Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Busy Going Crazy), 1989

So, is there a big new fad for inscribing messages on rifle shells, or is there a big new fad for finding and describing them?

Reminder: You have a patriotic duty to not want Jimmy Kimmel canceled by government officials but you do NOT have a patriotic duty to watch Jimmy Kimmel

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

I know antifa isn't a real organization because I don't get 40 texts a week from them asking for donations.

“MyPillow” rebrands as “MyPill,” pivots to folic acid supplements.

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

Don’t set aside time later. Just surrender it now.

This is very cool but it's very long so set aside some time.

This is absolutely fucking hilarious and pants shittingly terrifying in equal measure.

FIRE worked very hard to promote the idea that the biggest threat to campus speech was from the left, fueled largely by social scorn in reaction to right wing speech. In response, right wing governments used FIRE to justify repressing left wing speech in the name of “freedom.”

Dems ought to be telling people now these letters are worth absolutely nothing.

The commonplace tradition of denigrating the government workers who sustain the public good is a blight on us all. I'm reading Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis, with fascinating profiles of public servants written by Geraldine Brooks, W. Kamau Bell, Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, and others.

Built in the 13th century. So that mosque stood for 800 years with every sort of person from every place and every religion in the world passing through Gaza century after century, only for it to be blown up by some shithead loser sitting behind a computer that we probably paid for.

Robert Redford (RIP) survived a childhood bout of polio though bedridden for 2 weeks In 2014, he directed a short film on the architecture and mission of La Jolla's Salk Institute—honoring founder Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine that has saved countless lives, and architect Louis Kahn

Indeed a joke. But also worth noting that Trump can't actually "extend" anything—all he can do is refuse to do his job, i.e., enforce the law. It might sound like a pedantic distinction but it's important! We shouldn't accept the premise that Trump can just delay laws he doesn't like.

This is just an incredible level of corruption. I get there's a lot going on. But this stuff deserves way more attention. Yet more evidence that Trump is selling out the American people to line his and his family's pockets. Read this and tell me I'm wrong. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

Question: When in the actual fuck, as a country, did we decide that our government gets to demand that we mourn someone in some particular way?

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

US President back-pedalling furiously after his administration treated some innocent hard-working Koreans like they were innocent hard-working Latinos.

This woman was the LAST Black Opinion columnist for WaPo. As someone who has written for them, I remember being so proud of it. I’m filled with anger and shame witnessing this.

There were like eight Black writers at national pubs and journalism schools and like seven of us have been fired for taking stands against genocide abroad and racism at home lolsob

I really don’t see very much difference between Kirk and someone like David Duke.

A very bizarre but explicable phenomenon where Rs want everyone to bend the knee for kirk to demonstrate that the nation belongs to them and D pols bend the knee for kirk in their classic scrupulous performance of being above partisanship all while every normal person in the country is like "wtf"

“Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.” - George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-f...

"…and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel.”

It's fascinating how, because the left is coded as feminine, criticism is "scolding," while all the shaming and blaming on the right is masculine and therefore not "scolding."

If you expected anything else, trump’s vp is a partner in a company that buys bankrupt farms all over America. This situation was designed to CREATE a disruption in our food supplies and the consolidation of American farming. We who love to eat healthy affordable foods are fucked.

recently, Kirk kept calling for the release of the Epstein Files, even after Trump called him and asked him to stop, and Fuentes has been FURIOUS about it, and won't-someone-rid-me-of-this-meddlesome-priest about it: stochastic terrorism wasn't a "if", at this point, it was a "when".

.... well i wrote one book about weird right wing internet shit and one book about conservative american religion

@michaelharriot.bsky.social continues to be a national treasure.

Please fully understand that Charlie Kirk’s “legacy” was unabashed HATE of women (especially Black women), Jews, Muslims, immigrant, LGBTQ and disabled Americans. Everyone who says we should “honor” that legacy is saying they agree with the things he said. I’m a FUCK THAT, on this topic.

Based on what I'm seeing, Democrats think they can use this event to highlight their civility, steady hand and commitment to the high road for 2026 voters. Republicans, on the other hand, think they can use this to outlaw Democrats.

Clocking in to see a timeline of people i consciously and intentionally followed to see if there is an aberration in any given point in the ideological space, something that is definitely not correlated with my sampling whatsoever: my priors are holding up

this is your annual reminder to please take off your hetero-imitative frogskin and dance to a lesbian/gay spirit

It turns out that protecting hate speech did not create the conditions to protect other kinds of speech; instead, it protected hate and allowed hate movements to take over all the institutions of that might have defended the rest of us.

all day all night

If you're protesting ICE in Chicago, let me know at [email protected] if you need free legal training or legal support. If you're arrested protesting ICE, I can represent you pro bono. Email me at [email protected]. As always, I will take as many cases as I can.

My God.

The Dem Senate leadership's unbelievable negotiating position is that they will give Trump everything he wants except that they demand: an extension of Obamacare subsidies so that they expire right after the midterms, not before. This sounds like political malpractice on several levels.

I am still r e e l i n g from this.

Good morning

Your occasional reminder that the positive effects of UBI have been tested and validated hundreds of times more often than the murderous Musk robotaxis or LLM’s we’re rushing to put into our schools and streets.

There IS a machine that can detect heart problems in mere seconds and it's called an EKG and it was invented in 1895 you fucking clowns

I know, I know, but: The president of the US saying, literally, "we're going in" in reference to sending the military to an American city for no reason beyond terrorizing the local population should be the most immediately impeachable shit imaginable

Vance argued that Americans who trace their ancestry to pre-Civil War have a greater claim to citizenship (slaves’ descendants excluded, natch) and others should be officially second class. He explains his beliefs a lot. But acknowledging it means admitting they’re extreme and no Dem is equivalent.

I didn’t mean to Google the letter B, but the result did convince me to figure out how to disable Google AI

so the thing is, there is an actual law, the 1949 amendment to the national security act of 1947, that says he can't do this congress can pass a law changing it, and the senate could ratify, and the president can sign. but this is not executive order stuff