Went back to the history of the Sicilian Mafia to illustrate something obvious but worth stating explicitly: The Trump administration behaves like an organized crime syndicate running a protection racket, not a representative government www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

José Andrés really is one of the absolute best Americans.

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

A great post from @djnavarro.net, providing an accessible explanation of why statistics that can appear to reveal our ignorance may actually do the opposite. Makes excellent use of #datavis to provide visual support for the argument. blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

I think one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made in academia over the last few years was treating tenure and academic freedom as a guaranteed right and not a labor relation. Had more understood it as the latter perhaps we would have been better prepared to protect it

This was very clever: After collecting fines from speed cameras, Stockholm ran a lottery where non-speeding drivers could win the money. www.wired.com/2010/12/swed...

And we each must have something that keeps us fueled through this— something that nourishes the deep parts of us. Could be meditation or prayer. Could be making art or cooking, long walks in trees— hell, parenting will do it if you show up with the right lens. Concrete ideas & suggestions here:

Love moments like this. Public Enemy meets Mavis Staples ❤️

It doesn't matter if they are ever coming for you. It was always ever already too much that they were coming for anyone.

This is such a beautiful thread and was so exactly what I meant, and I'm so over the moon that it was helpful in any way-- and here are some other ideas if you want some:

I've got two new poems in an absolute banger of a double issue of July/August POETRY, along w/luminaries like Kevin Young, Danez Smith, Carey Salerno, Joanna Klink, & a folio from Wang Ping of Chinese poets following the Yellow & Yangtze Rivers from their headwaters. Full issue here:

"For the child born this summer in Texas, whose parents receive no documents, whose name never appears in any system, and who grows up asking why she can’t go on field trips, apply for scholarships, or open a bank account, the consequences are not legal theory. They are her life."

Showing a gun to intimidate a six-year-old? Beyond monstrous.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible. www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

Sunday thoughts. ☕️

"If we only fight because we think we’ll win, we aren’t going to last as long as we’re needed." I appreciated so much a work colleague sharing this today.

Dealing with law enforcement can be stressful, so it’s important to know your rights before you’re face-to-face with ICE agents. While there’s never any guarantee that law enforcement officers will follow the law, here’s what they can and can’t legally do to you and what you can legally demand. ⤵️

Floridas’s child-welfare agency — in a reversal of a 30-year policy — is now willing to turn minors over to ICE. This 17-year-old was taken from his foster home in handcuffs and shackles. www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...

leftists: that thing you teach us in school to be terrified of is happening historians: that thing is definitely happening star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it news outlets: these protesters are out of control

Scientists saved lives. The village was evacuated a week ago. www.bbc.com/news/article...

This piece by @mashagessen.bsky.social will go down in history. It is the cry of a nation going down in flames. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/o...

Do judges view psychiatrists and psychologists differently when they offer testimony on an individual’s competency to stand trial? Check out NEW RESEARCH here for the answer: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... @apajournals.bsky.social @pppl-journal.bsky.social

Posted this afternoon. Masked ICE agents arresting immigrants at their court hearings in Dallas.

Unconscionable

"No trial can be fair that leaves a person with mental illness alone before a court." A counsel-appointed program for detained immigrants with mental health needs and cognitive disabilities has been gutted. Providers say people will languish in detention and be deported without a fighting chance.

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but the orcas now have two F/A-18 Hornets

One of grants frozen at Cornell: $6.7M (4 yrs) to develop heart pumps for babies born w/ heart defects. It took decades of work to get to point of prepping device for in-human clinical trials. No private company could do this. The cruelty of the Trump administration is heartbreaking. So to speak.

The Spencer Foundation is offering rapid response bridge funding for those who lost NSF research grants. www.spencer.org/grant_types/...

this is so bleak treatments of cystic fibrosis are a perfect example of basic research (by Francis Collins as an assistant professor) that moved forward to save so many lives

Drawn 6 years go today. It was rejected and called unfair and alarmist.

DOGE appears to have ordered a 50% cut in the budget of the National Science Foundation, leading its director, appointed by Trump in his first term, to resign. www.science.org/content/arti...

There is no bottom to this barrel.

you can find things to quibble with in every Francis piece, but I picked this one to share because I feel like everything everyone is saying about him boils down to this: he was a Jesuit, through & through. I'll remember the times he made the church feel just a little bit bigger, if not big enough.

Statement from APA re/autism and what the science really says: updates.apaservices.org/autism

The other day, @himself.bsky.social wrote a brilliant piece about the Trump administration. In Henry's view there are two coordination problems going on - one among elites, since Trump cannot govern on his own - and one among the masses in opposition. 2/n www.programmablemutter.com/p/absolute-p...

Because Lee Gelernt and the other attys at the @ACLU DO NOT SLEEP on what must be done.

I don't remember the last time I was this emotionally invested

Lost his sister to a mass shooting, almost died in another. WE DON'T NEED TO LIVE LIKE THIS

I tell these stories because I think we are all on edge, watching the atrocities and outrages of the Trump Administration, and feeling that something more than the current protests must happen, something decisive, something transformative. I tell them because....

Per source, NIH has been instructed to hold off from issuing ALL awards to Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, and Northwestern (including med schools) Agency staff have also been instructed to not speak about this funding freeze to grantees and applicants

The science that we do can matter.

Rhe Stations of the Cross w/ poet & theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama. When our leaders are intentionally and cruelly inflicting harm for its own sake, Ó Tuama's reflection on Jesus' call to the power of love in the face of the abusive power of empire is starkly relevant. www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_o9...

Some scientists still employed at US government agencies say that their work has become impossible https://go.nature.com/3Y3TRH2

Women, minorities fired in purge of NIH science review boards Gift link: wapo.st/4jtCPdw

I see it. I have lived it. 83 years ago, the U.S. government turned upon a group of its own citizens and residents and sent them to internment camps without due process. I was there among them. American fascism is back. It is here. It is now.

A corrupt, authoritarian government seizes an innocent man, tortures and jails him on trumped-up charges that change during a manipulated "legal" process. The prisoner is left at the mercy of dehumanizing politicians & jailers to do with what they please. Holy Week then. America now.

Oof. We’ve fallen so far, so fast.

THREAD: The Trump administration's DOJ has removed a study from the NIJ website that found that immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at significantly lower rates than U.S. citizens. The study is at odds with the Trump regime's propaganda about immigrants & crime. (1)

once again: you’re bound to find wild (and untrue) things if you analyze data that you do not understand