Great opportunity to join us at JHU!

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to memory-hole Jan. 6, thousands of videos from the riot live on ProPublica’s website and other places. Additionally, much of the deleted DOJ database can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (Published Jan. 2025)

New hour of stand up Friends

The CDC changed the universal vaccine schedule & no longer recommends Rotavirus Hepatitis A & B Meningitis Influenza RSV I’ve cared for previously healthy kids who died from RSV, influenza and meningitis. We all are going to be caring for a lot more now. In our already overflowing hospitals

If anyone is or knows a PhD with EEG experience who is a) eligible for a Marie Curie post doc and b) interested in an ecological neuroscience project based in Leeds, let me know. I have an idea that needs a person!

But we are still the helpers, and we will keep trying. One at a time.

It’s just so amazing to spend your life trying to help people, only to watch a few incompetent men casually endanger the lives and health of so many more people than you could ever help

What a catastrophe.

As if having cancer or an immune deficiency as a kid isn’t bad enough, those patients also can’t receive vaccines. They rely on herd immunity, others doing the right thing. It’s the same with infants who are too young to be vaccinated but are also at increased risk of morbidity and mortality.

Routine vaccination prevents the targeted infection, but in many cases prevents other conditions. Some of these are the dreaded chronic illnesses that RFK Jr. likes to focus on. For example, the rotavirus vaccine prevents many cases of type 1 diabetes. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

This will kill children. It is not based on science. It is a belief-based system driven by a madman who doesn't even believe in germ theory. As someone who watched her baby struggle to breathe in the hospital for a week from RSV, it pains me we are going in reverse.

Children die from RSV, from meningococcus, from hepatitis A, from hepatitis B We have safe and effective ways to prevent them from serious illness and death PLEASE talk to your pediatrician and protect your children, their lives depend on it

Breakthrough for neonatal care: Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s & UCLA discover a way to spur lung vessel growth, offering hope for bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) therapies beyond symptom management. Learn more: scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/study-reveal...

Keeping the social safety net as small and as punitive as possible helps to ensure that there will always be a steady stream of people for employers like Bezos to exploit--people in such a precarious position that have no choice but to take whatever underpaid, overworked job they can get.

Everything is so stupid.

Oh ffs

[wakes up] “I’m sorry, what”

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Lots of podcasts are off this week, so if you're looking for a good listen, check out Control Room, my new podcast with @derekgottliebphd.com. This season, we're rewatching Chernobyl and unpacking its lessons about authoritarianism, science, and the cost of lies. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

1. Headlines everywhere today read "Grok apologizes." This is bullshit. A chatbot is not something that can apologize. Pretending otherwise is simple laundering these companies' bullshit about what AI is, while diffusing blame away from the human beings that developed and released this system.

THREAD. Every year, I tell the story of Ezell Gilbert. It's the story of one of the most remarkable cases in U.S. history, and you’ve probably never heard of it. The story of what the U.S. government did to him is vital for understanding the current moment we are in.

Always great advice to feel free NOT to accept homework from someone you've known for 10 seconds & enjoyed none of them!

Cover reveal. It's about how & why colonies/states controlled international & domestic migration until 1888, why in the late 19th c the feds took over, & what it was like for politically disfavored groups to live under that arrangement of power. You can't understand voluntary migration history 1/

RFK Jr. ordered the CDC to terminate their flu vaccination ad campaign immediately after taking office. Just in case anyone was curious about his silence in the face of what is emerging as an unusually severe flu season and why he’s not out encouraging vaccines.

AI cannot take accountability. AI cannot be “sorry.” You have no control over the outputs of AI if you did not make it yourself, train it on very specific data sets, and create extremely rigorous control methods. Even then the safeguards are limited. The creators must be held accountable

I’m a native Minnesotan who currently lives in Columbus, OH so I have connections to the two metro areas with the largest Somali populations in the United States. Let me state this unequivocally: the racist and Xenophobic garbage being spewed about Somalians must be condemned by everyone. Now.

The retirement of the MetroCard at midnight tonight is bittersweet for me. In 1983, as a young lawyer, I took a year's leave of absence from my law firm to serve as special counsel to Richard Ravitch, chairman of the NY MTA. He gave me the task of leading a study ...

