Mark Cleaveland

Vassar College Social at The Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego CA. Great catching up with old and new friends! #SfN2025 #Vassar @vassar.bsky.social @sfn.org

Those would be my top priorities, and yeah, there's a lot more to be done (knee-capping private equity, tax code reform, immigration reform, etc). Just trying to think of how to rebuild and revitalize our democratic systems.

4. Expand the House: why should some have more representation than others?
5. D.C. statehood (and a roadmap for Puerto Rican independence or statehood): we the people deserve a say
6. Privacy reforms: controlling our data is necessary for personal sovereingty... we the people, not we the product.

My 21st c Empowering Democracy list:
1. Filibuster eliminated: without this nothing else is possible
2. Court reforms: without this legal limbo will suck the blood out
3. Voter rights: codify money is not speech, easy access to voting, reform gerrymandering, campaign finance reforms

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

theimpactproject.org/dashboards/t...
Good work being done by PSA and the Impact Project to raise awareness of the threats being directed at public servants.

What Isn’t Intelligence? | Los Angeles Review of Books Patrick House is inspired by Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s “What Is Intelligence?” to think about what might constitute the difference between artificial and natural intelligence.

This was a fantastic read. Nice surprise that it had guest-star @carlbergstrom.com who I guess still has not see the lyrebird :-)
lareviewofbooks.org/article/what...

One of Josh Marshall’s best.

Why Scholars Should Take Their Show On the Road To ensure that informed and nuanced perspectives are part of public dialogue, academics need to hone their persuasive communication skills.

"If we cannot convey our findings and theories in accessible ways, we risk validating the misleading assumption that academia is merely an elitist silo that has little to do with the everyday realities of average Americans." Professor Dara Greenwood in Psychology Today.
https://bit.ly/3W370Pe

In our Office Hours video, we spoke to Lori Alison Newman, Associate Professor of Psychological Science, who talked about the importance of astrocytes.

Everything About Charlie Kirk’s Public Murder Fills Me with Dread The past 24 hours challenge any sense of optimism.

www.esquire.com/news-politic...

Four images to illustrate some prominent single-gene myths. Top left shows a photograph of a person deftly rolling their tongue into a U-shape. Top right shows a photograph of a person’s ear, highlighting the shape and features of the earlobe and cartilage. Bottom left shows a close-up photograph of a person’s eye, with a vivid blue colouration. Bottom right shows a photograph of a person poised to write with their left hand on the blank white page of a spiral-bound notebook.

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

Great column, and timely. I especially appreciate your emphasis on moving on from the Senate surrender. "Next play" as a well-known basketball coach was famous for saying. Clarify goals, and then make the next play to achieving them.

TPM and Drum have been my first check every morning for almost 25 years. So many benefited from Kevin’s voice and his insistence on data-based liberalism. :(

Great job by my student Alden Ormont (‘27) presenting research at the Eastern Psychological Association! Vassar PsycSci also has research being presented from Prof Clifton’s and Prof Greenwood’s labs. @vassar.bsky.social

#standupforscience Attended the event in NYC with colleague and students from Vassar College. Cancer treatments? Has your kid ever had strep? Safer vehicles for driving? Science can help.

Much wisdom shared at the Psychological Science career alumni event on Saturday! 👏👏Special thanks to the alumni who could come and share their on-going journeys: Lily Conroy ‘23, Wendy Gonzalez ‘03, Matt Grossman ‘10, Leesh Menard ‘18, Tomomi Uetani ‘00, and Joanna Weill ‘09.
@vassar.bsky.social

Crossing a line Borders between one kind of life and another

"I am on a night train from Kyiv, bound for Zaporizhzhia, a city in the southeast of Ukraine which is about twenty miles from the front... As I get ready to go to sleep, I find myself thinking that Americans are also speeding towards a line."
snyder.substack.com/p/crossing-a...

Very cool.

The "carpentered corner" story for the Müller-Lyer illusion is probably bullshit.