Also: this isn’t just about science. This will devastate the entire federal grant funding process, which means all academic research grants, arts grants, community project grants, agriculture grants, conservation grants, etc. Please leave a comment opposing this change.

Passionate about data science and health equity? The Health Federation of Philadelphia is hiring a Sr Epidemiologist to lead critical research, evaluation, & data strategies for gun violence prevention and chronic disease initiatives. Apply now: buff.ly/UkNETwv

It's that time of year again!

I agree with all the takes about an attack on the humanities being an attack on critical thinking, &c. It’s also about joy, though. ‘Why bother studying that’ is always also a sneer at — why do you think you should get to do something you enjoy? Grow up and be miserable all the time!

When I explain to peeps how much we do in research labs for how few $$, they simply don’t believe me. I once explained it to a famous person from Pixar, he looked me square in the eye and said “You mean all the cancer, vision, and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be %#ing kidding me!”

Read the whole article - but also bring it to your departments, your unions, your senate committees.

NEW: I thought I had missed something major in my reporting. Turns out I had stumbled into an AI-fueled feedback loop that involved a real LLC’s fictional website and a search engine that’s thrusting unreliable answers on users. By @justinelliott.bsky.social

Actually what I want is to publish a beautiful essay by a non-academic partner or roommate who watched a historian write a dissertation/book from an outside perspective. If any contingent historian out there has such a partner/roommate who is a great writer and wants to do this, pitch the magazine.

Man this is terrible. Again how do we proceed when this is the reality for many? www.medscape.com/viewarticle/...

This is a tremendous piece by Judy Stone at @forbes.com. This new OMB rule is going to hurt communities from coast to coast. Federal grants are not just about research! www.forbes.com/sites/judyst...

Library Cards–The New Landscape of Public Library Censorship. This is a really important–and incredibly well-done–piece from award-winning leader on the topic of library card registration, Amy Mikel at Brooklyn Public Library. bookriot.com/library-card...

As I wrote 9 months ago, this was entirely predictable. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-big-be...

My latest for @opinion.bloomberg.com: Trump's fresh attacks on US science are buried in proposed changes to federal grant rules& could mean research priorities at agencies like NIH shift w/the political winds. That could damage innovation, institutions & ultimately the health of Americans. 🎁 link

I like that Charlotte Brontë was basically telling a soapy saga about how the world is a hard and complicated place and sometimes Shit Happens, and Jane Austen is just like, “I’ve met the worst and simultaneously most boring people you can imagine. Hunker down, let me tell you all about them.”

“Academic science is not only about productivity, it is also about deep understanding, exploring creative solutions and training critical thinkers to be the next generation of researchers.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Heading home from #ASCO26 today! Put two dates for @ascocancer.bsky.social Quality Care Symposium on your calendar: 🚨Abstracts are due in 2 weeks 6/16/2026 📆 #ASCOQLTY26 is Friday-Saturday 10/16-17/2026 See you in Boston! www.asco.org/quality

It's great.

"determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer" and it's HMMER, a piece of software I use almost every single day

This is a fun extract from what happens if you get an AI podcast out of a blank pdf The cadence is what's so incredibly polished and clearly works on human brains It's a bit like optimising for the most important thing about news media being better newsreaders; to the detriment of everything else

For every Like I will countdown one more book from my top 100 BEST novels of all time list.

My hot take is that it shouldn’t take a half day to submit a paper for review. Why am I entering “Dr” in a separate box for each coauthor & writing a tweetable summary & uploading a title page & also putting all info from title page in at least 2 more places before anyone even decides to review it?

Two new facts stand out: 1. 85% of hallucinated citations in preprints are also in the subsequent journal version (thanks, peer review!) 2. Fake cites more likely to use the names of (male) scholars who are already highly cited, creating a fake-citation Matthew effect. arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

I highly recommend reading this essay by @cantb.bsky.social on the future of public research universities. I agree with his premise that institutions within the sector are going to look less similar to each other in the coming years.

You will be shocked to learn that me and some friends had thoughts about the whole canvas thing www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Sent this to my my kids with the following message: "See? Told you"

Something that more people need to embrace about the importance of public library organizing is that it's a good foundation to organize for other public goods. We need to explicitly connect library organizing with parks organizing as just one example and so on and so forth...

Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality is finally out in the world! Combining nationwide survey evidence, state administrative data, and 111 interviews with patients, physicians & others, it tells the long-overdue story of coverage barriers and their deepening of burden an inequity.

Look at all of those counties that contain mid-sized college towns whose universities (mostly flagships / other publics) dominate regional economies

This is either the biggest dork shit ever or beautiful or both. Amazing: the viral pacers bickering couple were actually yakking about uh the Ben Sasse podcast and hashing out ways to rejigger liberal arts education www.si.com/nba/pacers/v...

#Artemis II lunar flyby images are showing up! 😍 A crescent Earth setting behind the Moon.

What are you talking about? There's nothing wrong with AI fact-checking!

Nice bright moon tonight at the beach (photo courtesy of 200mm lens on my good camera) There are people zooming toward it! Wild!

The Town of Chapel Hill announced it will no longer post or monitor its accounts on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Read more here:

Oh boy. 😬

The NIH budget was basically the same in 2025 vs. 2024. This massive decline in health research funding was driven by *administrative* choices.

Hell yeah. Hot Gaskell Summer!!

Another great essay from my colleague Elizabeth Ginexi on how NIH is being restructured by the White House (Russell Vought) despite Congress rejecting such moves. open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Is this bad

I'm looking for a postdoc to work on our NIH-funded R01 which is a longitudinal cohort of adolescents (13-20) doing EMA and passive text sensing! Please apply, especially if you have experience in the analysis OR collection of these data. PLEASE SHARE!! indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/32132

I have had approximately 32 customer service jobs in my life (true story). I remember this transitionary period very well — the dawn of enterprise software when we will had high touch human interface for data and it hadn’t yet been monetized. I have been thinking about that era lately.

One of my most cherished classes is my 18th century novels course where the primary learning objective is "learn how read long novels." We did a "couch to 5k" approach to attention span and note-taking.

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you had in college Discrete math for computer science majors Human geography History of women's movements Jane Austen seminar Advanced poetry writing

Population science/demography folks: Looking for a list of journals that either a) don't have OA fees, b) have reasonable OA fees (a few hundred), or c) allow authors to deposit the author's accepted manuscript in PubMed. Does this exist somewhere? Do we need to start such a list?

Read through Letter from a Birmingham Jail again this morning and was struck by how very relevant King's words remain today.

FYI passengers. ✈️ #realID

NEW: The Trump administration under RFK Jr very quickly reversed course and is restoring grants for substance use and mental health programs in the U.S. From me: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Trump administration letter wipes out addiction, mental health grants www.npr.org/2026/01/14/n...

Trump administration cannot slash NIH research funding, court rules reut.rs/4sqWsIv

No. No. No. Punitive processes make narrowly targeted programs *less* efficient and *more* costly. Because more scrutiny requires more bureaucracy. Punitive processes also make it *less* likely that people will get aid for which they qualify. Because of the roadblocks and stigma scrutiny creates.

This is an outstanding essay describing some of the important roles and influences of NIH program officers (from an insider perspective). Read! elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-quiet-...