The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees 🧵

I understand there is a market for steel from ships that sank before 1945 because it is unpolluted by radiation from atom bombs. Perhaps we will soon demand references from papers printed before 2025 and the great information pollution disaster

Elon's little serfs are quite literally begging journalists to come back because every publicly available source of data shows people have fled the platform and young people won't use it. They are literally begging regular people to come back. Don't do it! It is a website by and for actual Nazis!

It's not the only reason to oppose the language of takers and shirkers and all that, but people have been warning with good reason: when you establish the existence of a subclass of despised, worthless people it's acceptable to hate and abuse, everyone ends up in there eventually.

Here’s the thing, emerging scientists aren’t going to flee to do science elsewhere…they just won’t do the science. We will lose at least one, if not two generations of knowledge if we don’t get this shit sorted out immediately.

I'll say again: we are oddly selective about the government services about which we will say, they operate at a loss. We say Amtrak and the post office "lose money" but we never say highways, the court system, the Pentagon, etc lose money

The markets are staying afloat right now on the hope that AI will destroy American workers. What a bleak thing. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/b...

Quick, they can’t have gotten far

somehow it's "hoarding" when I keep my old tech as long as possible and resent forced obsolescence but not "hoarding" when billionaires and tech companies suck up all the money and burn though the planet in search of endless growth

West Point plaque: "Our code of military obedience requires that, should orders and the law ever conflict, our officers must obey the law."

This is some scary shit you guys. Two pillars of the community—middle aged white guys no less—arrested because some off duty cop bastard sitting several booths away in a restaurant claims to have heard them “plotting against law enforcement.” We’re in the “ears everywhere, trust no one” stage of it.

I know everyone is fed up with the state of the world but what if you didn’t take it out on people you have mild disagreements with on social media

JD Vance owns a company that buys American real estate and sells it to foreign investors. They specifically target Americans in crisis to buy their property for less than it is worth.

Two panels commemorating the contribution of Black American soldiers towards the liberation of the Netherlands in World War Two have been quietly removed from a cemetery in Limburg. It follows a complaint by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

Then when the bubble bursts, the US taxpayers will already be on the hook. “Too big to fail” redux. Meanwhile these folks will continue to collect on their massive compensation packages.

The mandate of heaven descends on the city in honor of its new leader

👇

Get the hell off Substack before you literally can’t anymore without blowing up your business

$40 billion to Argentina’s right-wing government. The entire USAID budget was $34 billion.

If I had explain American history in one sentence, I could do worse than "John Brown was hung for treason, but Robert E. Lee was not."

It costs ~$70 to produce a year’s supply of insulin. Yet, the average annual cost of insulin went from $2,864 in 2012 to $5,705 in 2016 to $18,000 in 2025. A 25,714% markup. That isn’t inflation or supply chain—It’s corporate greed. Now—California will sell insulin for $11. Make this nationwide!

How it started: "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." (Introducing OpenAI blog post, 2015) How it's going:

This two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States. Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵

Remember this when they tell you that arts degrees are worthless.

People voting in ways wholly unrelated to how they want government to act isn’t sustainable

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

White House Deputy Press Secretary seen here posting data showing how much more prevalent right wing domestic terrorism is than left wing domestic terrorism... while thinking she's showing the reverse. Apparently she can only read headlines, but not the actual graph with the data.

as a christian, one thing i love about trump is that he explicitly rejects the teachings of jesus

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” -Declaration of Independence

Italians and beyond: this week we launch Pianeta Lab in Modena and Bologna, an experimental space to give people a voice in developing technology & policies that affect our everyday lives. We need your help to get this off the ground! Please consider donating: www.ideaginger.it/progetti/pia...

In the midst of all the erosion of respect for nuance and civility, I found it soothing to listen to this wonderful interview with @profess.bsky.social Lydia Patton. #HPS #HOPOS

"Every single person who has died during these cycles of actions and reprisals — around 140 people in large protests –– has been killed by the police." - @nanjala.bsky.social in @hammerandhope.bsky.social

So Cato seems to have decided to use fake, AI-generated young people expressing worries about the future of Social Security to illustrate the need to overhaul social security. www.cato.org/blog/reimagi...

@profess.bsky.social @hoposjournal.bsky.social #HOPOS #hps #philsci

The people who say we talk too much about slavery are the same ones who insist that we need public monuments and statues of men who are famous solely for waging a war of treason in defense of slavery. Statues that were created explicitly to deny any sense of "hope and progress" after the Civil War.

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

The US is on its way to "tractor production has risen 500%" style economic statistics

"WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 1, 2025) – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today that it will begin an orderly wind-down of its operations" cpb.org/pressroom/Co...

It's really weird to demand accountability from a NYC mayoral candidate for a deadly NYC shooting rather than the current NYC mayor, an ex-cop who campaigned on a "tough on crime" platform and promptly got indicted for crimes

This is possibly the most quintessentially American news story ever written. “Mr. Regalado and his wife said their cryptocurrency platform ‘blends biblical kingdom principles of wealth creation with cutting-edge blockchain technology.’” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/u...

It is an extraordinary loss of intellectual expertise that the American people invested millions in developing Every scientist who earns a graduate degree in the US is the product of an investment by the public This is like setting money on fire

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

Why do you lock your door at night. Is it because you think I'll come in and debate you. Are you afraid of free speech

Here's the first thing that really worried me: a 2012 event called the LA Space Salon, pitched as a space travel boosters club. A chance to meet Bill Nye and other open-minded futurists. I found out the Salon was covertly funded by Elon Musk. Goal: de-legitimize NASA and get contracts for SpaceX.

on the last day of the United States, when this country has finally descended into civil war, i will do a thread on how to dress for summer