I’m at the wild fire. I’m at the Taco Bell. I’m at the combination wild fire and Taco Bell.

Calling the RFK Jr diarrhea strain “MAHA Blast” since it has now evidently infiltrated Taco Bell

feel like taco bell is a scapegoat for a diarrhea outbreak caused by an incompetent government. i guess it could be both. the government. the taco bell. a combination government and taco bell.

Finally got an update on what’s happening to my SciAm reporting post acquisition. The original contract was a lowball offer of $2k for about 3 weeks of work/in depth on the field reporting. My editor was laid off. The new ed asked me to completely change the scope of the story for no extra pay.

Wow. Published in May in The Lancet. Look at those numbers of fabricated references per 10,000 articles in PubMed. The urge to publish is overcoming the urge to, I dunno, discover and learn things? #AI #medsky 🧪 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

We need a phone setting that’s something between a mute and block. Like I want no evidence anywhere on my screen that this person has contacted me. But I also want to he able to review communications at a later time I choose rather than cutting them off completely. I can’t be the only one?

Happy Fourth, everyone. My latest piece is about how the current US administration is directly threatening babies’ safety. Them have been multiple botulism outbreaks in infants bc of contaminated baby formula since Trump and DOGE took a hatchet to the FDA. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Ezra Klein sitting down for his journalistic interview with Chris Rufo

Big yikes too that Klein didn’t push back on Rufo’s obviously bogus claim that trans rights advocates are responsible for more mass violence than any other group.

Seen at The Logan Square Arts Fest. Three little dogs wait for their human who is in the porta potty. #Chicago

“guidance suggests all jails should be legally obligated to have MOUDs avail to at least some prisoners. But a nat’l survey of jails conducted after the guidance was issued found that fewer than half of them offered any MOUD at all.”🧪🛟

A tale of two jails where inmates face the same life threatening withdrawal crisis. In rural Pennsylvania, they let a woman suffer and offer only OTC meds for relief. “It was hell.” An hour away, in Pittsburgh, they send a man straight to the ICU. My first story for @statnews.com

Got my first assignment for Scientific American a few weeks ago, which felt huge. The story I pitched is urgent. It's about an adulterant in the drug supply that's killing people—someone I interviewed has since passed away. I don't know if they'll still publish it. We need to save journalism.

Wisconsin, my home state.

Letter to the editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, making a case that the future DSM should have an independent domain of psychological factors alongside social context, candidate biomarkers, and transdiagnostic features. psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/...

👀For me they are basically ibuprofen with instant unfixable constipation. No bueno.

For some people, opioids work well for pain. For others, they work too well. For still others, they have more negative side effects than benefits. (Me, for example. They give me a rash and make me puke.) So it’s good to have alternatives. My latest. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

I wrote about how “gold standard” tools for psychiatric diagnosis are far from ideal in terms of reliability. “Diagnostic interviews,” those criteria check lists you go over with provider, are the main tool doctors have to diagnose conditions like depression, anxiety and substance use disorders.

Really getting annoying how people (including neurodivergent ones) are talking about these conditions like they’re mostly about aesthetics and vibes.

Hot Ones is an interesting study in the level of masochism required to become a Famous Hollywood Actor.

This reminds me of those little puzzles in a plastic cube with a metal ball and little panels with holes.

Apparently SpaceX is being valued at over $1tn. I'm considering investing 1 penny in it and proposing to change its name to Spacey MacSpaceface. Bound to be a staggering success. 🔭 🧪

When I was a kid, I ❤️ Lunchables, although they didn’t taste great. But I got to squeeze chocolate frosting onto a “pizza!” For a kid, what could be cooler? Philip Morris was using the same psychological techniques to hook kids on ultra processed foods it did for adults w cigarettes. My latest.

Big tobacco uses cigarette playbook to help sell ultra-processed foods: American Journal of Public Health focuses on parallels between marketing for cigarettes and UPFs, by @whatsitlike.me ajph.aphapublications.org/ultraprocess... www.theguardian.com/society/2026... via @theguardian.com

Social Darwinism is also pseudoscience.

Also, news flash, if we want people in power that will support science & vaccines, some folks need to change the way they vote. Not sure I’m in the “they go low, we go high” camp. But openly wishing mass death on opposition voters is a really good way to keep them entrenched in their views.

