You've seen beer + shot You've seen beer + fries Have you seen beer + vaccine? So, so many scientific, safety, ethical things to weigh. www.sciencenews.org/article/vacc...

or at least download, print it, and kinda-sorta skim it, which is the Grad Student Way

You think you need an ayahuasca retreat, but what you really need is a COVID shot and a Hep B booster on the same day. I just lost a solid 15 hours of my life and I'm pretty sure some of it was a spiritual experience. I feel like I need to solve world hunger. Or found a startup.

Idly thinking, a big mistake we made in tech/business coverage with the rise of start-up culture was writing about things that companies *said* they were going to do, or had funding to do, as if they were done, or were certain to happen. And political reporters have caught the same fever.

I'm excited for the results of this study (woo basic science) showing how estrogen increases sensitivity to gut pain, which offers new ways to potentially treat issues like IBS! SO many people suffer from this, it can be debilitating, and they are often ignored. www.sciencenews.org/article/fema...

A fascinating new study shows WHY symptoms of IBS show up more often in people with estrogen cycling. Are estrogen receptors on cells that then send pain signals? LOL no. Occam's Razor? Evolution never heard of her. www.sciencenews.org/article/fema...

I want to adopt every single one of these. Particularly "you have no dead in this funeral"

The Primary purpose of email updates saying "your package has shipped" "Your package is out for delivery!" "Your package has been delivered!" Is to keep Boomer parents frantically texting their children to see if said package has really, truly arrived.

Pride and Prejudice and Grinch

A good way to know if your groupchats are healthy and thriving is if every single one of them had @drewmagary.bsky.social Hater's Guide posted in them within an hour of its going live. I'm proud to say several of mine had multiple, overlapping posts. defector.com/the-2025-hat... TIS THE SEASON

....I worked at SN for 7 years. At the END OF THAT TIME, I made as much as the CEO got AS A RAISE. Literally half of that amount, the amount she got AS A RAISE, would help these writers so much, writers making PEANUTS. And yet? Silence.

So, as someone who 1. Hates themselves on camera 2. Was called "butterface" in school. 3. Is pretty unattractive 4. Is also now a visibly aging woman... Tiktok and Insta have both been....honestly far far far less bad than anticipated! I have some reasons I think.

I think about stories like this a lot. I have several friends who were USAID. They loved their jobs. Aside from being jobless, they have the grief of knowing that people, sometimes people they KNOW, WILL DIE and ARE DYING because their jobs are gone. And for what.

We've reached the time of year where I have to ask myself: Am I extra angry/irritable because of something in particular? Or is my skin dry? It is VERY WEIRD how often it's the latter.

Ahem hello this is a reminder that books are a great holiday gift. I read a lot fewer science books than usual this year for various reasons, but the ones I did read I loved. And here they are. First, you could buy mine (I didn't read it this year though) www.harpercollins.com/products/pes...

In DC, Trump officials celebrated the decimation of USAID with a sheet cake. In South Sudan, USAID budget cuts closed a health clinic in the middle of a cholera outbreak. Tor Top had to take his sick mother to the hospital, 8 hours away. She died on the way. www.propublica.org/article/usai...

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

This. And so often, it's the rights of CHILDREN. The most helpless among us forced to flee, hide, and finally fight for their lives and the lives of their friends. And the rights of TEACHERS, people who do what they do out of passion, not pay. Who give their own lives for their students.

As a singer who makes most of my money at Christmas (and who just, in fact, sang this), yes. I've been singing the real lyrics to holiday drinking songs since long before I was old enough to drink. All the good ones are drinking songs.

I have a Jane Austen stone cold tea take: The most loving relationship in Sense & Sensibility is between Sir John Middleton and his Mother-in-Law, Mrs. Jennings. You will never convince me that they aren't deeply in love with each other, love for the ages, true soulmates.

This!!! Also every time an editor is like "oh we covered that back in 2010" ...people aren't reading science articles from 2010! I'm STILL telling people weekly that face mites actually have anuses.

The most striking official comment I've ever received from a government agency.

LE GRENOUILLE STEVE IL EST ORAAAAAAAANGE IL A DES BRAS ET DES JAMBES

The most formative experience I had in college was when I was excitedly discussing advanced symbolic logic with my phil advisor. We're nerding on the Blue and Brown Books And he stops and says "You must be very good at math." Me: Oh no I'm really bad at math. Him: ...this...is MATH. Me: 🤯

I maintain that a major difference between the humanities and math/sciences is we treat the latter as an innate skillset and we treat the humanities as learnable. Also the people IME have the most contempt for the humanities are the ones who struggle to write a simple paragraph.

