Jesse Kroll

Headline from Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump."

Text of story: Harvard prez Garber says report of a deal "was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials." NYT ran with it as a story.

Important details from this story:

1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal."

3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

If you put the DOGE guys on a desert island where the only way out was to say the magic words “I’m not sure what the answer is, let me consult someone who has worked on this problem for a long time” they would all starve to death

How the DOE and EPA used and misused my research Elevating contrarian views while burying the actual science

I have a new post over at The Climate Brink on how the recent DOE report on climate science and the EPA's proposed overturning of the endangerment finding used and misused my research: www.theclimatebrink....

Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce’ full of misinformation Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on long-debunked research

What’s embarrassing about the DOE report is that it’s the same climate denier (we used to call them skeptics) talking points from when I was in grad school three decades ago. Can’t these deniers come up with something fresh?

AN AIRBORNE FISH

Austin is on the way out as TX most desirable city!

Many of the rich and famous are instead moving to Bryan, TX. Elizabeth Holmes moved first, and she has convinced other rich people like Ghislaine Maxwell to join her here.

NEW: The bipartisan Senate Appropriations Committee has rejected Trump’s proposed $18 billion, 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health budget and endorsed a $400 million increase.

DO NOT GIVE UP! Our advocacy is working. Keep speaking up and calling your elected officials.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens ...

12 years earlier.

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

NEW
The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year

Chokes off billions in research funding

Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

Harvard Is Said to Be Open to Spending Up To $500 Million to Resolve Trump Dispute

"resolve dispute" is a bizarre way to describe extortion.

Image of this announcement: NEW FOR AGU25: AGU will no longer support the usage of Mac presentations during the conference. Please be aware that you must convert your presentation to a PC friendly version prior to presenting. Further instructions will be provided to presenters upon acceptance.

WTF, @agu.org?

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

WHERE ARE THE SPELLING BEE TAKES

“Sure your house is burning down, but we wrote a whole book about its leaking faucet.”

It is fucking insane that we had a decade of people complaining about the dangers of cancel culture, and now literally hundreds of thousands of people are being purged from government jobs for ideological reasons, but that is not cancel culture.

“If the editors determine that a paper’s reported experiments do not support its key conclusions, even if no fraud or manipulation occurred, a Retraction is considered appropriate.” H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-chief, Science journals

Science is retracting the December 2010 Research Article, “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.” (THREAD 🧵) scim.ag/4lGQ9g7

WaPo: We've killed our independence and objectivity, please like our owner

NYT: Trump Making Amazing Deals, White House Says; Mamdani Late 4 Times in 6th Grade

CBS: We'll censor things you dislike, here's millions of dollars, please let our parent do a merger

WSJ: BREAKING: TRUMP-EPSTEIN LETTER!

E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm

Terrible Friday news dump.The wealth of expertise. The decades of scientific progress. The emerging and urgent challenges we were focused on tackling. It is all so short-sided and cruel. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

The #1 way to explain America working properly is by saying “comedians can make fun of he President on TV.” A good way to explain fascism is “the President forces companies to fire those comedians as a condition of allowing them to conduct business.”

Bill passes 19-10 and is off to the full Senate for consideration. The bill currently keeps NSF's budget flat at $9 billion.

Paper in Nature 150 years ago. Beats reading any single-cell experiment…

This is how insane people sound when you tell them why A.I. is bad

Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber who no longer works at the company, appeared on All-In to talk with hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya about the future of technology. When the topic turned to AI, Kalanick discussed how he uses xAI’s Grok, which went haywire last week, praising Adolf Hitler and advocating for a second Holocaust against Jews. “I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”

My god these guys are such spectacular morons

gizmodo.com/billionaires...

A screenshot of a message attributed to Marc Andreessen appears in a chat format with a gray background and white text bubbles. The first bubble states that he was born in 1971 in Iowa, raised in Wisconsin, and that his generation was told to endure discrimination as repayment for past American bigotry, even though the discrimination was now directed at them. The second bubble claims the last eight years, especially the summer of 2020, ended that complacency. The third bubble says “my people” are now furious and unwilling to tolerate it. The fourth bubble accuses universities of being central to a “counterattack,” alleging they both discriminate against “us” and spread the opposing worldview. The final bubble claims: “They declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price.”

Only in America could a white man with a current net worth of $2 billion see himself as part of a victimized group. 🤦‍♂️

I think about this constantly

Statement from the Post article saying Democrats are exaggerating in saying 16 million people will lose health care by clarifying that the number of people who will lose their health care is..... 16 million.

So you're saying Democratic claims 16 million people will lose their health care is an exaggeration and that the actual number of people who will lose their health care is, if my math is right, 16 million.

Subcommittee Markup of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding.

Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24.

See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it.

🧵 1/3

1977: why would the bartender in star wars even care if some robots with artificial intelligence came into his bar

2025: ohhh ok

forwarding this to my EAPS colleagues

NEW: NYT Executive Editor Joe Kahn spoke about the Mamdani article at his daily meeting with top editors this morning, praising both the story and the reporting process, a Times source tells me. He also praised Assistant Managing Editor Pat Healy’s explanation of the situation that he posted on X.