Anti-vaccine sentiment is now a load-bearing plank in the Republican platform. Democrats haven’t budged on the need for school vaccine requirements since 2019. Republicans have consumed so much disinformation that their support has declined by 27% since then.

Hmmm…what USAID wasn’t bad for America…what if getting rid of it only hurt us and everyone else? What if the richest man in the world being responsible for ending aid to the poorest people in the world will go down as one of the most bizarre and disgusting acts of the 21st century?

Fair point. The effect of removing coffee from coffee drinkers is plausibly different from getting people to start drinking coffee.

US higher ed is one of our best and most amazing exports. This admin is against both exporting from the US and importing to the US (i.e they are promoting poverty)

When do bad apples spoil the barrel? Multiple Actors Matter More Than Repeated Exposure for Social Learning: https://osf.io/zacku

🧐 "Fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive and renewables are only going to get cheaper" is both true & something the public is already inclined to believe (or at the very least is persuadable).

thanks to Ran Blekhman for this nice review of our piece on #autism and #microbiome blekhman.substack.com/p/the-autism...

In a world in which people with too much power and influence desperately need to be told and to understand when they are wrong, we are suddenly all inescapably drowning in sycophancy machines.

Proto-Stolpersteine

Eventually comes up in the essay itself, but this "non ideological" focus on affordability is today in a context in which one ideology is responsible for doubling the price of healthcare, raising tariffs on imports, groceries, etc.

know how I've been saying that some in public health will embrace MAHA? treat it like a legitimate public health project instead of the fascist, eugenicist purge to 'MAGA-ify the gene pool' that it is? Others, like JHU, will point out the lies: publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-evi...

This is the first story I ever did that got more than a million views

I've got a runner up, but once I was reminded this was the year, figured little would top it

A lot of education discourse is at root an inability to decide whether the purpose of our education system is to 1) teach material and measure learning 2) reward students who work hard 3) separate the smart kids (destined for smart guy jobs) from the dumb kids (destined to serve the smart guys)

Incidentally, this is why you tax wealth through land / real estate, because you can't move that out of state.

NEW: The first two years of Massachusetts' millionaire tax has raised $3 billion more than expected. And rather than driving the rich away, IPS researchers found that the number of millionaires has *increased.* Tax the rich. Greg Ryan in @bloomberg.com:

it's been hard to put this feeling into words, but we've spent the past couple of decades being lectured to and patronized by an elite class that spent its free time joshing with jeffrey epstein about his little sex abuse empire while lecturing us about how out of touch we are

ok one last post -- oldheads are always going to "why is the web dying.... how can we get the kids invested in the free and open web" bro the kids can't read. that's why the web is dying. first things first

Debate over imported solar panels just got awkward. A new study finds these imports already saved nearly 600 American lives by slashing massive amounts of air pollution. While policymakers argue about trade, the panels have just been quietly cleaning our air and preventing premature deaths.

I am not a lawyer, but constantly emailing reporters to say "hey can I tell you all about my friend's crimes? I know about them because we did the crimes together," seems like a mistake to me.

Experimental participants to us

Nothing like a proposal for a modest amount of lower-income housing nearby to find out who your neighbors are.

This, but for Magneto the Holocaust survivor

These folks just voted with the Rs to double the price of health insurance

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly" - Goethe

I wonder if the "active" manipulation is just as useful to a human advisor in closing the gaps -- a lesson in being proactive about what a first-gen might not know and telling them

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

apropos james watson’s death i had an idle thought today about how stupid race/iq stuff sounds. “buh if your skin is darker you are biologically less smart” is a thing only a dumbass can believe

THIS! “I don't expect Zohran Mamdani to be perfect. None of us should. Perfection isn't the point of politics. Conviction is. What matters is that he believes the government should serve the people.” - Frederick Joseph

Mamdani decries anti-semitism and Islamophobia in the same sentence and it’s fine and good because normal people can handle that combo

Oh my god

Reminiscent of all those "comedians" decamping to Austin from LA and finding out Austin is not, in fact, LA. Except I sincerely doubt any of these rich NYC assholes are going anywhere.

The Difference Between Being Broke and Being Poor (2018)

once again posting The Chart

My favorite example was from the rainbow fentanyl panic of a few years back, people thinking it would lure children. NPR reported, in serious NPR voice: "Young children typically lack access to the kind of cash that makes for good repeat customers." www.npr.org/2022/10/11/1...

Interesting paper! When you ask people about the most important issue "facing the country," they often say immigration. But when you ask them about issues facing them personally, it doesn't crack the top 10. This indicates that voters are reacting to media narratives, not their own experience.

You can see what’s happening in this one chart. The NYT's ‘Non-Moderate' group (bracketed on the right) is created by combining the ‘Funded Non-Moderate' (+0.4) and 'No PAC Funding' (-1.9) bars. That massive -1.9 from non-competitive races is what's doing all the work, not moderation.

I don't think we should talk about climate change anymore, we should talk about kitchen-table issues. Like how climate change will destroy your kitchen table and everything else you have

“It’s so endemic, it’s so pervasive, it’s so ubiquitous, that people don’t recognize just how much it is all around them” I've been talking motonormativity with @grist.org. Also features @sgoodyear.bsky.social and @brooklynspoke.bsky.social grist.org/culture/cars...

Incidentally, here's the image from the test he took, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a tool designed to detect cognitive impairment and dementia associated with old age, Alzheimer's, and neurological deterioration. championsforhealth.org/wp-content/u...

The most Republican guy is the guy who owns the used car dealership, a tanning salon, and a boat in a place that has been economically decimated by deindustrialization See, for instance:

To help with this, the important thing to remember is to not be shitty to people when they reveal they've changed their mind or discovered new information

I don’t want to romanticize the past, but I feel like I remember times in my life where there would be one or even zero Nazi news cycles per week

Lol there were like 1500 in *Wooster, Ohio* on Saturday

The Tea Party's biggest distributed event was on tax day 2009, with 750 modestly attended protests. No Kings had 2,600. Its biggest single gathering was on 9/12/09 in DC, with somewhere between 75K and a few 100K participants. No Kings had 5-7 million. So: No Kings dwarfs the Tea Party. [2/3]

A Brief History of Men are Becoming Less Manly 🧵

They truly believe that if they can control the media, education, science, health, and the military, they'll control it all and stamp out dissent. If they read US history, they'd know we've been here before... and it led to mass movements and social change that shook this country and the world.

Good morning! You feel like you’re going crazy because their attempts to bludgeon you into submission with weaponized unreality aren’t working on you. Keep it up. You’re doing great.

I'm not a political genius, but I'm pretty sure the party that published a 600-page manifesto on how they want to shut down the federal government are the ones who shut down the federal government.