There is precisely one (1) other news story about this huge abortion news from Trump’s AG pick and it’s behind a paywall. Please support @autonomynews.co, which is worker-owned and paywall-free

The math behind the Trump Account projections checks out. The assumptions don't.⁣ ⁣ The headline numbers rely on decades of contributions, optimistic stock returns, and future dollars that won't buy nearly as much.⁣ ⁣ More in this week's Diving In: newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/what-the-w...

People drum up support for doing 'something' about low birth rates because, they argue, low fertility is bad for economic growth. That's actually *not* a settled point. New paper in @nber.org finds that lower birth rates are linked to higher GDP and wage growth. www.nber.org/papers/w35401

They don’t care about fertility any more than they cared about women’s sports. They want to own women and children as property. The only real fascist goal is domination. They have no other. The rest is just whatever lie they’re currently telling to disguise that fact.

“Overnight, under the cover of darkness, the federal government removed panels at the President’s House that told a thorough history of Philadelphia,” [Philadelphia Mayor] Parker said. “That it did so at night shows it understands this action is shameful, that it violates community trust.”

You would think idiots that obsess about levels of circulating T and fertility would bother to learn how negative feedback works.

It’s nifty how the “law and order party” plans to, once again, totally ignore the law. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

📺️ In this @msmagazine.com op-ed, @stephherold.bsky.social (@ansirh.bsky.social) draws on her research to argue that television may be the best hope for spreading accurate information about abortion, and one that too often gets it wrong. 🔗 Read: msmagazine.com/2026/06/25/t...

Apropos of, well, everything: - partnership and fatherhood reduces testosterone - intense combat training sharply reduces testosterone - testosterone fluctuates widely on a day-to-day basis, so a point in time measurement doesn't really mean anything without other symptoms

If they don't want us studying gender they need to stop doing so much gender all the time.

We're at a tipping point in the discourse where sexists deny that forcible rape is rape if you're dating. It's even more radical than denying marital rape.

Next call to action: The NIH is considering limiting the number of research grants a person could serve on as PI/MPI. The cap could go as low as *2* AND includes not just R01s but several other Rs (R03, R21, etc.) and U grants. Links to full text & HOW TO RESPOND (BY MIDNIGHT ON 8/3) BELOW

Good stuff here. “You know the launch was successful because you didn’t hear much about it, which is how it goes with government: You only hear the bad news.”

"But while American lawmakers nudge artificial-intelligence companies to add mental-health guardrails, Beijing is taking a heavier hand. It is policing virtual romance, in part because it wants people to stop dating machines and start having babies."

It is extremely unusual for *any* regulatory proposal to receive this many comments. But for one that is this technical is simply unheard of. If the point of this exercise was to hide a massive power grab in the arcane garb of administrative law, it failed. Spectacularly.

i had no idea this would become so literal

Do it!!

The State Dept incorrectly described several contraceptives — a subdermal implant, an IUD, & an oral contraceptive — as abortifacients. The State Dept has yet to explain why it pushed to destroy the contraceptives or whether their characterization as abortifacients triggered the action.

Don't let them lie to you; Social Security is a problem of income distribution, not demographics cepr.net/publications...

New from me: Demographic crisis framing is everywhere. It's a bar-lowering snowball ratchet. familyinequality.wordpress.com/2026/07/14/d...

The Heritage Foundation has a new ambassador for "traditional womanhood." But she’s hard-selling a life I’m not so certain she wants to live herself.

Elon Musk's xAI has installed more than double the number of gas turbines than it has publicly acknowledged to power its Colossus 2 data center project, without federal permits, and the pollution is hitting predominantly Black neighborhoods the hardest reut.rs/4bIghEm

Apropos of absolutely nothing, saw a cool paper presented at PAA this year that used the onset of Title IX as a natural experiment, showing that the increase in access to sports coincided with improvements in women's bone density

My god. The Heritage Foundation, which mercilessly attacked transgender kids in order to protect the "integrity of women's sports," is now attacking the legal basis for women's sports. The transgender student decision is barely 2 weeks old.

“American health care largely treats every woman as if she were either prepregnant, pregnant or invisible…This state of affairs is so demoralizing that a lot of women are relieved when they enter menopause … [It] beats being an infantilized baby-making machine.”

