1/ I looked at 20 years of Supreme Court decisions and found that for the first time, all nine justices decided more cases by secret ballot — aka the “shadow docket” — than it did for cases argued in open court last term. 🧵:

Interesting new work from Jack Lindsay Nicholas Sofroniew et al from the mech interp group at Anthropic. Quick take: these are abstract representations which do have similarities to human brain features. 1/2 #neuroscience #neuroai 🧪 transformer-circuits...

The lab is at @fens.org, with 5 posters — spatial & auditory working memory, prefrontal decision-making, dopamine in statistical learning, and a 2-photon rat-brain atlas for BrainGlobe. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it this year, but come find the rest of the lab on Tue, Thurs, & Fri! #FENS2026

also, and separately, but also relatedly the anticipatory ready-to-wait-a-decade hungry joy that i will have when this garbage court's rulings are corrected, good god you people have no idea

New paper from me: Reconstructing the Civil Rights State After Democratic Backsliding. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

One thing about John Roberts’ unitary executive theories is that they assume that a close presidential election every four years is **the only** binding referendum. And in between elections, the Roberts Court says, presidents are basically kings.

I’m out of DC visiting w/ family now, otherwise I’d be outraged about all the noise, bad air, troops, and brownshirts in masks. Be well, DC peeps. #DCStatehood asap, so everyone across DC gets a say in all this in the future

Sigh. I’ll be a hater and say it: In actual reality, your taxes paid for an illegal crew of naive tech boys, led by a billionaire, and backed by a Corrupt Court, to destroy your gov’t services, hospitals, housing, education, and cancer cures, taking them away from your American family members.

The US is winning thanks to birthright citizenship.

Concur.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident.” On the 250th. This shirt gets it right: America is an idea, of freedom, equality, and a fair shake for all. 1/

My thoughts on the day. I'd have liked the simpler title, "Is It the Fourth?" But editors get their own say on that. I do think that the close of Winthrop's sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630 sounds the right counterpoint to the aspirations of the Declaration. washingtonmonthly.com/2026/07/04/i...

Lessons here for the attacks on science too. Compromise with the pro-autocracy, anti-science forces won’t work. They are opposed to core American principles of freedom, equality, education, and a better society for all. Increasing trust comes from telling the truth about what’s really happening.

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire[.]”

Yes. Over the past 25 yrs, the US journalism industry has collapsed. Markets could never support journalism at the level we need,and the internet ended monopolies on ads. Now far-right Hoover fellows want to kill US science, b/c they don’t know Bell Labs basic research was also funded via monopoly.

John Ioannidis recently blasted us as SBM for criticizing supposedly "serious scientists." But were MAHA/MAGA doctors serious scientists or political propagandists using science as a shield to stave off criticism? Don't trust my answer. Just watch their videos. My latest.

Good response to the absurd @washingtonpost.com editorial from Scott Atlas and the billionaire funded Hoover Institute.

The NIH saved my life and got me the diagnosis I needed. Because of them I found proper treatment and can walk and talk again. I will personally go to the ends of the earth to oppose anyone who tries to shut it down.

Government Monopoly = Public Goods Get in fam, we're getting tattoos.

Think through this sort of phenomenologically. Science is a collective act of knowledge production. It requires humility and discernment. Presidentialism is a vision of the state as the embodiment of one man’s will. It is irrational, crude, and loathsome of a scientific mode of thinking.

I am excited to announce the latest paper from our lab, published in Science ! In this study, we show that thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish brain process sensory information hierarchically across topographically organized forebrain circuits.

On this debate about the role of Congress: The science funding agencies like NIH and NSF show how a powerful legislature can endow government agencies with pro-society democratic accountability and achieve great success. And a powerful president can be beholden to minority opinion and break things.

Excellent thread on the junk-idea opinion piece today. Like @joshuasweitz.bsky.social , I have immense respect for those great journalists at WaPo who have stayed and are continuing to do good work amidst institutional collapse.

Abolishing the NIH has always been this admin’s plan. They told us in Project 2025. They’ve SHOWN us with their actions over the past 18 months. This is why a heads down approach will not work. The scientific community has 2 options: oppose this with all we’ve got, or let them carry out their plan.

This is a very impt point I’ve also discussed with @josephestiglitz.bsky.social. We granted Bell Labs support by allowing them monopoly power. A *very* similar thing supported journalism for decades— natural monopolies over classified ads that we allowed. Also see @deanbaker13.bsky.social

It is sad that Scott Atlas doesn’t understand basic economics. Paul Samuelson wrote about public goods—why NIH has been such a stunning success—more than 75 yrs ago. Also, to see why Atlas urges ending US success, just look at who elevates him: pro-privatization billionaires. 1/

New in PLOS Comp Bio, cool work from @timothyoleary.bsky.social showing that representational "drift" (lol, sorry for the scare quotes, Tim!), follows non-Gaussian statistics that can be beneficial for adaptive decoding: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... #neuroscience 🧪

“The fight over the independent agencies has mostly been conducted in the vocabulary of administrative law. This is the wrong frame. Congress built [a system to battle] the tendency of concentrated private power to capture whatever public mechanism is built to discipline it.”