Glad to hear of this digitization project/collection - better late than never! - but be warned, the website is excellent and leaving it will be a struggle!

When universities tout their partnerships with OpenAI, parents, faculty and everyone really should be asking how they intend to account for the increasing evidence that their technology is hurting people, especially young and vulnerable people. How many instances of harm will be enough?

🎉 Happy (almost) New Year! Due to the holiday, our next podcast drops Friday the 2nd instead of Thursday. See you then!

"The Big One," by @mtosterholm & Mark Olshaker, made the New York Post's list of the 15 best nonfiction books of 2025 nypost.com/2025/12/2...

And so, as we find ourselves in a new daycare panic, I'm worried for the childcare providers who will be vilified and for the parents (especially moms) who will end up having to fill in the resulting gaps in childcare. And I'm furious that we're letting the GOP run this tired play yet again. 9/

The latest attacks on child care serve several evil purposes. They use racism to claim fraud to close places down & use nationalism to decimate the care workforce. Then sexism in families & workplaces means women will end up leaving the labor force to care for children.

🎆🎆Welcome to the edge-of-your-seat Semifinals for the 2025 Headline of the Year contest! 🎆🎆 The top 4 seeds have survived to the semis, with the #2 seed surviving two tough battles so far. Will Pretty Obvious hold off Leaked Memo? Will Resolved and Unresolved send the Police Scrambling? The draw:

Reviewing poorly written manuscripts is tough. my fist draft review is unfiltered thoughts, good and bad. Then I go back a day or two later to clean it up. Went back to a recent first draft review and I wrote: “Methods: What!?” Guess I have a bit more than just clean up for this one. 🫣

Under what circumstances is it acceptable to just not reply to requests to review from journals I've never heard of that are furthermore outside my field? #AcademicSky

This message hits hard.

The authors quote from an article I wrote in 2023, refuting false claims about government jawboning of social media platforms. One of the claims I directly push back against is the persistent lie that the FBI demanded Twitter censor online speech. knightcolumbia.org/blog/getting...

I know we asked for authors to include the DAG… but I don’t think throwing a bunch of variables in daggity then copying that image to a supplemental figure and referencing it in the methods section is meeting the spirit of that request 😵‍💫

Suppose you ask #AI for improvements to your writing. The #LLM was trained on, but doesn’t mention, Smith’s work. You adopt the suggestions containing Smith’s ideas. You don’t even realize YOU’VE PLAGIARIZED because you’ve never read or heard of Smith.

Fifteen of those twenty years were spent writing unsuccessful grant applications.

Bad-faith actors have used a well-worn playbook to undermine public health interventions and institutions to advance their commercial, political, and personal interests. We need to be careful not to conflate "meeting people where they are" with ceding scientific ground to these actors and agendas.

also, i'm looking for a phd student to join our team at the @aial.ie bsky.app/profile/abeb...

Many of you have told us you want to support TNG but aren’t always sure how — or where each option lives. So we pulled everything together to make giving easier and clearer. 🧡 You’ll find DAF info, employer matching, and one-time or recurring donations right on our secure Campaign Giving Page:

Differences like these, in how people answer the same question when using different modes of measurement, are called "mode effects". Look out for a new introduction to mode effects - with DAGs - coming soon, led by @georgiatomova.bsky.social

MAGA Boomer: At your age in 1970 I paid off college & bought a house w/hard work Millennials: In 1970 college was 5% of median salary—Now it’s 44%. A median home was $24K—Now its $417K. The top marginal tax rate was 70%—Now its 37%. Sure maybe you did work hard—but then closed the door behind you.

Manuscript and grant reviewers in biomedical sciences: Do you have any major pet peeves when it comes to formatting of papers or grants that you're reviewing? Anything else not format-related? I'm putting together some recommendations for trainees in our #epidemiology program. Thanks!

Anyway, I really feel like the whole environment, including the state of the published literature, is really colluding against students learning how to do proper research. That’s a shame; I always have the impression our students really do want to learn how to do things the right way.

It's important to extend yourself the grace to accept that you made the best decisions that you could with the information you had at the time.

I’ve spent the past two days as pediatric ward attending and frankly we need both more and even better vaccines not fewer