Two birds loved in a flurry of red feathers like a burst cottonball, continuing while I drove over them. I am a good driver, nothing shocks me. (Michael Ondaatje, “Application for a Driving License”)

Trans people suffer the most violence in prison. PREA was never enough but it’s just disgusting to roll it back.

The Twitter account for the Turning Point USA chapter at OU seems to have only started posting last week with an anti-trans pressure campaign. And then, oh gosh, what are the odds that they just happened to immediately find someone who claims to have been discriminated against by a trans person?

I am frustrated and enraged at the UCP and Danielle Smith, for using the most powerful constitutional hammer we have to vaporize human rights for children and their parents. I am disgusted by these Conservative MLAs. Every single one of them has taken leave of their senses and their humanity.

New paper: "A formal theory of group-level adaptation for obligate eusociality", with Kalyani Twyman (@kztwyman.bsky.social) #OpenAccess academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-... #Image #GoogleGemini @jevbio.bsky.social #OA

This is THE story of US poverty: that scores of people do everything Republicans say they want them to do—hold a steady job, be married, etc—and still be poor. I recommend this paper to anyone willing to understand this: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Coding Club: Creating an R Package by Lisa DeBruine #RStats https://bigbookofr.com/chapters/package%20development.html#coding-club-creating-an-r-package

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938 zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

For my Xtra column this month, I wrote about what it's been like living as a trans person in Trump's first year and the outlook moving forward. xtramagazine.com/power/politi...

And just like that, we lose our measles elimination status after 27 years. Three decades of work, gone. www.canada.ca/en/public-he...

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

I guess Rubin choosing "Missing at Random" for the scenario in which it is evident that the data are not missing at random is a close contender.

The Canadian government has seemingly never read a single one of its own commissioned reports on what Canadian science needs. (It's not more people.)

I really don’t think people know just how widespread poverty is in the US. Brady has an excellent review of this here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Causal Inference is Not Just a Statistics Problem. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... An introductory article including a primer on causal inference and DAGS , and accompanied by an r package containing simulated data to help explain concepts.

This entire thread is the stuff of nightmares.

The National Post is making a real run at the Toronto Sun’s title as the worst op-ed page in the country

In a new paper, we show from longitudinal UK and France data that income volatility (fluctatuations month to month) are bad for mental and general health. And it is much badder than you would expect given the lowness of the low months: doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...

Paging @johnpfaff.bsky.social

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

Will be a little sad forever that we got the clearest object lesson possible that each individual's health is inextricably related to every other individual's health in a society, and we seem to have come out of it with even less collective will to reshape our society relative to this knowledge.

That ratio, in turn, is a downstream effect of decades-long defunding of higher education such that institutions cannot afford enough qualified instructors for the student populations that increased for decades as administrations attempted to replace lost funding w tuition dollars

The result is a set of mutually reinforcing trends where fewer, lower-paid instructors buckle under (until recently) a constantly expanding student population. The students themselves caught in another accelerating debt crisis to complete their educations amidst rising costs

Giving students thoughtful, personalized feedback and instruction is not a problem that originates from the difficulty for an instructor to generate feedback, it is a problem that originates from institutions pivoting to student:instructor ratios where that dynamic is not logistically feasible.

Do you love research & writing & all things animal behavior? Well our journal, Animal Behavior, recruiting up to 5 (count em!) new Associate Editors! Editors serve three-year terms beginning January 2026. If you're interested, email Exec Editor Scott Sakaluk ([email protected]) by Oct 31!

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

The teacher pay penalty continues to grow. Public school teachers are paid only 73 cents for every dollar paid to similar college graduates New data from Sylvia Allegretto @epi.org and @ceprdc.bsky.social

Also worth recalling bsky.app/profile/patd...

Holy shit

The first time an Alberta government invoked the notwithstanding clause, public outrage forced a reversal in less than 24 hours. I wish to God Albertans would show the same moral fury now, when school children are outed & bullied by the government that is supposed to protect them. #ableg #abpoli

After last year’s US election, people liked to point out that almost every OECD country saw the party in power during the post-covid inflation lose office in the next election. With one big exception: Mexico. There may be a reason for that. www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

Horrors of Trump detention centre: Lisburn man tells his story after arrest for 'looking like a Mexican' Lee Stinton was lifted by US immigration police on an American street — in an incident he compared to a kidnapping. Here, he tells us his story.

Some thoughts about the Great Khan heading into Chicagoland's big Reverse Fort Sumter weekend.

Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...

I can think of very few people more deserving than Peter to have a professorship named after them. Queen’s is also a great uni and Kingston is a wonderful city.

You have got to be kidding me, part 2

You have got to be kidding me

When will people on the left wake up and realize they fell for a right wing moral panic about social media and cell phones that’s currently being used to strip us all of civil liberties? Jonathan Haidt, one of the primary architects of this moral panic, just brought his misinfo blog to Bari Weiss

Graham Greene has died. A Canadian acting icon, he earned an Oscar nomination for his role as Kicking Bird in Dances With Wolves. He also won a Grammy, Gemini and Canadian Screen Award, along with the Governor General's Performing Arts Award. He also earned a star on Canada's Walk of Fame.

The Tournament of Carts, folks.

Liberals: tbh I don't love Newsom but there's no other possible... Progressives: Pritzker seems alright Libs: ...we just can't let perfect be the enemy of the good, so we have to accept Newsom until... Progs: what about Pritzker Libs...just have to be loyal to Gavin and fall prey to purity tests

Crap like this gets excused away as savvy necessary-evil political strategy but most Americans, including most independents, oppose banning trans healthcare for minors. Why vote for someone so weak that podcasters can walk them into positions that are both unprincipled and unpopular?

I didn’t think Dean Cain could be more pathetic than when he opens his mouth. It turns out I was wrong.