The Institute for Family Studies report by Lyman Stone & Brookes asked people how supportive their friends are of having more children, and their childbearing intentions and aspirations. People with more "supportive" friends (questionnaire items not provided) desire / intend to have more children.

I am writing a couple of "big picture" pieces, and I am taking advantage of what has become a rarity - a week with few meetings. It's so fun to think and read and write. I so rarely have the time to do this kind of deep scholarly engagement. It's kind of awesome.

Wow. “The three directorates are being required to pull back NSF proposals that have already passed peer review and have been recommended for funding. Some of the funds will be funnelled to another project, a brainchild of the White House OSTP.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Important webinar tomorrow!

PLEASE SHARE: The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion has immediate opportunity for new Executive Officer. This part-time, remote position pays $55k. Details in attachment. Apply here https://bit.ly/SSSR-2026-EO.

🌸🌸🌸

Pete Hegseth lives on the podcasts of hyper-bearded men. He has no issues with bearded warriors. The only reason he's doing this is to purge the Navy of Black sailors. This skin condition affects Black men disproportionately.

Does it matter that comments are received? It does! So get those comments in!!! Today is the last day. frac.org/blog/federal...

SCOOP: The Reproductive Health Alliance of 23 Democratic governors submitted a comment objecting to a proposed rule that would drastically change the federal grantmaking process, saying it threatens programs related to maternal health and reproductive care, such as Perinatal Quality Collaboratives.

At the risk of stating the obvious: It’s not bigotry to say Lyman Stone is a bigot

It always reveals a lot about a person's views: which things are the policy levers "we" are discussing whether to pull, versus which things are just facts of life. To Lyman Stone, "immigration restrictionists" are apparently a fact of life, whereas policy can get American women to have more babies.

I can write a gazillion well-researched, peer-reviewed, respected-by-actual-experts articles on the causes and consequences of low fertility and place them in high-profile academic outlets, and I'll never have the exposure or reach that a Christian Nationalist aligned with Heritage will have.

1) Lyman Stone has bad tweets that he should be canceled for. 2) Falling birth rates are a neutral social fact, and it is bad to produce guest essays that argue that we are in big trouble and cannot consider migration, and that the future will be so much better with "fertility renewal"

Lyman Stone, the author of this op-ed, is an extremist smart enough to try to seem reasonable about racism, misogyny, and forced birth. I quote him in this piece, which notes how legacy media is helping sanewash far-right pronatalism.

“Over the past 2 decades, studies have repeatedly found that women are more likely to have their symptoms minimized, attributed to anxiety or emotion, & treated later & less aggressively—particularly when the pain is gynecological in origin.”🧪🛟

Reminder: Memphis is still “under full-blown occupation” by ICE. Task force members have reportedly killed at least two people in four days.

The Trump administration finalized a rule Friday that changes how agencies enforce the Endangered Species Act. The administration narrowed the definition of "harm" under the landmark law.

To the Anemona Hartocollis's credit, this article does not use the term "fertility crisis," which is good because there is. not. one. -- contrary to the clickbait bosses at NYT. When you say "fertility crisis," and then liberals can't "solve" it, you are left negotiating over the Nazi solutions.

What happens when two sociologists turn their analytical lens on parenting itself? In this edition of Ideas, Allison Daminger and Nina Bandelj dissect the “emotional economy” of modern parenting—arguing that today’s exhaustion is socially produced. press.princeton.edu/ideas/from-i...

“Because it’s Black youth gathering, because it’s Brown youth gathering, we see it as being a threat.” wapo.st/4ffd3Jz

Things the author of this op-ed have also proudly put out into world.

Maybe you think "these are tech/finance reporters, politics is not their beat" but they also get the tech wrong! Someone who understands how welfare programs & tech works would know the Trump account app is going to have low take-up skewed toward the wealthy. What Yahoo wrote (L) vs what I wrote (R)

Postdoc opportunity THIS FALL w/ @docthoughts.bsky.social at the Center for the Study of Family Health & Well-Being at UT-Knoxville! Esp interested in those studying structural & economic inequality, health disparities, or child well-being. fa-ewlq-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Instead of changing the language in their legacy scholarship, the Upperman family has decided to pull their $1M endowment from a North Carolina university They plan to move the scholarship to a school where it is likely a Black student will receive it

It is not headed by a “climate critic“. It is headed by someone who is unqualified in this area, who cannot offer valid critiques but instead shares debunked claims, and who regularly attacks climate scientists. Like me.