I find this type of response to my recent story on the Right-Left health gap really disturbing. This thinking is eugenicist adjacent if not outright eugenicist. The people we’re talking about, in general, mistrust the health system w good reason. Do charlatans take advantage of them? Of course.

Republicans are more likely to avoid vaccines and less likely to trust public health than Democrats, a gap that began in the 2010s and widened during the Covid pandemic; as this piece in @theguardian.com argues, the growing Republican mistrust of healthcare is now being turbocharged by RFK Jr

It’s easy to blame people for their mistrust of the health system but I urge people to remember that across political parties, Americans are struggling w unequal, unaffordable and declining quality healthcare. Neither the Left nor the Right has done nearly enough to rein in Private Equity.

The most Martha Stewart thing I’ve ever done is I just put some of my dog’s stale kibble in a blender with yogurt and put it all in an ice cube tray to make dog treats.

“started in the 2010s and has been widening ever since”. Issues like this predate Trump and RFK Jr. It is important to know that because we are not fixing anything if we think a change of government will fix it.

Why did it work? Propaganda works. That’s why billions get spent on it every year. But it’s especially effective in the U.S. where our for-profit healthcare system already breeds distrust—millions of Americans don’t even have a primary care doc. For millions experiences with the system are bad.

There’s a very clear and obvious reason the right is so skeptical of medicine: there’s a ton of right-wing money being spent to make it so. Why did it get so bad with COVID? The big money on the right saw public health measures as economically disruptive and politically unpalatable. So here we are

Maybe more ivermectin will fix this

The health gap between Republican and Democrats started in the 2010s and has been widening ever since. At first it was happening because college grads were moving Left and everyone else was moving Right. Education predicts health bc of better information and access as well as income. My latest.

@whatsitlike.me reports on a new tactic favored by venture capital and private equity to shrink debt and walk away from risky investments virtually scot-free: Chapter 7 bankruptcy, using the example of the popular convenience chain, Foxtrot.

Beyond the environment cost, how many hikers are going to end up getting mowed down this way?

Turns out there is a reason why life expectancy is falling in Republican-ruled states: the Republicans have adopted loco conspiracy theories in place of sound public healthcare policy, and you can count the consequences in corpses. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Lots of folks responding to my latest piece w things like "good riddance," "this is Darwinism," etc. which is to be expected IG. But I gotta push back. 1) Rooting for strangers' deaths is wrong. (When I say strangers I don't mean public figures whose actions have had known deadly consequences)

@whatsitlike.me reports on a new tactic favored by venture capital and private equity to shrink debt and walk away from risky investments virtually scot-free: Chapter 7 bankruptcy, using the example of the popular convenience chain, Foxtrot.

The popular convenience chain Foxtrot liquidated and then reopened a virtually identical version of its old self within weeks: same name, some same locations, same top executives. How? Chapter 7 bankruptcy, a wonky tactic growing in popularity for startups backed by VC and PE cash.

@whatsitlike.me reports on a new tactic favored by venture capital and private equity to shrink debt and walk away from risky investments virtually scot-free: Chapter 7 bankruptcy, using the example of the popular convenience chain, Foxtrot. /1 www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The original Foxtrot liked to promote a certain image. Bougie, minimalist, squeaky clean. My reporting tells a different story. Failed health inspections in the double digits. Employees encouraged to sell graying charcuterie boards. To wipe sewage off products & sell them after a flood.

When Foxtrot, an "elevated" Chicago convenience chain, shut down without warning, people were pissed. They owed money to local food vendors, and backpay to store employees. Months later, they reopened with unsettled debt. I wrote about how for @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The National Science Foundation is terminating and suspending grants again, and at Grant Witness we need you to help to track them! 🧪 We can only identify research being suppressed by under-the-radar suspensions directly from researchers. Please report! grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF

I'm building my natural immunity through wellness supplements (into my arm)

We should never have let fame become a middle-class job, or even middle-class job adjacent. It’s the toxic run-off of actual accomplishment, and instead we made it the top of the food pyramid.

I thought this serial killer documentary had a really effective creepy soundtrack. It was my dryer.

The manifesto left behind by the San Diego mosque shooters dedicates only a few paragraphs to the shooter’s hatred of Islam but pages and pages to their hatred of Jews, which would seem weird if you were a newborn baby deer who knew nothing about Christian Nationalism

My god, if I pick up one more book about the overdose crisis where the very first perspective comes from a cop…