A special shoutout to my scientist friends who I won’t name here. But please know that I am truly truly touched.

I’m working next to Colin (@colinmcroberts.bsky.social) at a coffee shop while he writes thank-you notes to donors to his congressional campaign. Seeing how many of you have donated to him makes my heart so full. THANK YOU so much, dear friends!!!

A study in Science reveals an extensive precolonial agricultural landscape in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, suggesting Indigenous American communities cultivated maize intensively between 1000 and 1600 CE, despite a cold climate and marginal growing conditions. https://scim.ag/49voBGO

Trumpers have a howling void of angry insecurity where a soul should be. Unchecked power tastes like ashes in their mouth because they thought when they got it everyone would be forced to like and admire them even though they’re irredeemable assholes. But people still treat them like assholes.

I always tell students if you ask a good question the article will write itself

This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

BREAKING: The National Institutes of Health has agreed to evaluate grant applications that were wrongfully frozen due to the Trump administration’s ideological purge of biomedical research.

NY is having a bad flu season. More hospitalizations last week than any week on record. Health authorities are encouraging everyone aged 6mo+ to get the flu vax (it's not too late). Find a provider here: on.nyc.gov/getvaccinated. You can filter for sites where there's no cost for the uninsured.

Famously Sauron is known for never allowing his home to he penetrated by intruders.

We’re showing Ox “The Martian” for the first time. He’s entranced. I’m so depressed by the change in our country’s support for science (in general) and NASA (in particular) since this movie first came out. We’ve lost so much.

Been thinking a lot recently about what these encounters might have been like, so this is interesting. 🏺🧪https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/12/the-encounter-between-neanderthals-and-modern-humans-in-the-iberian-peninsula-occurred-in-the-northwest/

Something lovely for the weekend! Beautiful blue glass beads from the late Bronze Age 💙 Ploughed up by a farmer in Denmark in 1885, analysis shows the beads were made in Mesopotamia, pointing to long-distance trade in luxury goods some 3,000 years ago. 📷 National Museum of Denmark #Archaeology

A few Christmas ago I published reflections on Nael's Tiger poem. I like them so reposting now. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2021/12/thou...

Anyway the single best check on your espoused prescriptions for social change is whether you yourself are doing what you say others need to do. It's extremely clarifying and usually very humbling.

Make a bond movie academic: GoldenEye: Incomplete dominance of OCA2 in the melanin synthesis pathway.

Ending the year with a bang on Within Reason with Mike Matson, one of those programs showing what good media can do to connect people to politics. www.youtube.com/live/IkUvug-...

the holy tomes have been found on this day.

Omg @kolyin.bsky.social found the Holy Grail. @seanbaby.bsky.social

If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

Here we go.

Happy Wednesday! The deadline for submitting an application for a Cobb Professional Development grant ($7,500 for early career biological anthropologists) is January 5! You can find more information and eligibility guidelines on our website.

you can tell so much about people by whom they give the benefit of the doubt to

We just adopted a cat for Ox’s Christmas present. Introducing Sanguinius!

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Bari Weiss doesn't want you to see this unless it includes "the other side" from an administration official

bari weiss saw this and decided that she had to hide it from the american public

People are dying inside American concentration camps right now. www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/i...

Happy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social, @natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

It looks like it's been scrubbed from every official 60 Minutes page now. It's only a 30-second promo but here it is if you didn't get a chance to see it.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

I know that nights like tonight can feel frustrating — and they are, in fact, bad — but, I also do think that nights like this show us how many people are still striving to do good journalism with accountability at its core. And how clear it is when there are efforts to stop that journalism.

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise. Happy winter solstice! Never give up.

One day something will happen — a wedding, a graduation, a job promotion, Jake Paul getting knocked out, Andrew Tate getting knocked out the next day — and you’ll want the right outfit to celebrate. Buy that special outfit now, so you’re ready when that next unexpected moment arrives.

Yes, it’s illegal. Like changing it to Department of War, like ten thousand other things. Part of the Trump strategy is to break the law and convey “the rule of law is weak and feminine and laughable and should be overridden by Our Guy.” Trump is fundamentally anti-law. /1

we more than love we NEED and DESERVE to see it

to add to the Jake Paul schadenfreude, Andrew Tate also lost a fight to some reality TV influencer. most analysis of the fight I've read described his opponent as deeply untalented but Andrew lost anyway. Tate's endurance was awful and he was gassed after the first round.

I’ve done nothing today but attend kids’ hockey games and read about Japanese swords and it has been DELIGHTFUL! (Retirement goals?)

There's a powerful illustration here regarding "influencers" vs. "experts".

holy shit look what i found in the Epstein Files SCP-██ Object class: ███ Containment Procedures: ██████████████████████████████████████ Description: ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████subject’s genitals█████████████████████████████████████████████

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

the epstein files as rick owens fall/winter 2024

This headline is wrong and misleading, and the brief text below it is not much better. Whatever might constitute a full explanation of the differences between sapiens and other hominins, we remain confident that 'genes' will be central to it. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪 Explainer🧵👇1/n

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

🏺Stellar work by @andyjmwalton.bsky.social and colleagues. Previous craniometric analysis of the Beachy Head Woman, a Roman burial from near Eastbourne Sussex, had suggested she had ancestry from Africa. Ancient DNA analysis finds no evidence for this... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Women in science in #Africa 🌍 Christina Mutinda, a HERI PhD candidate at @UCT_news, explores how early humans adapted to changing environments. Using fossils, isotopes and ecological clues, she reconstructs East Africa’s Early Pleistocene habitats, when Paranthropus boisei roamed.