One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

ICE is stockpiling arms, including chemical weapons, guided missile warheads and explosive components. The spending dwarfs anything we've ever seen in the agency - a 700% increase. The President is building an army to attack his own country.

Courtesy of colleagues at Penn

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis. Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

George Orwell’s Animal Crossing

Members of the Penn community: please sign this actionnetwork.org/petitions/ju...

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Imagine if Richard Nixon had just tweeted out the Watergate scandal rather than putting it on secret tapes. That’s what this is.

I won't quote-tweet our main character of the day, but if your complaint is that Charlie Kirk's words are being taken out of context, I'd encourage you to skim through the Media Matters tag for his name. They have hundreds of posts about Kirk and most have longer clips that give the full context.

These job ads have now been posted! 🎉 Social/Personality: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05020 Biological Basis of Behavior: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05054 Please spread the word!

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

We should all be disgusted by the flood of anti-Muslim remarks spewed in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral primary — some blatant, others latent. Shame on the members of Congress who have engaged in such bigotry and anyone who doesn’t challenge it.

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n

In Philadelphia alone, a crowd of over 100,000 hit the streets despite the rain. 🎥 @indivisiblephl.bsky.social

#106 - Chiara Caldinelli, Jing-Jing Li, Garrett Chao, Mike Arcaro & Anne Collins. The role of the thalamus in dynamic decision-making

this is such a good representation of American Christianity

Here is a link you can blast out to all of your networks to ask them to consider signing on in support of our NIH heroes. actionnetwork.org/forms/add-na... We are at 5000 folks who have signed on. But we can do better Only for people who have ever been sick or knows someone who has been.

Important thing to beat people over the head with: Trump has turned American cities into warzones and for fucking what? Prices are way up, jobs will be way down, the dollar is worth less, and now the highway is blocked off by cops. Maybe the Great Mythical Immigrant wasn’t the problem after all.

Man imagine being such a combination of malicious and incompetent that the LAPD think it’s too much

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

GUYS. The comment period for this ends in THREE DAYS. PLEASE if you have even a little bit of time, submit a comment here: www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD... Let them know EVERYONE should be able to get COVID vaccines. They BACK DOWN when WE PUSH BACK. www.statnews.com/2025/05/20/f...

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

The best time for university presidents to get out in public & fight this authoritarianism collectively was two months ago. The next best time is now. Reactive unilateralism & quiet lawsuits is not working, & the public still doesn't grasp how existential the fascist assault on higher ed really is.

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow. It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America. All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

Q: VIETNAM wants tariffs dropped. So what does Trump get? A: A golf course for his family, and Starlink access: TLDR: The Trump family is looting 🇺🇸 foreign policy. (Hey @NBCNews @Reuters — saying these negotiations are “separate” is deeply unserious) www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/t...

This is completely false. Even the largest university endowment cannot sustain large-scale scientific research. In my 25 years at my school, the most monumental research fund drive raised $325M in *total*. Federal research here costs $200M per *every year*. This is an extinction-level event.

Come check out my poster with @mikearcaro.bsky.social tomorrow afternoon in the pavilion where we describe the cortical and subcortical organization of the newborn visual system! @vssmtg.bsky.social #VSS2025

Linda McMahon wrote Harvard a letter to which they responded by noting areas that are in need of corrections and then posted it on social media. Great job Harvard!👏👏👏

Let Them Eat Dolls

We all need to dedicate the rest of our lives to destroying the republican party

Good reporting here. Student paper gets what the bigs have missed. White House is actually threatening to defund all of bostons major hospitals www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

It certainly looks like Elon Musk’s henchmen stole all the data from the agency which protects workers rights, tried to cover it up, and then threatened to kill the guy who blew the whistle on it.

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

Harvard will not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding, the university president announced www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

So, for any universities who are not paying attention or thinking they will be spared, here it is, as plain as day. Pushing back individually and as a group is the only rational strategy.

I have never seen anything like this in NYC. 5th Ave covered from 42nd St well to the 20s. Nobody prepared for this volume. Volunteers are holding the traffic on all the side streets. No police in sight. #handsoff

US recessions since 1950: 1953 - Eisenhower 🔴 1958 - Eisenhower 🔴 1960 - Eisenhower 🔴 1969-70 - Nixon 🔴 1973-75 - Nixon 🔴 1980 - Carter 🔵 1981-82 - Reagan 🔴 1990-91 - Bush Sr 🔴 2001 - Dubya 🔴 2007-09 - Dubya 🔴 2020 - Trump 🔴 2025-?? - Trump 🔴

If Trump can disappear green card holders for protesting war, he can disappear you. If he can disappear visa holders for criticizing him, he can disappear you. If he can disappear asylum seekers for tattoos, he can disappear you. We must speak out now — before there is no one left to speak out.

While Fetterman is busy telling reporters the left is Dems' biggest problem, he had to cancel an event with his Republican bro because they're both too unpopular and too chickenshit to face their own constituents.

We published this on Monday, and within minutes, there were already a bunch of new stories we needed to add to it. Now, five days later, there are dozens. We will update this list every month for the remainder of Trump's term.

Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School, was detained at Logan Airport after returning from France and sent to an ICE detention in Louisiana, The Insider reports. A big critic of Putin and the war in Ukraine, she may now be deported to Russia.

What people in every part of higher education need to understand is that Republicans now want to do to universities what they’ve tried to do to labor unions: erase them from the institutional landscape. The question is how much you want to collaborate in your own destruction.

In vivo reconstruction of Duvernoy's postmortem vasculature images - Fast, high-res imaging: Whole-brain 0.35 mm MRI in <7 min at 7 T - Vessel-type specific podt-processing: Capturing large leptomeningeal, pial, and intracortical meso-veins PDF: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Leadership from UC Berkeley. "...we see recent actions going beyond those purposes in ways that threaten core values: academic freedom, freedom of inquiry, & freedom of expression.... we will be steadfast and unrelenting in our efforts to defend those core values."

New preprint “Monkey See, Model Knew: LLMs accurately predict visual responses in humans AND NHPs” Led by Colin Conwell with @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social Akshay Jagadeesh, Kasper Vinken @amrahs-inolas.bsky.social @jacob-prince.bsky.social George Alvarez @taliakonkle.bsky.social & Marge Livingstone 1/n

I'm hiring a full-time research assistant to start this Summer! The lab studies perception and cognition from infancy to adulthood using neuroimaging, behavioral, and computational approaches For more details about the lab and the position, see: vlad-lab.com/join #psychjobs #neurojobs

Excited to share my first first-author paper out now in PNAS! By comparing retinotopically-defined visual areas in macaques and humans, we found that evolutionary expansion is reflected in the size, not number, of visual areas. #neuroskyence #neuroscience www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...