Super happy that my paper on modeling artist networks is out on Harvard Data Science Review. Writing it was such a fun journey (and still so much to be done, which is the best part!) hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/t4txmd81...

On 3/1/33, Frida Kahlo wrote Georgia O'Keefe an incredible letter that I held in my hands at @yale.edu Beinecke Library in 2019. This brought me to tears: "If you [are] still in the hospital when I come back, I will bring you flowers, but it is so difficult to find the ones I would like for you."

Oh wow @reuters.com got the photo here:

The mind-bending power of placebo Studies with open-label placebos — sugar pills given without deception — suggest that the placebo effect is more psychologically complex than previously thought. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Chinese state-backed hackers hijacked Claude Code to run one of the first AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage operations. The operation targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies. www.anthropic.com/news/disrupt...

Social Interactions Are Related to Cognitive Development in Western Australian Magpie Fledglings | doi.org/10.1002/ece3... | Ecology and Evolution | #ornithology 🪶

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938 zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

This policy is inconsistent, because, at the same time, they are defunding American scientists. How can such research be so essential that we cannot tolerate Chinese scientists coming into remote contact with it, and yet it should be defunded within America?

8 new cases of measles in SC. Spartanburg County is on its way to becoming the Gaines County of this fall. As I’ve written before (link in 1st reply) Spartanburg has a problem with exceptionally low vax rates in some private & charter schools, particularly bc of religious exemptions to vax mandates

UCSD has released a report documenting a “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of its freshmen. The number of entering students needing remedial math has gone from 1/100 to 1/8. The causes are many, from COVID to admissions policies, etc. senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347...

The Turkish translation of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society is now out. Other translations include Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Dutch, Greek, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, etc.

Will always be puzzled as to why Republicans hammered so hard on the Epstein stuff given that it was obvious that it would be a huge risk for their own guy Trump and Epstein were buddies throughout the height of his trafficking -- what did they think would happen? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/u...

Apologies, I realized I was posting like a scientist rather than a social-media influencer. What I meant to say was: Cosmologists in SHAMBLES as statistical significance of their cherished idea tumbles from 4.2σ to a measly 3.2σ! When will science face this CRISIS? Or is it all just GROUPTHINK???

I feel seen.

Invisible leviathans lurk at the cores of nearly all of the 2 trillion or so galaxies strewn throughout space-time, leaving astronomers wondering how these supermassive black holes could have grown so hefty in such little time.

Exactly five years ago—the news that kindled hope amidst the pandemic's despair.

And yet not a peep on campus. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Here’s video of federal agents doing a drive by pepper spraying that hit a father and his one-year old on Saturday when the Feds were hitting Little Village and Cicero

I was honored to work for many years, from 1979-1984 (age ~17-22), as a research assistant in Tom Reese's lab at @mblscience.bsky.social & NIH, during the heyday of his work with John Heuser discovering synaptic vesicle exocytosis. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZv5...

A new and very accurate technique called mind captioning’ generates descriptive sentences of what a person is seeing or picturing in their mind using a read-out of their brain activity and AI tools. This could also be used to reveal what animals are thinking. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart. The environmental group gave up its singular focus on climate change for a broader agenda. The ensuing internal strife left it weakened. This is a common and unfortunate pattern. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

Yes, colleges face a crisis. It’s also an opportunity. Over two centuries, American higher education has periodically remade itself. Time to do it again. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202... Prof. R. Howard Bloch and I have two modest suggestions. via @washingtonpost.com

This makes sense to me.

I’m surprised by this finding, inconsistent with received wisdom.

TL;DR: Even the most advanced language models crumble on first-person false beliefs, showing sharp accuracy drops and revealing that their “understanding” of others’ minds is still shallow pattern mimicry, not genuine epistemic reasoning. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

This is not how our nation is supposed to run. The lawlessness of the Trump administration and its lackeys must be resisted by all lawful means.

This super interesting study found that SpaceX's Starlink constellation reacted to the May 2024 solar storm like a giant wave as the atmosphere swelled. It highlights some of the challenges constellations face from the sun. Story by me in @newscientist.com www.newscientist.com/article/2502...

I feel seen.

Life expectancy has increased at all ages

“I’m a law-abiding citizen who never thought I’d be of such interest that the U.S. government would use my tax dollars & yours to try to send me to prison…[after being] manhandled by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent trying to remove my phone from my hand.” www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Why do we pay (crucial) air-traffic controllers so little that we don't have enough of them and that they struggle to pay there bills?! "These are people that oftentimes live paycheck to paycheck," he said. "They're concerned about gas in the car. They're concerned about child care and mortgages."

Personalized gene editing helped one baby: can it be rolled out widely? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Bomb/arson at my beloved alma mater, @harvardmed.bsky.social www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Pleased to share that the Kennedy School has been authorized to conduct a faculty search in American politics This is as an extraordinary opportunity for us - please share widely with your networks and consider applying academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15418

Did you know that we allow child marriage in the US? We do, in 34 states, and four or five children are being married every day on average. I once met a Floridian married at 11 to her rapist. And California has no minimum age at all for marriage: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/o...

Traffic fatalities for kids rise on Halloween. Drive carefully. Study of 42 years of Halloweens and 1 ,580,608 traffic crashes reveals relative risk of a pedestrian fatality is 43% higher on Halloween compared with control evenings. A typical Halloween results in 4 additional pedestrian deaths.

Harvard students react very poorly to a report on huge huge grade inflation at their college. “I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious.... If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”

Cool new post-doctoral position in my lab on the area of human social chemosignaling. What role does odor and olfaction play in shaping social behavior? (Here also is a 10-minute video about this new line of work in the Human Nature Lab: humannaturelab.net/making-of/so... .) Please share.

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

40M users! 🥳

The simplex algorithm is super efficient. 80 years of experience says it runs in linear time. Nobody can explain _why_ it is so fast. We invented a new algorithm analysis framework to find out.

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

Fascinating use case.

Reginald Dwayne Betts was locked up as a teenager for carjacking. While in prison, books were his escape. After his release he went on to be a poet, lawyer and founder of Freedom Reads — a nonprofit that installs libraries in prisons across the country.

"Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers' electric and hybrid vehicles 17-22%..."

If you have absolutely nothing good to say about A.I. come and sit by me. www.thewrap.com/emma-thompso...

Scientists explain how Maya calendar specialists developed their eclipse tables with centuries-long accuracy. Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/3L0co3m

New report by FIRE (a non-partisan organization defending free expression): "Sanctioned Scholars: The Price of Speaking Freely in Today’s Academy" thefire.org/research-lea... Being a target of temporally concentrated calls for cancellation has many challenging implications.

🧵1/6 New paper out in @sociologicalsci.bsky.social with @marckeuschnigg.bsky.social and Peter Hedström! We identify a social-influence mechanism that widens individuals' behavioral repertoires and breaks the link between individuals' initial preferences and the collective outcomes they bring about.

How did rumors related to the peasant insurrections in revolutionary France (1789) spread? Researchers used epidemiological models to provide a quantitative answer, marking - to my knowledge - the first quantitative history paper that @nature.com has published www.nature.com/articles/s41...