On behalf of our 85+ experts, @andrewdessler.com and I submitted a minor update to the experts’ review as a comment on EPA’s proposed repeal of the Endangerment Finding. This version includes a new cover letter that walks through all the science EPA gets wrong.

Watermelon tastes amazing this summer. It was 92° when these Kern County farm workers were harvesting the melons this day. An average melon weighs 20 lbs. Workers toss them to each other as they put them in the trailer. #WeFeedYou

LA Times: "'It backfired,' said one senior administrator at UCLA, reflecting the sense of whiplash. .... 'Within hours of announcing our settlement, the DOJ was on our back.' WHO COULD'VE SEEN THIS COMING www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0ypqo...

New in Reuters, on carceral heat: Venkat supports closing down prisons as a long-term solution. “If you close a couple of prisons, you save billions of dollars. And those billions can be used to make sure that you climate proof the remainder of carceral facilities,” he said. tinyurl.com/b74yt7hw

10/ This was a naked attempt by both the Frankel Plaintiffs and UCLA to manipulate the legal system and silence the Jewish faculty and students who were actually in the encampment.

1/ I represent 5 anti-zionist students and faculty challenging the outrageous claim that the Palestine Solidarity Encampment was a "Jew exclusion zone". UCLA refused to defend. Today they agreed to pay millions instead. I can't overstate how dangerous this is. 🧵 www.latimes.com/california/s...

Prosecutors will not bring criminal charges against sheriff’s officers who wrestled a Black man out of a car during a traffic stop and punched him multiple times, the local sheriff said Monday.

UNRWA has food for the entire population for over three months — stockpiled and ready also in Al Arish, Egypt. The supplies are available. The systems are in place. Open the gates. Let UNRWA deliver. 1 million children are waiting.

The Israeli Authorities are starving civilians in #Gaza. Among them are 1 million children. Lift the siege: allow UNRWA to bring in food and medicines.

California OSHA inspectors don’t visit worksites even when workers are injured calmatters.org/politics/202...

really looking forward to our new era of fascist medicine

When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.

Dropping some dog-related wisdom from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1937:

Remember more than 80% of US federal career employees work outside of the Washington DC area. EPA is shutting down its scientific research division, which helps keep our air & water safe. It’s overwhelmingly staffed in Cincinnati, Ohio, with ~1000 employees there. The OH & KY Senators don’t care?

A U.S. surgeon trying to have a “peer to peer” consultation with a doctor at a health insurance company who is hiding his identity as her patient gets denied coverage. And it gets worse from there. You have to see it to believe it. (1/2)

These Central Valley farm workers are hard at work harvesting tomatos. This involves a lot of bending, reaching, and carrying heavy loads. This is very hard on the body - especially on days like this day where highs reached 100°. #WeFeedYou

Tragically, the NIH is finding any reason it can to cancel grants, including critical research into the nature and function of mycobacterium tuberculosis. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

In our 2016 NYC atlas there's a map titled "What Is a Jew? From Emma Goldman to Goldman Sachs," made in part to point out that "Jewish" is not a homogenous anything. Lots of Jews are enthused about Mamdani. Lots of goys should stop pretending they speak for "the Jewish community."

Our hearts are heavy for the grieving family of Jaime Alanis, who died from injuries sustained during a chaotic raid on Thursday. We will do everything we can to support them. We continue to work with the hundreds of farm worker families navigating the aftermath of this violent raid.

The tomato season is going full blast in quick start CA's Central Valley. Work starts at 5am which means many workers get up at 3am to drive one hour to the site. The early start time is to beat the heat as 100°+ temps are common. It's not easy but it pays their rent. #WeFeedYou

Wfh in a heat wave: I’ve had two interviews today cut off when my iPhone overheated. So the rest of the day, it sits in frozen chips. (Chips in chips...)

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Precarious housing—in particular top-floor single-room apartments with no plumbing in Haussmannian buildings under uninsulated zinc roofs, often occupied by older poor people who can’t descend the stairs without real risk—is killing people.

Across Portugal, Spain and France, some areas could exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days, the result of a hot-air mass that recently brought record-breaking heat and humidity to the eastern United States, and another from Africa.

