I did not know! Chart from Briefing book, which has a longer analysis of why this is happening. It should be a bigger story! When 2025 numbers all come in, it may be the lowest murder rate since 1900. open.substack.com/pub/briefing... !!

“I didn’t think, ‘I can’t believe that this happened.' I’m very well aware that this can happen.” I wrote about the parents of children with mental illness and substance use disorder, for whom the tragedy of the Reiner family carries a particularly painful resonance. Gift link: wapo.st/4todI0b

“My Mother’s Money” is this month’s Color of Money book Club selection from @michellesingletary.bsky.social I’m so honored! www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

TECH BRUNCHLORDS: we believe AI has successfully achieved human-level cognition NEUROLOGISTS: okay so your brain is like, imagine if there was a kind of pudding that sang two bars from Semi-Charmed Life whenever somebody nearby was baking cookies, right? we don’t know why it does that

The proper approach journalists should take to any element of power is skepticism that at times tips over into distrust. That’s the job.

A California quail on an ocotillo at Borrego Palm Canyon (Sicco Rood).

Bug I saw in a dream once #art

Multiple Myeloma. 4-generations of pharma-driven drug discovery.

Your weekend wisdom from Thelonious Monk: “A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.” “Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy.”

There are two different places you can live in America, one is a place where lemons cost a little more than you think they should, and the other is a place where people are handing you lemons trying to get rid of the giant pile of lemons

Life (2017) Nagai Kazumasa Design Museum Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark

1 month after Trump nominated Ben Landa, who owns >100 nursing homes, for Ambassador to Hungary, the President's own agency estimated his facility received over $31 million in excess taxpayer money via Medicare. Landa then sued the gov. It's just the beginning. www.propublica.org/article/benj...

This is intense, and difficult. Cesar Chavez was a hero to my parents. They were not farmworkers but they admired him and what he stood for.

"I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years I have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for..." Dolores Huerta's powerful statement on Cesar Chavez' abuse. medium.com/@dolores_hue...

Just incredible shoebill awareness-raising from this Hong Kong teens' magazine

This is another one of those moments where I point out that I pitched the Washington Post on an editorial about family caregiving, an issue that affects 1 out of 4 American adults, and never got any response. Newsworthiness is in the eye of the beholder!

I made an app. play.google.com/store/apps/d... Nearby Glasses is here to warn you when smart glasses are nearby. I hope it's useful for someone. Nearby Glasses's open source, free and rather simple github.com/yjeanrenaud/... It's also downloadable outside the Play Store. iOS port is in the making

How many times during your #publichealth course work did you learn health impacts of #bereavement? For me, that number was 0. Working w #caregivers & formers, I missed understanding that went beyond #grief. Check out special topic of @frontiersmedia.bsky.social www.frontiersin.org/journals/pub...

This is just terrific. Do yourself a favor and read:

Got me through the 1990s. Your turn: Post a banger not in English. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jGs...)

We used to think that the benefit of GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) was dependent on weight loss. Now we know so many health benefits have little to do with that! Today's report: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New MACPAC data show the highly effective Medicaid Drug Rebate Program reducing gross Medicaid drug costs by 54.9% in FY 2024. Earlier Congressional Budget Office research found that Medicaid gets the lowest net prices of other federal programs/agencies even the VA: www.macpac.gov/publication/...

So it's a power move to make lots of typos and spelling mistakes? I am just figuring this out.

Here’s What the Latest Epstein Files Say About His Ties to Higher Ed: Collectively, the files underscore how deeply Epstein remained embedded in academic and intellectual circles even after his criminal history became public. www.chronicle.com/article/here...

This image is a bit different than my usual "style," if that's even a thing. Much more minimalistic given the Snowy Owl sitting out in the field. Not sure how well this image translates to a smaller screen (phone, thumbnail, etc.) but thought I'd share it nonetheless. #wildlife #birds #owls

Good for her.

How HHS is implementing Trump AI mandates, in numbers I take a look at the AI tools the nation's health agency is using for everything from controversial audits to helping the agency cope with layoffs & executive orders. Full charts in the story @statnews.com: www.statnews.com/2026/02/03/n...

As plenty of others have noted, one striking thing the Epstein files reveal is just an extraordinary level of moral rot among elites, even if you assume most of his eager friendly correspondents were not directly involved in his crimes.

Downfall Bovino Edition. You're welcome.

Selective silencing of the CDC: ~50% of surveillance databases have halted updates —87% of these were vaccine related www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/... editorial www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...

I am taking down the paywall for this one, as I believe it remains relevant as a reflection on the limits of the authoritarian assault – and the need to push back against the idea that America is inevitably and irresistibly marching towards a Trump dictatorship. This week’s piece:

there are so many gutting stories, but this one is hitting me extra hard. just imagining wael tarabishi slowly dying without his dad there to care for him because he was jailed by ICE makes me…i don’t have words. this country is disgusting.

Pretty galling what the first urologist tried to do here. www.statnews.com/2026/01/21/w...

Holy hell, what an obituary

"Last April, HHS had informed staff of plans to terminate around 90% of NIOSH's roughly 1,000 employees, eviscerating the agency." Nine months later, the decision is reversed and layoff notices to workplace safety workers have been revoked. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The Trump administration reinstated on Tuesday hundreds of CDC employees who had been placed on administrative leave in April. Gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/h...

hi! do you want to be my editor? i know you do - come work with me

🚨 NEW: DRAMA! House to vote on 3-yr extension of enhanced #ACA tax credits this week...while Senate GOP tries to cobble together SOMETHING acceptable: acasignups.net/26/01/07/dra...

Homicides have dropped in L.A. by roughly 43% since 2021, according to a Los Angeles Times review of crime stats. The LAT's @liborjany.bsky.social & Richard Winton have details: www.latimes.com/california/s...

@mcgowankat.bsky.social writes of the double stigma of being a #caregiver supporting a person living with severe #mentalillness. There are not meal trains or get well soon cards, rather suffering and silence

I grew up glued to the Iran-contra bearings—so shocking at the time!—so I see a lot of wisdom in this framing of the Venezuela coup as an 80s reboot

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I'm so proud of ProPublica's journalism from 2025. In case you missed it, here's our most-read stories, as well as some you may have missed: www.propublica.org/article/prop...

I've heard about this before, but the details are fascinating. A Saudi-owned alfalfa farm in the middle of the Arizona desert, pumping groundwater to irrigate crops that feed dairy cows in Saudi Arabia--because growing water-intensive crops is banned there. www.latimes.com/environment/...

The book of Job really brings it:

I count 10 cities in 2025 that are on track to have the fewest murders since at least 1970. Newark is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1956 (though only have data through Oct this year) and San Francisco is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1942.

I'm obsessed with this topic--the lions of a Certain Type of literary journalism, the ones seated on thrones and pedestals (Joseph Mitchell! Truman Capote! Tom Wolfe!) so clearly made up their dialog and probably more. (I have libelous suspicions about John McPhee, too.)

I thought, based on the social media-fication of the @rachelaviv.bsky.social Oliver Sacks piece, that Sacks had invented patients wholesale. But instead it’s what was once seemingly secretly acceptable among highbrow writers: making up quotes and details about people to make them more interesting.

A wet desert lily flowering with a grand view while storm clouds are moving in from the west this morning (Photo: Sicco Rood).