Gabriella "Biella" Coleman

Today’s walk

Woah

Nice. Fall is special. It's much better out east but Seattle I guess has enough deciduous tress to make it a thing!

Seattlelites: the arboretum is lit! And worth visiting this week

Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

This is brutal, and Amazon is making *$86 BILLION* this year — with $20 billion of that in profit. This may well be the first domino that reveals what so many already know, which is that everyone but the wealthy are already in a recession. www.reuters.com/business/wor...

Python was awarded a funding grant, funding grant asked Python foundation to remove all diversity and inclusion initiatives they have.

Python foundation said no and rejected the grant.

If you use Python, send a few dollars to the charity to keep it going. I’m pushing a dono on behalf of ScamGuard.

I was definitely wrong about this

the visuals of him destroying a landmark to build a dance hall nobody asked for while furloughed government employees wait in long food bank lines really resonated in useful ways

YouTube video by Frog Talk 1987 Night Time News Story About Computer Hackers - Busted - Archive Footage

Found this news clip from 1987 about the arrest of Leslie Lynn Doucette, aka Kyrie, who was arrested for running a network of teenagers engaging in fraud across the U.S. The media dubbed her “Queen of the #Hackers”
#hacking #history
youtu.be/RBiSItRDKL4

It was but it was only marginally better in the air

I had to take Paris low and slow and it helps!

Ugh 737 max

On top of it!

Jeff Bezos Says He Doesn't Understand Why Anybody Alive Now Would Be 'Discouraged'—Because Soon, 'Millions Of People Will Be Living In Space' Jeff Bezos says the future is so bright, he "doesn't see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now." Speaking at Italian Tech Week 2025 earlier this month with Ferrari and Stellantis chair...

Extreme wealth and ideology: what a powerful mind altering drug tech.yahoo.com/science/arti...

I don’t get why the air quality is so bad in planes? Can’t they just let in a bit more air?

Amazing. I’m away this year on sabbatical but look forward to leaning more when I’m back

Come work with me! I'm hiring a data scientist to join me at @harvardkennedy.bsky.social @shorensteinctr.bsky.social

careers.harvard.edu/job/senior-d...

Wow! That’s really cool and how it should be!

I dunno, I think that's a rather surface rendition: yes, those things exist and that's what you might see on Instagram but dive a bit deeper (in an ethnographic sense) and a different picture emerges (signed someone doing some of this work)

SNAP benefits expire in one week.

I’m offline for the night so illl pick up later

Opinion | How MAHA Is Helping Poison Americans While Claiming to Save Them The Trump administration’s deregulatory regime is undermining MAHA’s health aims.

MAHA is a broad tent and so vax aside, what do you think of this? www.politico.com/news/magazin...

ok, last question: are you ethnographically (or otherwise) studying them?

and many other interests that can't be boiled down to a tweet, so I am signing off.

I’m interested in scientific dogmatism—à la Kuhn—as it surfaces in disputes over chronic Lyme & mold. Their marginality today reveals how, amid our epistemic crisis, many treat “truth” as obvious, though it’s never easy to attain even among credential experts, as the history of science shows

Opinion | How MAHA Is Helping Poison Americans While Claiming to Save Them The Trump administration’s deregulatory regime is undermining MAHA’s health aims.

MAHA has advocates & supporters. I tend to focus more on the supporters who are not acting in bad faith. Some of the advocates are (or are really making a mess, as I argue here) but some (like Kelly Ryerson), whether or not you agree r acting in good faith www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Mold, Mold Everywhere The number of Americans claiming they suffer from toxic-mold exposure keeps growing — and so does the list of their symptoms.

btw, another example of I think terrible reporting on mold, pinning it partly to MAHA (which is weird, b/c I've been on mold groups for 20 years and the numbers of new folks sky rocketed well before MAHA). Pretty bad reporting www.thecut.com/article/peop...

<3 I am SO glad you know. So many don't know that mold makes them worse (or just is the problem). I have had to leave 3 apartments at significant financial and emotional cost. I am currently building in the hopes of building a safe home.

In my piece, I try to qualify who and what I mean (with examples), and it's not everyone on either side of the right vs. liberal/progressive divide. Writing a 10,000-word piece provides the space needed to bypassing the binary, centering the nuance, something that's so hard to achieve here.

I would argue too that there has been an unhelpful doubling down on arrogance (or so I argue in a piece under review) and that it is counterproductive for the goals of good science.

No one deserves death threats. Science deserves robust funding, and medicine does tremendous good, but yes, there are massive shortcomings. Sometimes we need to turn that critical lens on ourselves as well. Naomi Klein did exactly that in her book, and such self-reflection is rare in the field.