20,000 words, 150 footnotes, 100+ timeline events = our attempt at documenting and synthesizing all the ways that the federal government has attempted to destroy access to gender-affirming care since January unbreaking.org/issues/trans...

US appeals Harvard court victory on $2 billion funding freeze reut.rs/3MDG5In

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...

@gregggonsalves.bsky.social on how we can remain hopeful these days as well as the people, institutions, and groups that give him hope

AGU has a Congressional email and call script up on NCAR:

Thinking of Thea Hunter today www.theatlantic.com/education/ar...

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.

"Does OU have resources and plans in place to safeguard the security of its employees or are we just easy targets for vociferous bullying? Our future depends on...academic freedom, free speech, the pursuit of knowledge, safety, human rights, and trust and belief in mutual coexistence."

This is exactly it. You can have optimism in mourning: knowing that people will die and lives will be diminished but also believing that everything we do now matters and will help.

Each summer, I lead a week-long creative retreat for environmental researchers & academics on Catalina Island. We develop your most ambitious project ideas. It's truly life-changing. Applications for the 2026 Storymakers fellowship are now open! Deadline is Feb 1. dornsife.usc.edu/wrigley/enga...

This is extraordinarily effective (buying bundled medical debt), and life-changing for the people it helps. It’s just ludicrous that we are in these situations to begin with - www.ctinsider.com/politics/art...

NEW: Friday memo from the NIH shows the agency is still thinking about terminations & aligning awards with its priorities The upside, experts told me, is that this new guidance offers more of an opportunity for researchers to push back on terminations www.statnews.com/2025/12/15/n...

The US National Science Foundation is relaxing some of its requirements for the review of grant proposals in an effort to cope with a backlog of applications and reduced staff numbers go.nature.com/3MF8aPm

i want to be clear about this: worker’s rights also includes the right to be free from racist or sexist or gendered abuse at your job.

This feeling is part of why I named my company Liminal. We don’t see the ways yet, but I believe we will find or make them, together.

Note that it was the @aaup.org and faculty standing up for themselves, not UCLA as an institution, that successfully went to court to arrest Trump’s overreach here.

NEW: Trump’s DOJ Pressured Lawyers to “Find” Evidence That UCLA Had Illegally Tolerated Antisemitism An investigation by ProPublica and @chronicle.com reveals how the U.S. government ignored due process to gin up its attack on the University of California.

I did this in person once. Met the guy who wrote the paper that changed my career and told him about it. He said, “wow, I didn’t think anyone read that paper!” 😂

"loneliness, beneath its many cultural expressions, is often a structural failure disguised as personal failure. The solution isn't fixing individuals. It's transforming the conditions under which we attempt to connect." www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/body...

🚨 Today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people. Michiganders cannot take another day of his chaos.

When I post about RFK Jr. undermining vaccines, I’m noticing more and more comments saying things like “I am glad my state is part of a coalition that is not listening to him”. That’s great, but I ask you to bear in mind the following: 1. Pathogens don’t care about lines on a map

Similarly a lot of projects that were promised no cost extensions were denied those extensions when the time came to ask for them. These projects don’t show up as “terminated” or “cancelled” but in most cases were cut shorter than expected (including personnel’s expected duration of employment).

We need better ways of capturing the reality of research funding - Colin’s thread shows one desperate situation where a thriving lab has been strangled, but won’t show up in counts of officially terminated projects

friends! @coyotemedia.org is dropping our paywall for December so you can see what we’ve been up to even if you have none dollars. All of our posts are currently free to read. Come check us out & spread the word? www.coyotemedia.org

I read @kissane.myatproto.social to better understand the world. (And for achingly beautiful lines like "patient little demons, those tools carry inside them the spirit of their making. They twist in our hands in our moment of need and leave us blistered & bleeding.") www.wrecka.ge/sparks-fly-up/

Pay attention at #NIH to peer review of grant applications. I don't think it's too much to say the keystone of US biomedical science is NIH's Center for Scientific Review. CSR organizes peer review—relying on 25k US scientists. Review helps isolate grantmaking from political interference. But! /1

"As one senior researcher told me, decades of painstaking work vanished overnight in an attack by an inexperienced and ideologically driven staff intent on dismantling the bureaucracy without understanding its purpose."

Still haven't read the full agreement because I deserve nice things occasionally. But there's really a need for a propublica-type investigation into the social network of these boards, presidents, & donors with the admin. At the same time, exploring the similarities and differences across deals.

Every year around this time, I ask folks to consider doing something in support of Native people. This year, please join me in supporting the Native Organizers Alliance as they build grassroots power, defend Native voting rights, and equip our people for collective struggle through skill-building.

My aim with DWI was to develop a research process in which data workers could shape research agendas, interpretive frameworks, and conceptual categories. The challenge was how to do this methodologically, beyond extractive social science conventions. data-workers.org/about/how-to...

Really proud of my colleagues for launching this new series at @coyotemedia.org -- First Aid Kit, a set of pieces that help you be safer, healthier, and more helpful in your community. How to respond to an overdose by @nuala.bsky.social

This is what I spent most of last week working on with other people who cannot leave this stuff alone. Gotta put the facts in order in a stable place and then see what meaning emerges.

BE A MINDFUL CONSUMER IN THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

What should we expect this flu season? Here’s a forecast from a wastewater perspective (because sh*t don’t lie) 1/

This connection isn’t articulated often enough.

We have a new timeline up today on our Medical Research Funding page, documenting the onslaught of political, legal, and bureaucratic attacks on medical research since January: unbreaking.org/issues/medic...

Oh this 🧵 is SO interesting!

A reminder that if you are called to be part of a jury in a political prosecution you have a right to refuse to convict on the grounds the prosecution is unjust. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

This week's @unbreaking.org update on immigration is *also* an update on data security because the administration is using immigration enforcement as a way to trial and operationalize a full-on surveillance state.

Interesting 🧵 on this 25-yr old (!) paper on “social translucence” dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

You did it @louierivers3.bsky.social !!!

Now comes the even harder work. But for tonight, let's celebrate.

HCI, Infosci, Comm folks, what are your favorite readings for gradstudents on how to choose a scholarly community, and how to choose where to publish? Assembling some notes on this and would love to know about your favorite reads on this.

Perhaps relevant today, a framework for understanding how many election rumors mislead.

New-to-me but very helpful visualizations how all the actions of the past ten months are affecting the CDC www.cdcdataproject.org

The response by @utaustinaaup.bsky.social to UT Austin's new "Academic Integrity" statement is good. "The statement contributes to a climate of fear that is not conducive to high quality education."

I was in a meeting when this news was shared so I quite literally watched my own jaw drop.

I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day. certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.