Clear @sciam.bsky.social piece re: if pregnant women taking acetaminophen (Tylenol) causes autism, as RFKJr seems ready to assert. Answer: maybe, but whatever the effect is, it's very small, and very possibly outweighed by the good Tylenol does (easing pregnancy pain and fever for many women).

Speaking of vaccines, it's worth noting that although the west Texas measles outbreak ended last month measles remains at historically high levels. It's tempting to note that the rise coincides w/ RFKJr taking office, but he's more a symptom than a cause.

Getting my Covid shot at CVS this a.m., I asked the tech if she'd had a lot of ppl coming in. Her: "People are pouring in 'cause they're scared the gov't will ban the vaccines." Me: "You hearing anything about that?" Her: "Nobody knows what's going to happen. They're right to come in."

I didn't know until a few years ago that the British Museum had posted high-res images of the Tonindeye (Zouche-Nuttall) Codex, and as I was taking a coffee break just now and looking at them it occurred to me that other people also might not know and find them as interesting as I do.

Nice hack: Japanese build zero-emissions power plant that generates electricity via osmosis, using as “fuel” the brine from a desalination plant. No idea whether this is scalable but it sure is clever.

#thiswritinglife #booksky As prescribed in scripture: 1 screeching handbrake turn in plot underpinning 2 yawning existential doubt as to quality of text so far written 3 despair 4 yawning existential doubt as to quality of self 5 profound sympathy for writers who abuse drugs 1/n

Not really my field, but this is the best piece that I have come across on the motives of the guy who shot Kirk. He seems to have been a bisexual guy who was into guns, gaming, and outdoor activities like fishing and camping.

Newspapers used to be more fun. (The Pacific Bee, April 1, 1882)

Two econ historians ask, Which had the most impact, UK naval suppression of the slave trade (supply), or suppression of demand at source (US ban on the trade, cut in Caribbean via Haitian revolution, and then the biggest demand, Brazil)? UK naval ban gets most att'n, but isn't most important.

Josh Kraft, who lost the Boston mayoral primary almost 3-1 to Michelle Wu, drops out of the race.

RFKJr apparently wants a new systematic review of the effects of Covid vaccines on pregnant women. You gotta wonder: Does he not know there's an ongoing, continually updated review of just this question that already has data from 500K women in 26 nations?

Graph of intense pain and suffering (this is after the 50% tariffs on Brazilian coffee)

Is there anything better than the smell of freshly picked white peaches? Asking for a friend.

Zohran Mamdani gets lots of attention. But Michelle Wu seems to my inexpert eye a more interesting model for leftie Dems. She just won a 3-to-1 victory (every city ward, including S. Boston!) over a very plausible opponent--a mainstream Dem who's the son of the owner of the ultra-popular Patriots.

Fiction couldn't do better. BBC reporting now that the group that's running security for the failed Gaza "humanitarian" food distribution operation is a repurposed biker gang worth a well documented history of virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric, including promotion of imagery from the Crusades.

This early review of Helen Dewitt's new novel, Your Name Here, which is coming out next month, makes it sound amazing.

This is one of the people whom RFKJr wants to put on the federal vaccine advisory panel, whose decrees many states are required by their own laws to follow. (W/r/t her comments: The US Supreme Court OK'd vaccine mandates as far back as 1905.) www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

A good thread that reminds us that African slaves constantly rebelled--and that these rebellions were acts of remarkable courage, given the near-impossibility of organizing in large groups and obtaining weapons.

The striking thing (to me, anyway) about this fine NY Times dive into Epstein's decades-long relationship with his bankers is how many lower-rung bank employees sought to push him out--it was the top dogs who insisted, time and time again, on keeping him as a client despite the obvious red flags.

Fine wrap-up on the $1.5B settlement for Anthropic's use of pirated books. Apparent lessons: 1) Using books for training AIs is OK, as it's transformative as per copyright law; 2) But you have to *buy* the damn books--you can't download a database of pirated books, as Anthropic did; ...

Incredibly charming profile of longtime pals Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter aka Bill and Ted as they prepare to star as Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot" on Broadway.

This is a long, fascinating peek into how climate scientists evaluate each others' work--and gives some idea why most think that sea levels are rising at ever-faster rates. My thanks to @revkin.bsky.social for drawing my attention to it.

AI firm, Anthropic, offers to settle copyright-infringement claims for $1.5 billion--biggest copyright settlement in history. It will be interesting to see whether the other big AI outfits also fold. Having stuff in the pirate databases these guys used, I'm, er, invested in the outcome.

A helpful discussion of some of the complex issues in a big question--what is happening with sea-level rise? As usual with social media posts, you have to do a bit of clicking to get everything in chronological order. But it's worth it. Note: SLR = sea level rise.

I love it when a ride on #transit includes a sea or river cruise! I always take the Star Ferry to Kowloon when I visit #HongKong. They've been running since the 1880s, and carry 26 million passengers a year. Lower-deck fare: $4HK, or 50 cents US. ⛴️🧵

One thing I like about this fine graphic is the way that it captures some of the nuances of vaccines and history. Not all vaccines were instantly 100% effective disease-killers--look at the mumps chart. But they are overall a fantastically valuable weapon in the fight against infectious disease.

