Bayou Park.

Here are 380+ great reads from 2025 handpicked just for you by NPR staffers and trusted critics.

A balance of infection and harmony called endosymbiosis helps shape evolution. For the first time, biologists have reproduced this arrangement between microbes in a lab.

About 14% of Americans and 17% of Texans are food insecure, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That number is even higher in Harris County, where roughly 2 in 5 households are food insecure.

this is what I hear in my head when I argue with software engineer guys who decide to give back by teaching programming and fail like 90% of their students btw www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Gross.

Know your rights.

Many say that AI tools are saving them time and money, but others have seen the negative effects that such tools can have on research go.nature.com/4oFomNQ

You can access the Center for American Progress article by clicking here: www.americanprogress.org/article/raci...

Happy Thanksgiving! 🍁🦃🍽

🎉 Announcing surveydown v1.0.0! surveydown is an #opensource #rstats package for building surveys with #Quarto & #Shiny. This release improves the survey design experience, including: - Simplified YAML settings - Auto page navigation - Previous buttons! More at surveydown.org/blog/2025-11...

Winter Is Coming: And the Earth’s oldest organisms are prepping. 🥶

Saw something that @realgdt.bsky.social said the other day, and remembered I had something I started a while ago that I should finish up. I'm so tired of all this.

“I love feeling like I’m part of the collective human experiment, in which my brain is, quite literally, architecturally reshaped, down to the neuron, by ideas unleashed by thousands of other minds across time and space.” 💯

I need this mug!

This is sending me!

We’re hiring! Our new resume portal is live, and we’re looking for top talent in NYC to help build this administration and deliver on our affordability agenda. Could that be you? Apply using the link below. transition2025.com/apply

One interesting thing about the California redistricting Prop 50 election is lawmakers in Texas, Missouri & North Carolina all redrew their congressional maps this year without having to go to the voters for approval and idk maybe voters in those states would like to change that

I live along an arterial road in Houston. I have been pondering some protest art to paint along my fence. Maybe this is something I could do since they removed the rainbow crosswalk. 🤔 🌈

Isopods!! 🧡

Some doctoral programmes in the US are admitting no students at all amid uncertainty about federal science funding go.nature.com/4o63boK

If you haven't got a website and want to give #quarto a go, the first video in my "Quarto Websites" series with @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social could be a good place to start: www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7r2... More resources in 🧵

Very helpful resources. I really liked the link to the congressional map changes. Check it out!

Oh, be careful, Merriam-Webster, lest we suffer vertigo from the dizzying heights of our lexical ground.

🐸

Darn you, AI garbage. www.npr.org/2025/10/14/n...

We are living in the "everyone has an AI hammer, therefore everything is a nail" era of problem solving. And it is extremely pervasive in tech & data circles.

New code review response just dropped:

ggplot v4.0.0 is now out! 🎉 Join the release party on October 3rd with developer & maintainer @teunbrand.bsky.social and the ggplot2 extenders meetup to learn all about what's new and the change-making process! 📅 Friday, Oct 3rd 🕐 3pm Eastern 📋 Sign up: bit.ly/join-gg-extenders #RStats

I'm exited to announce a new resource about making slides with quarto and revealjs. This book is the combination of all the work I have done in this area, reordered and polished up There isn't a lot of new information yet, but this format allows me to add more easily slidecrafting-book.com #quarto

I had to do a double take on this map. To really highlight “high” vs “low,” it’s clearer to use completely different colors instead of similar hues. The choice below reads like a sequential scale - light blue feels like a middle bin, not a low one. Color opinions aside, interesting info!

Tell me something you do when you code that other people would tell you that you shouldn't do. Tell me the rules you break! I'll go first: I work in untitled files in the wrong project directories all the time. Like, all the time. Yes, I do tend to lose things 😂 #databs #rstats #python

📣We're hosting a rainbowR conference, to connect and promote LGBTQ+ people in the #RStats community and to showcase examples of working with LGBTQ+ data 🌈🎉 To help us plan, if you'd be interested in attending or speaking, please fill in this very short form (1-2 mins) docs.google.com/forms/d/1Tx0...

I love this idea so much as a fellow early bird. Staying out late feels so unnatural to me. And exhausting. Earlybirds Club is a dance party from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., started by two friends. www.npr.org/2025/09/21/n...

Our next meetup will be Wednesday Oct 29th at 6pm CST! Efficient File Management in R with {fs} with @jadeynryan.bsky.social www.meetup.com/rladies-st-l...

Hooray! See y'all next year in my hometown! 🐎 #positconf #rstats #htx

For the open source devotees out there, I've integrated @OpenFreeMapOrg into the #rstats {mapgl} package. Do `maplibre(style = openfreemap_style("liberty"))` for an excellent street map with 3D buildings; "bright" & "positron" are also available. Map with no API keys required!

Now it's "shinyGovStyle - accessible government design in RShiny" by Cameron Race and Sarah Wong-Brown. #PositConf2025 #RStats #RShiny

Houston has a higher percentage of residents living in poverty among the largest cities in the United States, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

I hope no one is tired of seeing adorable #pawsitconf posts full of cute pets and punny talk titles, because @trevinflickinger.com helped his THREE dogs submit talks 😭 JUST LOOK AT THEM #rstats #python #databs #positconf2025

Oh, for sure. Even the LBJ's. Chestnut-winged Cinclodes, Spotted Sandpiper, Brown-backed Chat-Tyrant, Darwin's Ground Finch

One of the country's foremost food policy experts said Tuesday that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again report is "a report about intentions. It's not about actions."

Hello grant-writers! 👋 Join us 👯‍♀️ tomorrow, ✨Sept 10th at noon CDT✨ for a short workshop on using #rstats and #shiny to find trigger words in your federal grant applications. @rladies.org @rladies-bot.bsky.social 🥴 💜

Sometimes you just need to add a quick row of data to your data frame in #rstats. tibble::add_row() can help

UK government report based on internal civil service trial finds Copilot doesn’t increase productivity, and indeed makes Excel take longer and with more errors, and requires Powerpoint users to have ‘corrective action’ applied to their outputs. www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...

Happy to announce ✨quarto-revealjs-editable✨ This fully supersedes the imagemover extension, as I back then didn't realize the potential. You can now also move, resize, change font size and alignment for text in your slides github.com/EmilHvitfeld... #quarto #slidecrafting

sneak preview of the upcoming WIP issue‘s dataviz:

“Diversity of thought is, in many ways, harder to be comfortable with than demographic diversity,” Arthur C. Brooks writes. Corporate leaders should turn curiosity about others’ beliefs into a cultural norm. It’ll be great for their business too: https://theatln.tc/7IegYzMp