The cyclospora outbreak needs an appropriate nickname, like “the RFK runs” or “the Bobby Browns.”

A haunting, sad but hopeful imagined version of what America’s end might feel like to the future, which hits very differently now from when I planned the speech back in 2006. It compares America to the first human infant carried & born in space, & wracked by the consequences.

This Day in Labor History: July 1, 1922. the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 begins. Also known as the Railway Shopmen’s Strike, this action was the largest railway strike in the United States since the Pullman Strike in 1894. At least 10 died before the government and corporate America crushed it!

And if you want to see the video of this discussion Complete with frenzied gesticulations which my students are very familiar with See here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRXW...

IT'S FINALLY HAPPENING. IT'S REAL. YOU CAN PRE-ORDER NOW!!!! amzn.to/4b2iESb

NEW: As most states move away from the death penalty, Florida is executing more prisoners than ever before. Last year, 19 people were put to death — shattering the state’s previous annual record of 11, first set in 1936. with @nytimes.com

Le Guin shortlist for the 2026 prize for fiction is out! www.ursulakleguin.com/prize26

I know better, but ever time I see an "m-plus" ad at the world cup there is a moment where I think that the Muthens must be doing great to afford ad space for their "mplus" statistical software.

Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or condemnation: us.macmillan.com/books/978037... 1/

Hey @addictionjournal.bsky.social , what happened to the book lists of new releases you used to update throughout the year? That was a really useful list to keep an eye on.

Here is a hypothesis: The basic condition of modernity is falling birth rates, for mostly positive reasons that are pretty well understood. When they get low enough some people think the consequences will be bad and figure there must be some new, bad reason birth rates are falling.

You don't perfect your society just by making it *work* well. You have to make it *fail* well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong - it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them: www.wired.com/2017/04/cory... 13/

Will the concern on the political right about declining American fertility result in more pro-family economic policy to make childbearing more affordable? Nope. In my new study at @socprobsjournal.bsky.social, I document what I call the "natalism-neoliberalism" paradox. 1/4 doi.org/10.1093/socp...

We ran @gelliottmorris.com's latest high-res Trump approval estimates through the #AmericanNations model. He's underwater in every single region, even his stronghold of Greater Appalachia. He's definitely lost the room. www.nationhoodlab.org/trumps-suppo...

New Glitch Mob track is excellent. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbEI...

Yikes 😬

Quite good as always. Well worth a few minutes of your time.

Nice to see new results from @pewresearch.org on Cannabis in the US. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

The worst part about being a caveman is people constantly yelling questions about seed oil and fermented foods when you're just trying to relax. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/cave-3 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

1/ Has life expectancy fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic? In a new pre-print, we find that 31 of 34 high-income countries had still not returned to their expected life expectancy trajectories five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... #demography

New research from a team I was part of w Lauren Steele, @andreatilstra.bsky.social, & other virologists & demographers: Research on flu pandemics has been heavily shaped by 1) the 1918 flu & 2) US-specific data for other pandemics. Turns out that way understates the variety of age patterns of risk!

Trump loses across courts in bruising week of immigration and legal setbacks www.latimes.com/politics/sto...

Google has privately proposed building a new data center in Nebraska that could require three times the amount of electricity needed to power all of Lincoln during the hottest months of the year, according to documents obtained by the Flatwater Free Press. 🔗 buff.ly/6FlWg7H

🚨NEW: Last year, the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. increased again. The driving factor? President Trump’s deportation agenda. Our annual report, The Whole Pie, gives the big picture of mass incarceration. Here are some key takeaways 🧵

In more than half of US states, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation that would boost adoption of small plug-in solar panels that sit on apartment balconies and plug directly into household outlets. Canary Media buff.ly/5B79fOA #ShareGoodNewsToo

Any #historians out there with any possible interest in public opinion from 1935 to now? I would be very grateful for anyone willing to chat about how to help historians discover materials in the polling archive. All topics: politics, policy, health, culture, religion #skystorians

Opening of overdose prevention centers in New York City was not associated with significant changes in neighborhood foot traffic or consumer spending, suggesting no observed economic harms near these #HarmReduction sites. ja.ma/403HXgS

Great read.

This guy's smiling photograph is appearing today, in normal news coverage of an elite gathering. He has killed 215,000 adults and 445,000 children with USAID cuts, as of the most recent estimates. 14 million deaths are expected by 2030.

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.