In the 1990s, millions of vultures quietly vanished from India—and the consequences were deadly. In this week's episode of Shocked, host @amyaharder.bsky.social and UChicago Professor @eyalfrank.bsky.social unpack the most expensive extinction you’ve never heard of. lnk.to/shockedpodca...

I have a new @nytimes.com guest essay w/ @davidkeith.bsky.social about sunlight reflection. We note its not a solution for climate change and at best a band aid to treat systems, and suggest if its ever done it should only be to replace the cooling from air pollution today:

How extreme weather fuels interest in geoengineering www.axios.com/2025/09/15/e... via @axios.com and the Shocked podcast

This is just objectively the exact opposite of the truth. Every serious effort to actually quantify the ideological valence of political violence has found the reverse of what Vance claims.

Fox defense reporter notes no U.S. response or role in Russia's violation of Poland's border.

This is because the military has historically been religiously apolitical and professional. The response to this kind of data will almost certainly be to try and de-professionalize the military and fill it with party ideologues, as has happened with ICE.

National Guard, in measuring public sentiment about Trump’s federal takeover of DC, has assessed that its mission is perceived as “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military,” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans

I wrote about what I think is a genuinely revealing document of elite depravity and impunity. It is shocking and sickening. But it's also a crucial moment. We're about to see what happens when conspiracy theorists actually get what they asked for but it turns out not to be what they want.

This is the official spokesperson for the White House, stating that the President hopes to deploy the United States military to occupy every city controlled by the political party that opposes him. Explicitly.

Those Hyundai arrests already sending a chill in foreign companies’ US investment plans. 🤡 @nikkei.com asia.nikkei.com/politics/int...

The relentless dishonesty is revealing. This was a meeting of the *academic advisory council* of the Chicago Fed. Think: Nerds around a conference table. No, academics don't set rates. No, the Chicago Fed doesn't set rates. No, the Chicago Fed President didn't even vote on rates that year.

To the extent cultural literacy means anything anymore, Col. Kurtz attacked and destroyed a village in large part because he wanted to surf its beach, reveled in its destruction, took casualties and killed a bunch of civilians in the process. Also, Trump could have served in Vietnam but didn't.

Just so we're clear, the admin wants the US military to focus on: - Lethality. - US cities.

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

Just Trump declaring war on a US city, a normal Saturday

If it wasn’t so disgraceful it’d be laughable

This is beyond un-American. Who in our country can possibly support this kind of rhetoric toward their fellow Americans?

Increasingly hard to understand how investors don’t run for the exits when they hear these things.

Question: Why did US put big tariffs on India despite major national interest in cultivating a strategic counterweight to China and trying to isolate Russia? Answer: Because the US president lied that he fixed India-Pakistan and India wouldn’t go along with the lie. (Seriously, that’s the answer)

Beautiful day in one of the best cities on earth.

I imagine this same dynamic will play out on all fronts: health innovation (mRNA vaccines, e.g.), university research, next gen batteries, and on and on. Things we got started here that could’ve been huge economic advantages will just go abroad. Maybe we will be the world leader in meme coin scams.

The biggest force behind rising power bills isn’t how we produce electricity. It’s how we get it to homes. @opinion.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

It is just beyond infuriating to watch these guys go on TV and tell absurd, unhinged lies about the city I grew up in and have lived in for almost all of my life.

Here's what the third day of elementary school looked like in Mount Pleasant, Washington DC.

Happy b’day, “Graceland”, the album released by Paul Simon today in 1986 — and recorded in Apartheid-era Johannesburg, where Black musicians were prohibited from being outside after sundown. “Graceland, the song and the album,” he said, “is probably the best thing I ever did.” “You Can Call Me Al”

Actually the research on this shows that housing prices increase because deportations eliminate construction jobs and reduce the number of new homes being built

First time I’ve gotten tariff sticker shock:

The crew leader on an Oregon blaze said her team went hungry for several days, ran short of medical supplies and had to scrounge for chainsaw fuel after support staff quit the agency during two rounds of "fork in the road" buyouts.

Sometimes calls for prayer are sincere and sometimes they are an argument: a claim that this is God’s fault and our choices and policies have nothing to do with it.

This is a region known as “flood alley” as the risks of flash flooding are already so high. As always, though, climate change takes existing risks and makes them worse – in this case, warmer air holds more water vapor, increasing risks of heavier downpours. More by @zhonggg.bsky.social here:

The subway is not scary. Literal children ride it millions of times every day. Fascists and bigots lie about it constantly and have for years because they’re trying to destroy NYC and our subway, and most things wrong with the subway can be traced to their attacks resulting in its underfunding.

It's infuriating how 99% of the coverage of this new war doesn't bother to mention that it is happening because we had an agreement to limit and monitor Iran's nuclear program, which even Trump's own aides said was working, and he blew it up because it was negotiated under Obama.

I wrote about the legal argument Trump’s EPA is making to repeal GHG standards for power plants, how it fits into his longer term strategy to undermine the Clean Air Act, and how things could play out once it hits the courts. heatmap.news/climate/trum...

Wes Anderson has earned a reputation for his meticulously styled, diorama-like worlds. But the director has always been “clearly responsive to modern life”—and especially so in his new film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” writes David Sims: https://theatln.tc/W3g8AunH

Tesla was bailed out by the Department of Energy during the Great Recession in 2010 and Tesla wasn’t even profitable without the revenue from receiving emissions credits that the government created, until 2021.

Without these credits Tesla is unprofitable today. They would have been $200 million in the red for Q1. With sales falling ~20%, even these credits can't keep Tesla in business. All those billions in subsidies were for nothing.

The core conservative argument in Citizens United was that political giving was a form of speech and should be protected. Things have really evolved.

It took just 15 years to get from Citizens United to this

This is the dumbest fucking thing. First, climate change will destroy humans way before the Sun destroys the Earth. Second, when the Sun explodes in a few billion years, it'll wipe out Mars as well.

According to the Congressional Budget Office: Biden's Inflation Reduction Act was projected to *REDUCE* the deficit by $238 BILLION. The GOP Budget would *INCREASE* the deficit by $3.8 TRILLION (and that's not even considering the deceptive sunsets that will never sunset).

Let's check in and see what profound and moving words our president has to honor the brave warriors who sacrificed everything to protect our nation...

"A critical mass of the nation’s politicians, news outlets, and major brands regularly post content for free to the exclusive streaming platform for the Ye song 'Heil Hitler.'"

We're back to "greedflation"

To add to this, Walmart's net profit margin was 2.39% last year.

Reuters: Food rations that could feed 3.5 million people for a month are rotting in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation.

#Energy analysts, industry and policymakers should be paying close attention to what's happening at EIA. EIA provides absolutely essential data and analysis that underpins an incredible range of policy and market activity. Would be a disaster to see it undermined www.energyintel.com/00000196-d05...

This story requires a great deal more attention. The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get Russian gas back into Europe. This is Washington and Moscow now in full strategic alignment via a shared vision of a fossil fuel future.

This is very good and outlines a specific kind of pragmatism that is badly needed on climate policy.