This is my lane. I went through the 194 Trump v Barbara opinion from yesterday section by section, noting what they got right about US migration and citizenship history, and what the dissents get wrong. Please share if you think it is helpful to others.

“This [small] drop is part of a wider loss of trust in civic institutions, rather than being unique to science, research indicates..” Yes. Best explanation:the billionaire class has launched a war on public institutions, via social media and astroturfing.

I disagree w/ almost all parts of this plot. Having used Claude Code myself and talked to “Sr Engineers” whose design judgement is not replaced by AI, @dacemoglumit.bsky.social is correct: AI, like the internet before it, is a tool not a replacement. The hype itself is part of the biz model.

I’m a broken record, but: The Supreme Court does not have the capacity nor the expertise to run US scientific research, which is built on agencies like NIH. If we allow the Roberts Court to keep saying the only check on a president is the Court, not Congress, American science as we know it is dead.

“Ultimately, Slaughter’s broad language and indeterminacy provides fuel for the Trump administration to argue that the president has the constitutional prerogative to remove all inferior officers and [civil servants]…” Good luck running a gov’t like this

Over at Lawfare, I talk about the indeterminacy in Slaughter, the ways the Trump administration may weaponize it, and why federal courts are not the best enforcement mechanism for preserving administrative capacity. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/slau...

here is what i think: we're not consumers or spectators, we are participants with agency. you should not hope that democrats will do anything. you must work to force them to do the right thing. the odds are long, but we are far from the first americans to face long odds. we will win.

Ben and Jerry’s delivers. Hi Massachusetts, summer is pleasant here

Another reason to worry is the Dissent Ratchet. Yes, the Court majority rejected Thomas’ arguments in his dissent. But now the FedSoc world will workshop those arguments and organize around them and they’ll return. For ex, Scalia’s dissent arguments in Morrison built the opinion in Slaughter.

“Slaughter is the most important separation-of-powers ruling of the twenty-first century—and, by far, the most important decision of the current term. It embraces a remarkably strong form of the unitary executive theory…”

SCHRODINGER'S ALITO RETIREMENT

Yesterday @joshtpm.bsky.social likened the current American system to Iran’s. That is a structure of self-government, and atop it a Guardian Council of Islamic clerics and lawyers which block any non-hardliners from governing. Hard not to agree talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-s...

5-4 for what it explicitly says in the constitution is incredible. They were this close to undoing the civil war entirely. bsky.app/profile/mjsd...

Here's what most amazes me, having read Slaughter & Cook. UET is the holy grail of 40+ years of the conservative legal movement. Endless articles, earlier jud. opinions paving the way, conferences, lectures. And the Roberts opinions are BAD. Weak, thin, wave away counter-arguments. It's pure power.

To restore democracy we need different fields to work together—lawyers, historians, political scientists, and physical and biomedical scientists amongst others. We can’t cast legal thinking aside. Because our government is built on laws and modern society needs good government.

As with Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, I guess the other thing I'd add here is that these guys are successful because right wing billionaires give them money to do propaganda. That's like 90% of the game.

A lie. Slaughter allows Trump to purge the heads of the MSPB and Office of Special Counsel, which protect civil servants from unlawful firings. When those agencies are paralyzed or corrupted, civil servants’ job protections become worthless. Thomas and Barrett endorsed this outcome just last month.

I don't know what Roberts intended. Anything I can say would really be a guess. The problem is that Roberts could have drawn a line in the sand---like they always have---and said "principal officers only." He didn't. Sotomayor warned him it was a problem with the opinion.

I love everything about this editorial by @dereklowe.bsky.social. Silence won't save anyone in the end. www.science.org/content/blog... "So the CEOs have decided to lie very still and hope that no one notices them.... But will it work? Only so long as Trump and his creatures see a benefit in it..."

If we get one or two retirements of Supreme Court justices tomorrow (last day of the term!), every scientist, scientific society, and patient group has got to be in the public battle over the confirmations.

Yes. We are a battle over constitutional meaning here and what is super-duper crazy here: the Founders—the grandsons of the Glorious Revolution—were real clear about the supremacy of Congress over the President.

And moreover we have to figure out what the government—the agencies— will look like. It is going to be a new thing. We’re not going back.