Local bumblebees change their foraging behavior when honeybees are trucked in. I can't help but be reminded of like, how locals avoid the DC mall at all costs during school trip season. www.sciencenews.org/article/hone...

time i see to post my favorite meme I ever created

If you need a goal for your next career, these scientists spend the late summer walking slowing through fields of blooming heather, gently catching, measuring, and releasing bumblebees. For science. www.sciencenews.org/article/hone...

Interesting addendum to this: I pitched a version of this (a skeptical take on raccoons as your next little house gremlin) to not one but TWO outlets. One said "nah we've written about raccoons too much lately" The other said "nah we've written about domestication too much lately"

Are raccoons on the fast track (or very, very slow track) to domestication? I don't think so. brookshire-team-trash.beehiiv.com/p/raccoons-d... Except that drunk one passed out in the Virginia liquor store. She gets a pass.

I would just like to offer a small blessing to every scientist who has gamely read a paper and fielded desperate last minute questions from a science journalist. You are a blessing to science. May you always be exactly on time and never get a paper cut.

This but unironically

This is one of the things that bugs me about humans. Why do we think we have a right to touch? It's not because we have "respect" for wild creatures. It is in fact because we have none. brookshire-team-trash.beehiiv.com/p/why-do-we-...

Listen, I want a cute pet raccoon as much as the next person (ok I don't, you don't want to live a life with a chaos gremlin with HANDS). But if you've seen the paper about how raccoons are on their way to domestication... brookshire-team-trash.beehiiv.com/p/raccoons-d...

Yes, yes, urban raccoons have shorter noses and rural ones. Is this domestication syndrome? ...ehhhh. brookshire-team-trash.beehiiv.com/p/raccoons-d...

I am begging us in media to stop mealy-mouthed avoidance of bias with phrases like "in a controversial move." When what we actually mean is "in a move antithetical to every scientific finding and medical recommendation." "A move that will cause both illness and death."

We science writers will show her what "spaghettification" REALLY MEANS. ...with citations and a powerpoint presentation. ANGRY citations. No matter what, we'd make her run screaming, unable to face people who really are deeply worried about, you know. TRUTH. And reality.

I challenge everyone calling their reps to work in a reference to defensive thanatosis.

Millennial Gray replaced by Fragile Whiteness www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/s...

Every year I see the panic-inducing headlines "IS CANNED PUMPKIN ACTUALLY PUMPKIN" Designed to get us all to click because wHaT iS In oUr FoOd!? And like, the answer is yeah ok it's not a Jack O' lantern pumpkin but the REAL answer is: WHAT THE FUCK IS PUMPKIN www.snopes.com/fact-check/c...

This is something that took me YEARS to unlearn when I got out. Any success was something that you should have been doing all along and unworthy of praise or mention. Any failure however minor? CATASTROPHIC. SHAME TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR CAT. You're an INSULT TO SCIENCE.

This particular video is doing numbers on TT, where I have found apparently the trick to doing numbers is: reproductive organs, OR, weird human tricks. Today, I made thousands of people deliberately flare their nostrils. I'm not sorry. youtube.com/shorts/7ENZa...

Your scalp is a diva. youtube.com/shorts/WGw0W...

I both love and hate, so much, how unsettling this looks. youtube.com/shorts/zZNyK...

Here kitty kitty. The ancient Chinese thought cats were so nice, they brought them in twice. But the FIRST one...wasn't a house cat. It was a LEOPARD CAT. www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-...

“I desired. He desired me desiring. He desired to desire my desiring. It was turtles all the way down, except the turtles were boners.” This is the only version of this book you need to read.

What makes this story about cats in China really fascinating to me is not JUST that leopard cats were there before house cats were. People changed the environment and they arrived. But what's wild to me is that they left...and they left BECAUSE OF PEOPLE. www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-...

I'm not saying that my editor and I didn't trade cat pictures back and forth for two hours for this story. But I'm also not saying we didn't. www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-...

For real, the "joy" of hate-reading is, I am convinced, what has given us the flaming dumpster fire of our current op-ed sections. A hate click is a click. A hate purchase is money spent, and more reason for people to publish...more slop you hate.

The deck here may be Axios' finest work to date.