Owen Poindexter

What Daniel Naroditsky’s Death Reveals About the Chess World’s Dark Side Daniel Naroditsky was a young, popular chess streamer. Then his childhood hero accused him of cheating online—and his world flipped over.

For Slate, I wrote about the death of the internet’s best chess teacher, and where the chess world goes from here. slate.com/technology/2...

Military Plans to Fire Artillery Over California Freeway on Saturday

Not the biggest problem in the world right now, but still super fucked up.

Military Plans to Fire Artillery Over California Freeway on Saturday www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/u...

$10 Million in Contraceptives Have Been Destroyed on Orders From Trump Officials

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what pointlessly harmful thing you can do to your country www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/h...

Thanks for the thread! This is a topic I’m deeply interested in, and I always appreciate straightforward explanations of high quality studies.

Sounds bad

If I were president, I wouldn’t declare martial law to forward a racist, fascist agenda, but I would declare that technology in movies now follows kid movie logic: any device can do anything if it forwards the plot.

Brain is glitching out at how dumb and self-destructive it is.

If you woke up from a coma and heard that scientists, diplomats, public health experts and thousands of other civil servants were all out of work, what would you think had happened?

My guess would probably be that we’d lost some kind of terrible war.

You used to be able do a whole ASG in one Divided Sky jam.

California Rolls Back Its Landmark Environmental Law

I may regret saying this, but I’m optimistic about California’s future. (And in case you’re just seeing the headline and my comment without all the context, I am a big environmentalist and CEQA was making pro-climate action harder) www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/u...

How the G.O.P. Bill Saves Money: Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork

This is both a good article for understanding the bill, and how conservatives cut benefits without saying they’re cutting benefits. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/u...

Good job, people. Keep it up.

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

The Spencer Foundation is offering rapid response bridge funding for those who lost NSF research grants.

www.spencer.org/grant_types/...

If it’s possible to quantify US science progress, the graph is going to look like the one for housing prices when the financial crisis hit.

Play the camera, solve mystery

JBP has a pretty good blend of looking like a space filling rando on the presidential debate stage but speaking to core dem values unapologetically.

See you there!

IF WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS SO RIGHTEOUS WHY DO YOU HAVE TO HIDE YOUR FACES?

The Mayor of Somerville, MA (where this took place) says that the mostly masked ICE agents misidentified themselves as "police" even though they had no connection with either Somerville or Tufts police. whdh.com/news/video-r...

The Race to AGI: Markets, Experts, and the Uncertain Path to Superintelligence Prediction market traders are pricing in a rapid AI breakthrough—are they ahead of the curve or just wishful thinkers?

The super smart robots are coming ... maybe. Wrote this article for Prediction News on the likelihood that we're a few years away from artificial general intelligence (AGI): predictionnews.com/featured/the...

I miss the time when people were capable of feeling embarrassed.

Anyone want to help deliver medicine to people with infectious diseases through the power of fantasy baseball?

I'm looking to start a league where half the buy-in goes to a global health org. Say hi if interested.

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

Soy milk walked so oat milk could run.

YouTube video by vlogbrothers What Trump's Doing

Thanks @hankgreen.bsky.social this was well explained. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI14...

You really need the voice for this one, but I'm sure you're hearing it for all of these.

"I saw a human pyramid. It was unnecessary. Did not need to happen."

Mets To Re-Sign Pete Alonso The Polar Bear is headed back to Queens. Find the contract details at MLB Trade Rumors.

Taking a break from all of that (gestures at world) to say woot for this! www.mlbtraderumors.com/2025/02/mets...

The big pharmaceuticals are already working on a bird flu vaccine, right? Please? At least a half serious sketch?

Life saving aid is good, actually

It said key lime in the rundown