Did the Pope actually quote Tolkien? Apparently, yes.

Films more likely to star an actor called Chris or a talking animal than a woman over 60, study finds

A beautiful day on the shore of Lake Michigan - visiting Northwestern to see our kiddo in a play

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Tonight we congratulate our friend Stephen Colbert and his writers, staff and crew for eleven years of excellence. Watch Colbert’s finale tonight, and then never watch CBS again.

Possibly unpopular opinion? I think artists should get to sign the art they make for book covers. It should be right there, on the front, because it’s never been more important to showcase the humanness of art. And also there are many times when I see a beautiful cover and wonder, “Who made this?”

Our paper unpacking "fitness" is out doi.org/10.1093/gene.... How to define fitness depends on what question you ask. Selection acts on organismal vital rates, longer-term outcomes make sense for genetic lineages, models link them. "Invasion fitness" = speed, but sometimes probability matters more.

The point is to move public funds to private, for profit companies.

Not clear to me that any university team unless granted a ton of independence could qualify to do #NSF x-labs; from sam.gov/workspace/co...

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

Watching a series of former Confederate states rush to eliminate any vestige of black representation in the House pretty much answers the question whether the Voting Rights Act was still necessary.

“The message, very clearly, they’re sending is, do not speak out on behalf of Chinese postdocs. If you do, you’re going to pay a penalty...It seems pretty obvious that this is an attempt by the current administration to silence people that question their activities." — Roger Innes, IU AAUP member

I'm looking for postdoc opportunities for the 2026-2027 academic year. If you're looking for a postdoc with a broad skill set spanning evolutionary genetics, bioinformatics, and various omics methods, feel free to reach out. Some recent pubs: (1) doi.org/10.1126/scie... (2) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

New #ecoevo paper @pnas.org: Evolution of species’ range and niche in changing environments. I show that feedback between evolutionary and population dynamics can create a tipping point where genetic variance erodes, and species’ ranges contract or fragment www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #popgen 🧬🧪 🌎

I'm hiring a postdoc to lead sedimentary aDNA reconstructions of alpine plant biodiversity as part of a broader project exploring the mechanisms of alpine plant resilience. Come join a collaborative team working in beautiful places! Bonus: postdocs at UMaine are unionized!

Voting rights

Almost forgot to post this - Happy John Brown’s birthday to those who celebrate. Try not to be the sort of person John Brown would have shot.

Happy John Brown’s Birthday to all who celebrate.

Happy birthday to John Brown, who knew exactly how to handle the south’s “Peculiar Institution”

My student won an award for best flash talk!

Every talk prize should come with giant checks

Having fun at the KU center for genomics annual conference!

I’m sure everything will be fine, right?

So how is your day going, fellow academics?

I found 777 grants with title changes. Here is a word cloud of the words that had been removed. 2/5

First of this spring’s peonies!

I'm looking to hire a postdoc. Please share if you can!

My story on the NSB terminations:

UPDATE: They’ve *all* received the talking points 😬

There was a mass shooting this morning at Indiana University that has left nine injured. The Indiana Daily Student has been facing pressure by Republicans and school administrators to shut down the print edition all year. Why isn't Donald Trump or legacy media corps reporting about this huh?

unrelenting

Meet “ASU Atomic,” a subscription platform that claims to offer customized learning modules for fee-paying users. None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image, lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used.

He's the worst thing that ever happened to America. I despise him BECAUSE I love my country. 🇺🇸

Breaking news: Multiple scientists who serve on an independent board established to guide the nation’s nearly $9 billion basic science funding agency were terminated from their positions Friday by President Trump.

Trump just fired much of the National Science Board that guides the National Science Foundation - another blow to the NSF. #savetheNSF

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

Today was an exceptionally trying day. And then I got the following very kind email from @asn-amnat.bsky.social, and I felt a lot better: Dear reviewer (with apologies for the mass email), Thank you so much for the time and effort you put into your AmNat review . . .

Those of us doing research related to women’s health have been hit particularly hard by the govt’s sabotage of the NIH. I spoke to WaPo for this piece, as painful as it was to discuss the reality my lab is facing. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

“Between January 2025 and February 2026, STEM and health employees at science-focused agencies saw nearly 15,000 jobs cut. The rate outpaced cuts among other federal workers.” OPM data - Figure from Wash Post article 19 April. (Where US science has been hit hardest.) NSF at -42%!

WANTED: Lead Collections Manager. Smithsonian NMNH Botany is looking for a Supervisory Museum Specialist to manage the United States National Herbarium and a top-notch collections team. For more information, visit USAJOBS (www.usajobs.gov/job/864499200). Applications due in two weeks (1 May 2026).

Every day, like clockwork, have to turn off Copilot on my iPhone Outlook. Every day, it turns back on. My hatred of @microsoft.com grows each time.

👋 👋 SSE members, I hope you'll join me May 21 for the virtual SSE Presidential Symposium: Navigating Uncertainty: Individual Resilience and Collective Action in Evolutionary Biology Pls RT to help get the word out!

“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.” ― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

I do not want to create an account or open a subscription I just want to buy a thing and never hear from you again why is this so hard.

Biologists Confirm Not Much Evolution Happened Today theonion.com/biologists-c...

😱 Super excited to be named as a Guggenheim Fellow!! 😱

Sigh. Destruction of democracy with a side of grift?

We need your help transcribing KU Mammalogy's historical field notes to makes these data available to the global research community! Join this week's "expedition" on Notes from Nature. We are 18% of the way through W. C. Stanley's field expeditions to Kansas and Mexico.

Breaking News: The Trump administration agreed to allow the rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall monument in Manhattan, reversing its earlier decision. nyti.ms/4c8DEry

I love this photo of Saint Luke with piles of manuscripts in his lap from the Gospel Book of Otto III (c. 1000 CE) (Manuscript (Clm. 4453), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich). Probably projection, but he looks traumatized by all the reading he still needs to do before the end of the semester.