Sara Grady

“The dismantling of Harvard’s diversity offices arrived at Harvard College on Wednesday as websites for centers serving minority students, LGBTQ students, and women disappeared suddenly and without fanfare.”

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

HHS announced today they will consider Head Start a welfare program, not an education program, and will subject it to new citizenship requirements. This goes against decades of legal precedence that all children in America have a right to education. Announcement here. www.hhs.gov/press-room/p...

Seamless Interaction: Dyadic Audiovisual Motion Modeling and Large-Scale Dataset Human communication involves a complex interplay of verbal and nonverbal signals, essential for conveying meaning and achieving interpersonal goals. To develop socially intelligent AI technologies, it...

Seamless Interaction dataset with 4000+ hrs of face-to-face dyadic interactions! 🤯

Seems like it could be a game changer for studying embodied turn-taking & mutual adaptation complementary with CANDOR, etc...

arxiv.org/abs/2506.22554

A Pocket Guide for Scientists: The First Amendment - Climate Science Legal Defense Fund We wrote this guide so scientists can make informed decisions about how to safely and effectively participate in advocacy and activism.

The 1st Amendment protects scientists who engage in advocacy & activism - even if they work for a federal agency. We joined forces with @aclu.org to create a guide for scientists who wish to speak out while minimizing negative repercussions: www.csldf.org/resource/fir...

If this were not so incredibly disturbing because it reeks of authoritarianism, it would just be incredibly sad. The attorney general of Missouri is threatening tech companies because their AI engines don't respond that Donald Trump is the best president in terms of combating antisemitism.

This sounds batsh*t crazy but it's, quite literally, a straightforward & purely factual description of what's going on here

Very cool methods contribution here

I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit

But universities are threatened with losing their tax exempt status if *students protesting the university* are too openly political.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/u...

I love this so hard

Bar chart of polling data from Data For Progress. Title: Voters Do Not Think the President Should Have the Power to Denaturalize Citizens. Description: "Naturalized citizens" are people who immigrated to the U.S. and have since become U.S. citizens. Do you think the president should have the power to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens? All likely voters — The president should have this power: 25%, Don't know: 5%, The president should not have this power: 70% Democrat — The president should have this power: 10%, Don't know: 2%, The president should not have this power: 88% Independent / Third party — The president should have this power: 20%, Don't know: 6%, The president should not have this power: 74% Republican — The president should have this power: 43%, Don't know: 6%, The president should not have this power: 50% July 3–4, 2025 survey of 1,152 U.S. likely voters.

NEW: Only 1 in 4 voters believe that the president should have the power to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens.

www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/7/...

Every living NASA science chief unites in opposition to unprecedented… The entire past leadership of NASA’s science activities have released a joint statement condemning the proposed 47% cuts proposed to the agency’s science…

Today, *every* living prior leader of NASA's science directorate have released a joint letter condemning the proposed cuts to NASA science. These individuals every administration from Reagan to Biden, and all believe these cuts are insanely destructive: www.planetary.org/press-releas...

Stripping immigration status from thousands of people who’ve lived here for years is a really gross way to keep manufacturing a crisis and justify even more harm

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Notices Temporary Protected Status: Designation of Honduras; Termination Filed on: 07/07/2025 at 8:45 am Scheduled Pub. Date: 07/08/2025 FR Document: 2025-12621 PDF 11 Pages (120 KB) Permalink Termination of the Designation of Nicaragua Filed on: 07/07/2025 at 8:45 am Scheduled Pub. Date: 07/08/2025 FR Document: 2025-12688 PDE 10 Pages (114 KB) Permalink

NEW: the Trump admin has moved to terminate TPS for Honduras and Nicaragua, covering over 50,000 people

Both of these designations date back to 1999, meaning Trump wants to strip legal status from people here legally who have had a background check every 18 months for the last 26 years.

SciComm Summer continues!

This week, @joelbervell.bsky.social shares how he achieved incredible success on social media, debunking medical misinformation and sharing sound medical science. He's gained a large following, and his work has been widely applauded, including his recent Peabody Award (!)

Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships AoIR is very happy to once again offer the Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for scholars and researchers who would otherwise face financial barriers to attending the #AoIR2025 conference. Please see the link below for full details on the scholarships and how to apply. *Application deadline is July 8th, 2025.* aoir.org/2025kellyquinntravelscholarship

AoIR is very happy to once again offer the Kelly Quinn Travel Scholarships for scholars & researchers who would otherwise face financial barriers to attending the #AoIR2025 conference.

Please see here for details & how to apply: aoir.org/2025kellyqui...

Application deadline is July 8th.

Here are all the polls on the Republican budget, which will be signed into law by the president today. Trump may have won the popular vote, but Trumpism is not exactly a popular movement. There will be political costs for passing this.

www.gelliottmorris.com/p/one-big-un...

Brilliant! Comparing the original 27 grievances from the Declaration of Independence to Trump’s Executive orders and rating whether Trumps violations are more or less severe than those from 1776.

Perceived community alignment increases information sharing - Nature Communications Information sharing is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior. Here, the authors use neuroimaging and behavioral studies to show that people are driven to share information that they believe will be ...

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

You’re a rock star 👏 love this

Groundbreaking work by @martamasilva.bsky.social using intracranial recordings to study event boundaries and event memory, revealing neural mechanisms that we haven't been able to measure with fMRI!

Update: The Environmental Protection Agency placed 139 employees on administrative leave today and launched an investigation into their signing of an open letter criticizing agency leadership.

See our initial reporting. ⬇️

Frederick Douglass Quote: "For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but the thunder. We need the store, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling in the nation must be quickened, the conscience of the nation must be roused, the propriety of the nation must be startled, the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed: and its crimes against God and man must be denounced".

This year especially seems like an important one to revisit the (shamefully) timeless words of Frederick Douglass, on the 4th of July and all it stands for. A long read for a long weekend, but a perennially good one. loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1852Fre...

This suggests that as awareness of the GOP budget bill grows, backlash will too

= WIRED "We're pushing back against authoritarianism. We're pushing back against fascism," he says. "They're gonna fire off hate rhetoric at you. They're gonna demonize everything you're doing. They're gonna threaten you"

Spoke with ICEBlock’s developer and legal experts who see the app as clearly protected speech under the First Amendment.

My latest for @wired.com:

www.wired.com/story/trump-...

two charts on the now-passed OBBBA:

Open Call View the 2025-2026 PRRI Public Fellows Open Call Here and apply The PRRI Public Fellows program, founded in 2017, promotes and supports interdisciplinary public scholarship through a cohort of…

The open call for the 2025-2026 cohort of Public Religion Research Institute ( @prri.org ) Public Fellows is now live!

PRRI seeks 12 mid-career scholars interested in the intersection of religion, culture, and politics for an 11-month, non-residential fellowship. Due 7/25/25.

prri.org/open-call/

University of Virginia President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration

This is naked authoritarianism. It is exactly what happened in Turkey. There is nothing to stop this regime from demanding that faculty be purged too. Everyone must stand up and push back.
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u...

What's with this euphemistic language about Trump trying to "shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system" being repeated 2x by the NYT in 24 hours? And why call it a "bid" or "push"?

Reality: He's using illegal tactics to try to *control* higher ed by dictating policies and personnel.

In a 6–3 ruling, the Court said that lower courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions, meaning they can’t stop a federal law or executive order from taking effect across the entire country unless it directly affects the people who sued.

As if we needed any more evidence of what we been knew.