This awful disease took the life of one of my oldest friends at age 39. Nothing the doctors tried had any impact. Just three months passed between diagnosis and death. It makes me glad (but also sad, remembering Tom) to see this.

Outstanding news that should be shared.

This paragraph is not what I expected to come across as I read my New Yorker over coffee this morning. There should be a journalistic term for the type of piece that exists to make ordinary middle-class people grateful for the comparative tedium of their lives. www.newyorker.com/news/our-loc...

This fine WaPo piece about the Heritage Foundation calling to promote childbirth would be even better if it noted that none of these efforts have ever worked in other nations, and the only sorta exception, France, has done it by embracing exactly the Big Gov't policies Heritage has fought for years.

ICYMI: they added a search function to user profiles (FINALLY) We can now go to any user profile including our own and tap the three dots at the top right and select “search posts”

Last spring, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association unveiled pretty strong evidence from a big study in Sweden--2.4 million kids over 20+ yrs--that the alleged association between acetaminophen (Tylenol) and autism/ADHD is spurious.

The 400-plus-page climate scientist response to the Trump-commissioned climate science critique will be posted here Tuesday morning at 9 AM Eastern: sites.google.com/tamu.edu/doe... You can discuss it with LIVE with me and a couple of the authors (Dessler and Kopp) at 230 Eastern below. 1/

Recently I learned about some young big-band-type jazz leaders, I've been spending the weekend listening, and they're just great. Right now I've got this on by Endea Owens--not a big band, but the music has the sweep of one. So great to see these great young players!

Paywall is down on this fine piece that explains how many of our housing issues date back to decisions made by Herbert Hoover in the 1920s for what surely seemed like good reasons at the time.

Just learned why the new COVID vaccine isn't available in Mass. State law says you can't give vaxxes that haven't been approved by the CDC advisory panel--the one RFK Jr disbanded. My thanks to the NY Times reporter in the quoted post for being on the case. Off to tell my elderly neighbors the news.

Fine, clear @sciam.bsky.social wrapup of the current state of peanut-allergy treatments contains the surprising (to me, anyway) news that UCLA researchers are in the early stages of developing a kind of mRNA "vaccine" for peanut allergies. Wonder how that work is faring under the new dispensation.

During tomato season every year, we treat ourselves to a ridiculously fancy (for us, anyway) bottle of Italian olive oil that comes wrapped in foil it's so fancy. We always get it from a store run by a fellah we've come to know a little bit. Last week he emailed us to say, "Buy this now because..."

Not a big fan of this kind of mathematizing analysis, but it is interesting that the places in pre-revolutionary France most susceptible to the waves of crazy beliefs called the Great Fear were those w/ both high literacy and high wealth concentration. Article ($): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fascinating, detailed look at how late medieval England turned itself into a workers' hell by passing maximum-wage laws(!), banning any kind of collective action, and blocking people from getting better jobs, moving to other villages, or even simply shifting from what they were doing as 12-yr-olds.

2/ When the Times truly deserves critique, go for it. But a lot of people on here do it when they don't— for Klout and/or to peacock. And that's really gross when it's other members of the media who do that cynically to boost their own followings. But: restore the public editor!

🧵1/ I'm sure everyone will apologize now that the NYT pubbed the huge investigation they've been working on about China's influence/pressure campaign on local elections. The red envelopes are only the tip of the iceberg (gift link): www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/n...

"It’s a genetic sandwich with a thin Denisovan filling surrounded by thick Neanderthal bread." @johnhawks.net on the fascinating discovery of a DNA segment that slipped from Denisovans to Neanderthals to, among others, Native peoples in Mesoamerica.

Unfortunate that the Wash Post puts up this kind of chart without explanation. Most of the graph covers a time before satellite and other observation tools let us reliably see hurricanes, and so we're picking up a lot more of them, which biases the numbers. Same with tornadoes before Doppler radar.

There are not 55 million people in the US with a visa. There may be 55 million people on Earth who have a US visa, but that includes many who live in places like Canada or Britain but travel frequently to the US, and many who have still-valid tourist visas but aren't in the US, and so on.

Most people are surprised to learn that per capita beef consumption has gone down by about 1/3 in both the U.S. and Europe since the 1970s.

My thanks to the generous people at Scientific American, who asked for a piece on the overturning of scientific paradigms and didn't blink when they got a piece about relativity, malaria, surveys of the Great Plains, mammograms, LLMs, climatology, COVID, Back to the Future, and some other stuff.

Helping my photographer pal Kiliii Yüyan with his book of gorgeous images is such a pleasure. I'm putting in some of the little black marks around the photos that people like to have. Coming next year, highly recommended (talking about his photos, not my text).

My thanks to the fine folks at Scientific American, who let me have a little fun with the ghost of Thomas Kuhn and talk about what happens when science reverses itself. www.scientificamerican.com/article/what... A couple snippets below.