In 2020, I wrote a piece for the LA Times warning that our immigration/border enforcement regime was poised to become an uncontrolled federal super police. But even I never imagined this scale of surveillance and detention. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

politicians like Jeffries are well on their way to becoming irrelevant as they play language police to folks like Mamdani who are actually calling for change. It’s whataboutism in its worst form, designed to distract from the actual & ongoing genocide of Palestinians supported by Jeffries & others

My new article, "Twilight Shift," on how the global shipping industry drives thermal inequality, commodity fetishism under climate change, and the debilitating heat exposure experienced by warehouse workers and delivery drivers, out now in Limn! doi.org/10.70312/JXNH

This book is riveting and so, so infuriating. It follows 5 families in Atlanta who are struggling to remain housed and paints deeply compassionate portraits of each unit. It reads almost like a novel but is outstanding journalism

“We’ll often talk about heat cramps. We’ll talk about heat exhaustion. We will talk about heat stroke,” Venkat said. “But it’s actually much wider than that. Heat can really impact every system in our body, our hearts, our lungs.” apnews.com/article/heat...

Happy voting New York friends!

Another critical team is the UCLA Heat Lab, run by @bharatvenkat.bsky.social, which has produced exceptional work on thermal inequality--that is, the uneven distribution of heat vulnerability.

Heat waves everywhere in the global north this week, so time for a thread on heat humanities research. Humanities scholars are exceptionally good at analyzing intersections of race, class, gender, and labor to highlight social vulnerabilities to meteorological disasters.

It'll be interesting to see how the heatwave impacts the democratic mayoral primary in NYC. Pundits have long argued that heat alters the shape of voter turnout on election day. Scholars have debated what exactly that looks like. On Tuesday, the "feels like" temp will be over 100F. My thoughts:

Given the heat discourse today, an important point: in summer 2022, extreme heat killed 60,000 in Europe. But two million Europeans had already died from Covid at that point, meaning--given similar vulnerabilities--far more would likely have died in the absence of the pandemic.

There is nothing better in this job than the moment an idea ignites. It's not even the big ideas that are the highest hit - the small connective things which turn a concept into a structure which are a pure demiurgic thrill. "I know how this bridge isn't going to collapse."

L.A. TACO has confirmed that ICE has detained two taqueros at Jason’s Tacos , a taco truck specializing in al pastor located on Whittier Boulevard and Bradshawe Street in East Los Angeles. @theglutster.bsky.social reporting for L.A. TACO

I'm proud I don't have Andrew Cuomo's record of corruption, scandal and disgrace. And the name is M-A-M-D-A-N-I.

we live in a militarized state

Greetings! A large immigration operation and subsequent protest in Paramount, CA has led to a large amount of gas and “less lethal” munitions. Situation ongoing. Will update as I can.

It's telling that the brutal tactics of ICE (mace, flash bangs) to kidnap people are the same tactics used by UCPD to arrest our students. The mayor of LA feigns horror while continuing to fund a militarized police force at truly ludicrous levels. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/u...

staging a show-and-tell about a fake genocide during a real genocide to the government that has done the most to seek justice for that real genocide is designed to break our brains. They know what they are doing. www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/w...

This is truly something else, wtaf.

No matter what this Administration tells the American people, the law is very clear: Members of Congress have a legal right to enter any DHS detention facility to conduct oversight without prior notice - something I’ve done twice this year without issue.

Today, our client Rümeysa Öztürk was released on bail from ICE detention in Louisiana, and she will return to New England to continue her studies. 📸 Giancarlo D’Agostaro

NEW ARTICLE: A literal decade ago, Lyle Fearnley & I began writing RESERVOIRS OF HISTORY. In this essay, we argue that the concept of reservoir articulates what we think of as a particular bio-logic of historical time (1/3) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

NEW ARTICLE: A literal decade ago, Lyle Fearnley & I began writing RESERVOIRS OF HISTORY. In this essay, we argue that the concept of reservoir articulates what we think of as a particular bio-logic of historical time (1/3) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

so, lies?