confirmed here by multiple sources!! another fun rumor is apparently the small and inexperienced firm taking over will subcontract the work back to ResDAC! I can feel the efficiency growing!

"Why doesn't the US have national health insurance?" Fascinating new paper from Alsan and Neberai out in QJE @qjeharvard.bsky.social finds: rise of private health insurance in the US was enabled by 'strategic, interest group-financed effort to shape citizen views and influence policy' #EconSky

Never great when the level-headed headline reads "West Braces for Critical Water Shortages After Unprecedented Snow Drought." www.drought.gov/drought-stat...

I feel I should alert Bluesky to the baby foxes in our yard

We published today the latest figures on cause of death in children. In every year since COVID, the number one killer of children in the US is guns.

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

BMI is like every other clinical measurement. It can be totally misused if you're not thoughtful. People misinterpret lab values, vital signs, and test results all the time. One person's blood pressure of 90/50 could be normal while for someone else they need to be in the ICU.

You may have noticed that the word for ‘night’ in many languages appears to be that language’s word for ‘eight’ with an ‘N' in front of it. English: N + eight = Night German: N + acht = Nacht French: N + huit = Nuit Spanish: N + ocho = Noche Italian: N + otto = Notte Portuguese: N + oito = Noite ⬇️

Alcohol is wreaking havoc on U.S. public health. American society looks the other way Read the story: www.statnews.com/2026/05/12/a...

North America's only marsupials, opossums have a 13 day gestation. After birth, the bee-sized babies spend 6-9 weeks in the pouch attached to a nipple, then another 4-5 months riding on mom's back. During the 'baby-bus' phase, she continues to forage. This momma has a mustache made of baby tails.

i've heard this too from NIH sources 😓

wandering the Sonora desert in a carefree fashion like

Among adults 50 years of age or older, fewer cases of confirmed influenza-like illness were observed with an mRNA influenza vaccine than with standard vaccines. Reactogenicity was higher with the mRNA vaccine. Full phase 3 Fluent trial results: https://nej.md/4nfu2z8 #InfectiousDisease

PSA: don’t self-censor your grants. Don’t use the AI tools or word/phrase alternative sheets you see out there. Here’s why: 1) These tools are almost certainly wrong bc the list keeps changing. There’s no way they can be up to date, POs can’t even stay up to date. 🧵1/2

On its third attempt tonight, Marblehead Town Meeting approved an “MBTA Communities–compliant” district largely centered on the 125-year-old Tedesco Country Club, meeting 3A requirements on paper while all but assuring no new housing would be built. This comment says it all.

high quality survey question. i approve.

Scoop — Trump admin's new Medicare portal accidentally exposed health workers’ social security numbers. It’s latest setback with DOGE-backed initiative. We flagged the problem to officials two days ago to fix it. with @ence.bsky.social

Lots of people are talking about this study, this headline, this picture (!), and ultra-processed foods. It’s been my job for 25 years to understand nutrition. I think there are 5 - count ‘em, 5! - things that you need to know about UPFs and health. Here they are. 🧵 bsky.app/profile/cnn....

wow

RFK Jr. and the CDC’s top official, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, don’t want you to read this. Paper shows that 2025-2026 Covid-19 vaccines were effective. They censored it. That’s exactly why we need to read it. So, we published it in Inside Medicine! Take a look... open.substack.com/pub/insideme...

About to release the Covid-19 vaccine paper censored by the CDC’s top official this month! We’ve got the document and expert analysis in Inside Medicine, coming in just a few moments. If you want it for free in your inbox, subscribe now. Https://insidemedicine.substack.com/subscribe

🚨🚨🚨 Tl; dr: Enrollment in Medicaid expansion is associated with dramatic long-term improvements in credit score and reductions in medical debt sent to collections! Published today in @jamanetworkopen.com (full paper is linked below) Read on for more details 1/n www.uofmhealth.org/health-lab/m...

watching the pitt as a doctor is like sitting through Board Exam: The Show!

IPUMS DHS data extracts can now be created using a microdata API in R, through a package called ipumsr! See our introduction to the microdata API at https://tech.popdata.org/ipumsr/dev/articles/ipums-api.html

THE HOUSE JUST VOTED TO EXTENDED TPS FOR HAITI!!! Thank you, Rep. Ayanna Pressley for your leadership on this. Proud to help co-lead this effort for our Haitian brothers, sisters, and siblings. What a day.

💬 Viewpoint: Mandatory annual training modules consume millions of physician‑hours each year, yet their largely passive formats may offer limited educational value while contributing to administrative burden and clinician burnout. ja.ma/4mICoPp

a+++ pedantic footnote

Academia -- where you can firmly be in your mid 40s and still be considered an emerging leader. I like feeling like there is always something to learn and a frontier to discover. I don't like having to wait just because of some "time" (indep of experience or achievement) .

Attention all who have ever received AHRQ funding to fuel #healthcare research: You have 6 days left to submit expert testimony to the House Appropriations Committee as they consider the agency's future funding. @academyhealth.bsky.social has tips: ahsituationreport.substack.com/p/academyhea...

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Recently accepted by #QJE: “The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military,” by Greenberg, Wasserman, and Weber: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

How it feels doing literally any task right now.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/07/b... in other news ...

I do appreciate that NYT called a physicist at Emory to ensure that he also had Atlanta credentials in order to ask about Waffle House teleportation

"You call hamburgers 'steamed hams'?" "Yes, it's a regional dialect." "Uh-huh. What region?" "Uh, upstate New York." "Really? Well, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase 'steamed hams'." "Oh, not in Utica, no, it's an Albany expression." "I see."

We consulted with the writers of The Pitt on this storyline. The scripts don’t always get all the insurance and health policy details right, but I can vouch for the fact that they definitely work hard to understand the nuances. It has to work as a compelling story, too. @robinr.bsky.social

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding go.nature.com/4bZ9k0W

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

We are thrilled to announce the finalists for the 32nd Annual #NIHCMAwards in Health Care Journalism and Policy Research! Join us in congratulating these journalists and researchers and learn more about their work here: bit.ly/NIHCM2026Awa... #NIHCMAwardsJournalism #NIHCMAwardsPolicyResearch

this is pretty fascinating, have to digest more to understand the meaning of the inequality scale

Now available: my hospital cost report (HCRIS) code downloads and processes SNF cost reports, too. I've only tested it a little, so take with a grain of salt and let me know how it works for you! For now, it's a separate branch in the repository here: github.com/asacarny/hos...

Only 23% of government workers believe they “can report a suspected violation of a law, rule, or regulation without experiencing retaliation.” That's way down form the share the prior year (72%) who said they could report suspected illegal activity without fear www.thebulwark.com/p/two-more-g...

Pet peeve: un-self-aware academic junket culture. We spend $2000 to attend conferences where 75% of speakers rail against American inequality, while we splurge on $75 dinners, stay in $300/night hotel rooms, and take a $50 uber ride to avoid a 3-stop subway ride that would cost $2.50.

so much of the time when one of these guys says "i would do ANYTHING for my family" they mean "i fantasize about using violence to defend my family" and not "i'm willing to do some cooking and cleaning and spend time with my partner and kids doing things that interest them"

CERN took some antiprotons on a field trip! apnews.com/article/cern... (HT @matociquala.bsky.social)

This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results. (One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

Antibiotics and the gut microbiome - “Clindamycin, fluoroquinolones and flucloxacillin accounted for most of the associations with the abundance of individual species,” with impact seen 4-8 years after use… www.nature.com/articles/s41... #IDSky

He was a skater frog