I’ve been posting a lot today about white fraternities and the first cohorts at elite schools to really experience (and resist) race and gender integration. Y’all. That’s Gen X.

An experimental finding sure to shock: white evangelicals are especially attuned to slights against Christians, but significantly less likely to view same actions as discriminatory when against a religious out-group. And this double-standard is unique to white evangelicals. doi.org/10.1111/jssr...

Great primer on the birth rate scare

This is quite neat to see and the methodological challenges to do a project like this are fun to consider.

Estimated 2 billion dollars in cuts to substance use and mental health services. Nothing good to come out this. www.npr.org/2026/01/14/n...

The Problem With Crediting the Drop in Fentanyl OD to Supply Reduction filtermag.org/fentanyl-sup...

Very excited to share a new publication! We discuss the importance of designing drug policy with a public health approach, laying out the evidence for our argument. I'm honored to have been a part of this paper, and to have learned from my incredible coauthors. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41199684/

/8 A huge part of what makes it very hard to convict Jonathan Ross for murder was baked into America generations before Trump was President. That’s the primary factor that lets law enforcement kill with impunity, not Trump. Dick Wolf has killed more black men than Leopold II.

"Tough on crime" types are not really pro-police. They are pro-SOCIAL CONTROL, and (understandably) saw the police as a way to impose that control. But the loyalty is, first and foremost, to that control. And if the police get in the way of that, the support disappears.

The street samurai flashed his credstick at the vendor, who frowned. "Sorry, I can't take PoopCoin. It's down 99% since this morning's hack. I accept payment only in mutant pig GIFs or speculative real estate."

A few favorites from 2025: books (nonfiction/fiction) and music albums. 🧵

This was a fascinating read

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated that the 1918 flu pandemic was caused by a lab virus from vaccine research, a defective influenza vaccine. Let’s analyze what a lie this is. First, in 1918, 107 years ago, virology was in its infancy

Merry Christmas! 🎅🎄

DOJ trying to execute these prisoners. www.npr.org/2025/12/23/n...

Many of us in the MECFS community started warning in 2020 that COVID was going to be a mass disabling event. It was, and it continues to be.

The European Union Drugs Agency’s Drug School is a jam-packed educational session covering all things drugs and drug policy. The Winter session is online in early March. Registrations are open! www.euda.europa.eu/event/2026/0...

My first funding curve post for Fiscal Year 2026 FY2026 is off to a slow start. Some of this is due to the government shut down, but some of it is likely due to the new process for "remediating" applications that are deemed not to align with "agency priorities".

This Day in Labor History: December 19, 1907. The Darr Mine near Smithton, Pennsylvania, caught fire and exploded. 239 people died, many of them children. This was the largest workplace disaster in Pennsylvania history. Let's talk about this horrible tragedy and all the dead coal miners of this era!

If you aren't local, this the Nebraska governor's farm.

Also, people are, both individually and in aggregate, weird and fascinating and I think there's some inherent human solidarity to be gleaned from that.

Dunkelman: “The problem stems from today’s progressives lacking a clear theory of how public authority is supposed to work.” "Unitary executive theory - but for good” is a theory of power, but one contrary to accountability. Progressives who care about democracy also need a theory of accountability.

Methods sections that once said "Qualtrics panel" are going to now need more specific

I'm not sure if people realize the murder strikes are taking place across a large region. It's quite staggering. www.newsweek.com/map-us-strik...

In a Mississippi prison, a broken arm turned into an amputation. In a Minnesota county jail, a man showing classic stroke symptoms was allegedly ignored until he collapsed and died. In New York, a man detained by immigration officials temporarily lost the ability to walk due to untreated infections.

Today a harrowing excerpt from A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon by Eric King (PM Press 2026). It's a harrowing but steadfast look inside one of the most notorious prisons in America one of the most punitive and carceral countries in the world.

This speech for U Washington's Neuroscience, AI and Society series was really good. It was, among things, a good reminder to check in on Doctorow's site more often.

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

Counterpoint: The Supreme Court lacks the authority to change the text of the Constitution. So either it affirms the text or (further, and more completely) nukes its authority as Constitutional arbiter. There’s no third option. Art III (courts) can’t just usurp Art V (amendments).

Yeah, the field is cooked

This Day in Labor History: December 2, 1984. A gas leak in a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India killed somewhere between 3787 and 16,000 people. Let's talk about probably the worst industrial disaster in history and how U.S. companies can murder with impunity, then and now!

Interesting paper on belief formation.

Absolutely fantastic book.

ICYMI: "Negative Views of Falling Birth Rates in the United States Come Mostly from the Right Wing." From me: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Highly recommend if you have 90 minutes for a dive into what is going on with the boat strikes, history of military and police actions, attempted justifications, and the denial of human rights.

Another good piece from Flatwater Free Press on the consequences of poor/hidden/missing overdose death data. flatwaterfreepress.org/we-know-drug...

This is what the band of the Milky Way would look like at night if your eyes could see radio waves. A hidden beauty. It's a new image created by the Murchison Widefield Array, which scanned the sky in 20 radio "colors" over frequencies from 72 to 231 megahertz. 🧪🔭 www.icrar.org/gleam-x-gala...

Absolutely shameful that, 1) folks are using AI for peer-review and that, 2) apparently enough of them are that they had to add a check box for reviewers about not using AI for this.

NYC is going to have the world's biggest media-manufactured crime panic in history the second Mamdani is elected. They aren't even going to wait until he is inaugurated. Whether or not you like the guy, you need to start preparing now for the fire hose of disinformation that is about to activate.

Being stripped of parental rights while in prison, even for minor crimes, is “the family separation crisis that no one knows about,” an advocate says.

Good read on parallel powers.

Sadly didn't get to all 8 of these before the winner (Rakesfall) was selected. It was a great reading list though and I really enjoyed the range of styles.

Judge: “The troubling thing about this prosecution is that everyone knew what was happening… It seems like these two [gestures to defendants Nyx and Kalicum] are being hung out to dry. As soon as politicians started complaining, all of a sudden VPD—which before was fine—suddenly is not fine.”

The experiences of children with parents on death row are often forgotten when it comes to capital punishment. No organization tracks information on this particular group. Of the past 10 people who have faced execution in Missouri, at least six had children.

MMWR stole the show in the first round of headlines about CDC cuts but in the chaos, many missed that the NHANES mobile team remains RIF'd. This is the backbone of this key survey that contains some of the only representative anthropometric, biochemical, clinical and dietary data on the country.

Just FYI, here are my personal beliefs on the use of large scale violence. 1. Violence tends to be self-replicating, and so should be avoided as much as possible. All violence has the potential to entrench itself.

Great MacArthur award pick. www.npr.org/2025/10/08/n...

This books was absolutely fantastic. Tripping on Utopia by Benjamin Breen. Loved all the suggested next reads at the end too.

Quite useful