This is murderous. Meningitis can kill a kid in 24 hours and it is a horrible death. Survival is often accompanied by disfigurement and brain damage and the vaccines are highly effective and safe. In a just society RFK, Jr. would be imprisoned for life, for this. www.meningitis.org/about-mening...

amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders

Vaguely worried I'm coming across as someone who thinks Share Prices mean anything more than rich people feelings, so just so we're clear here, I think this signifies how much rich people associate war, bloodshed, instability and chaos with fossil fuel industry benefits (which was true, for Ukraine)

The fossil fuel companies are insisting they're not interested in increasing oil extraction in Venezuela but their investors / shareholders don't seem to believe them

This makes me sad. So many nights walking home from there, ears ringing. I keep a playlist of bands I remember seeing there ca. 1997-2001. open.spotify.com/playlist/1qy...

Meanwhile, a Crossover Episode.

Canadian officials say US health institutions no longer dependable for accurate information Misinformation from the Trump administration is cited as fuelling Canadians’ concerns over childhood vaccinations

It’s sobering to look back on the run-up to the Iraq war—a period of unceasing chattering-class debate, elaborate official lies, media complicity, unavailing global protest, in the end a giant stitch-up—and have it seem like some sort of paradise of public deliberation compared to these gangsters.

Several hours later and there hasn’t been anything that has made me think that the primary goal of this was anything but to make war-flavored content to make the people it the room look “strong” and “lethal” with no real thought about what comes next.

Perhaps now people will stop wishcasting about the US military refusing illegal orders. That's not a thing that happens. The 100% compliance rate with using civilian boats for target practice was a bit of a tell.

Oooooh scary. A bipartisan resolution! Wake me up when Democrats promise that the next Democratic AG is arresting everyone involves and charging them with various crimes.

ICE heads to Minnesota as the triple dip polar vortex starts

Every journalist who stays at CBS better wear this shit for the rest of their careers. If I ever hear “I stayed at CBS because I thought I could quietly make a difference” it better come right before “Do you want fries with that?”

To be alive in America in 2025 is to have a bunch of robed lunatics insist that the constitution requires that nutjobs wander around your neighborhood or campus with weapons or mass murder, even though no previous generation of Americans ever lived though this nonsense.

SAT SCORES?! 😭😭 UnFUCKINGbelievable…Just the absolute fucking biggest losers 🫠🫠🫠

Happy 2026

The Jane Austen Mayor.

Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty

Our basement is full of lab equipment because funding lapse led to lab being decommissioned.

Almost every scientist I know in Canada is trying to reduce the size of their lab because of the tenuous operating funding situation, meanwhile govt throws $$$ at recruitment.

With which professors, at which (oversaturated, underfunded, understaffed) universities, for which jobs? Lots of Canadian press pointing at this without looking at the actual case in the country.

Resisting him almost always works, trying to bargain with him never ever works

This is the technology our schools are encouraging our children to use.

Oh good lord. Such referendums will fail because the majority in each province knows they are better in Canada than on their own. That holds in good economic times and bad.

That people who dined for a lifetime off that freedom have sold it out for the chance to elevate their professional resentments into fundamental principles, for the sake of a slightly wider audience that neither knows nor wants to know any better, is a massive and grotesque betrayal.

But what this purge is coming for isn’t bad history or divisive concepts or postmodern neoMarxism or presentism or grievance studies or theory or jargon or any of the bullshit bugbears of right-wing and centrist commentary; what it’s coming for is the free and open study of past and present alike.

It seems to me that there are more than a few cases right now of once-accomplished scholars who’ve found and been charmed by right-wing or centrist audiences. They tell each other office gripes, student speech or normal historiography are proof that academia needs a purge. Well: the purge is here.

This is a good thread. Fields of inquiry naturally develop new questions, sources, methods, and styles; in a fundamental sense, that change is what they are for. Culture war makes normal intellectual variation and change suspect and turns run-of-the-mill resentments into civilizational struggles.

No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction – and I even got Colossal’s chief scientist to admit as much in interview with me. In response, the company put out a statement reiterating its claims 3/ www.newscientist.com/article/2481...

1. The mice don't have AD, they are genetically engineered to rapidly produce selected AD-like phenotypes. 2. We've "cured" mice like this, by some measures, 100s of times. 3. BUT I think this is exciting because it focuses on behavioral endpoints, used 2 models, & showed prevention and reversal.

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

And I should note: This is all of course little relief for the countless researchers that have left academia — or changed course otherwise — because their applications were basically ghosted.

Now the big question is: Can NIH be trusted to review these applications in good faith? The Challenged Directives were extremely vague to begin with — so what's to stop the agency from applying them under the table, especially with more influence from political appointees? bsky.app/profile/maxk...

On delayed application review, the NIH grant terminations lawsuit appears to be headed for a settlement. Both plaintiffs and defendants have submitted a joint document outlining their agreement. Judge Young must sign off on it before it takes effect. Here's what it says and what all this means 🧵

I wonder what it's like living in an endless loop of "Those magic beans turned out to be bullshit. These magic beans, however..."

Judge Young's order has come in. Grant terminations in the plaintiff states or to the plaintiff orgs (APHA, UAW) are officially void and illegal. It also says that the "Challenged Directives" are arbitrary and capricious — and thus illegal as well. Now what exactly are are these directives? 🧵

Sometimes the hype machine knows whereof it speaks. Or I'm just old. 2025 top 5 (unranked): Horsegirl, Wet Leg, Water From Your Eyes, Geese, Wednesday.

something very important for Dems to realize is that the tech overlords are not people you can win back by promising a lighter touch and saying a few nice things they’ve gotten a taste of mask-off fascism and they are not going back, they don’t want to play nice with the peons anymore

Yeah, this dum dum is talking about chicken pox. Anyway, it's very cool and awesome that he has so much cultural and political influence.

“it is illegal for you not to like me”

Deciding that doing much of anything to prevent ecological catastrophe that will probably kill billions was "unrealistic" and doing next to nothing is somehow better is a pretty amazing commitment to the delusion that our politics aren't broken.

The utter perversion of the #BrokenTimes' both-sidesing compulsion: Here it equates the right-wing ruin of New College with (checks notes) liberal (in any sense of the word) education, which it dismisses as just another "ideological bubble." Just fuck off.

Love how Chatterton is like "yes Bruenig is right and Savage is wrong but this demonstrably false phenomenon feels true to me." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Incredible what you find when you start looking for data on the "white men can't get jobs anymore" phenomenon www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/w...

NYT provides no evidence here, probably because the claim is flatly untrue. See eg recent Pew data, or many posts on the subject from @gelliottmorris.com this year www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

This is what it took to shame Kristi Noem into letting an Irish green card holder who bouncing $80 in 2 checks 10 years ago free after 5 months in detention: A veteran, Trump-voting spouse 9 US descendants Letter signed by 18 Senators 30 character witnesses www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-...

Two simple changes to improve Montreal traffic and road safety: 1. Congestion pricing 2. Ban vehicles with >4 wheels from most city streets (with obvious exceptions). A lot of our traffic and safety problems arise from massive trucks blocking and limiting visibility on 1-2 lane streets.

"...the whole affair neatly encapsulates the bizarre anti-free-speech free-speech discourse of the past decade, the purpose of which has been to justify restricting any speech that conservatives disapprove of while framing liberal censoriousness as equivalent to state censorship."

The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...