Fox Baudelaire

Zohran Mamdani Wins Decisive Victory in NYC, Triumphing Over Billionaire Onslaught Mamdani is one of just a few democratic socialists to ever win the seat for the largest city in the U.S.

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race on Tuesday, marking a historic win for the left over a high-powered, moneyed coalition of establishment forces that came together in hopes of defeating him.

NEW: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and a state assemblymember, will become New York City’s next mayor, The Associated Press reports.

He will be the city’s first Muslim mayor and, at age 34, ties the record for the youngest person to hold the office. https://to.pbs.org/4ovh28q

The numbers when the race was called.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

Where can lefties improve?

I think knowledge about Christian nationalism is a big gap with progressives, lefties, socialists, etc. This is a problem because it means that people aren't always strategizing around the opposition we actually face.

Here are my recs for self-ed 🧵

Starting a chemistry PhD as a mature student The benefits and challenges of returning to academia after a period away

Age is no barrier to starting a PhD. Three current students share how their wider life experiences have been an asset to their research.

Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for…

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.

William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus report.

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

The Illusion of Neutrality in Higher Education Universities cannot claim apolitical ground when their choices create the very conditions for campus violence.

Views | Higher education leaders often claim to be “apolitical,” but neutrality itself is a strategy, one shaped by economics, politics, and institutional branding.

Statistical thermodynamics based design principles into the temperature induced fold switching of a metamorphic protein https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.10.679401v1

Jay Capsian Kang writes about how the internet has deepened the cracks in our fracturing sense of shared reality—and how many Americans have come to embrace a conspiratorial world view. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/XEjaFK

4 Characteristics of Outstanding ‘Warm Demander’ Teachers The dispositions and priorities of teachers who hold high expectations for every child, care deeply, and help them reach their academic potential in a structured environment.

Consistency, compassion, and high expectations for every child—here are 4 things that characterize the warm demander approach. 🧡

#EduSky #ClassroomManagement

Trump Baselessly Claims He ‘Took the Freedom of Speech Away’ From Flag Burners

My first public political commentary was a letter I wrote as a high school kid to the Ann Arbor News excoriating efforts by Reagan and a GOP congress to criminalize flag-burning.

Amazing that 35 years after after Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, we're still dealing with this bullshit.

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead The children’s names below appear on a list of victims of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, maintained by health authorities in the territory. As of the end of July it ran to 60,199 names, of whom 18,457 were under 18s. Far from comprehensive, the list does not include the thousands still buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, as well as the war’s many indirect victims As of the end of July there were 18,457 children named on the long official list of Palestinian victims of Israel’s war in Gaza. Over almost two years, that is equivalent to bombs, bullets and shells killing a boy or girl every hour of every day. In reality the deaths are not spaced out so evenly. Siblings, cousins and playmates are often killed together, by an airstrike or artillery shell. Even children shot by snipers or quadcopters are sometimes brought into hospitals in groups, doctors say. Continue reading...

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead

The Innovation Illusion: Most of what’s worth knowing in education isn’t new, and most of what’s new isn’t worth knowing.

Will SCOTUS Greenlight Conversion Therapy Even Though the UN Calls It “Torture”? The outcome of “Chiles v. Salazar” could have major implications for conversion therapy bans across the country.

Five years ago, the United Nations concluded that conversion therapy could amount to torture and recommended it be banned. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider a case that could greenlight it for LGBTQ+ youth across the nation.

JUST IN: A U.S. citizen from Alabama who has been detained twice by ICE while working at a construction site, has filed a class action suit claiming ICE's broad warrantless arrest powers violate the constitution. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Claudia Prieto, “Tus Ojos” Claudia Prieto is a Venezuelan singer-songwriter about whom I know next to nothing except that she recorded this gorgeous song, “Tus Ojos,” in 2018. By the way, I found out about this s…

quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/c...

An image of Jane Goodall and a chimpanzee, from 1965. Photo courtesy CBS Photo Archive / Getty.

The naturalist Jane Goodall died today at 91. Hope, she argued, is not merely “passive wishful thinking” but a “crucial survival trait.” Revisit a conversation with Goodall, from 2021: nyer.cm/F55JtsS

Constantly shocked by the cottage industry of tenured philosophers who used to do M&E and now publish papers on social justice that literally don't contain a single paragraph a random 18 year old college activist couldn't put together on the spot

Onward. Forward. Steady. Things have really changed. Now I need your help.

This week’s piece was a very personal one:
 
I wrote about why I left academia, why I left America, why I left Substack – and why I am asking for support as I am starting over as a full-time independent writer.
 
If you’ll indulge me:

I felt very moved by this too. Not because we yet have a cure, but because of the reminder of the passionate and humane commitment that goes into such research, contrasted with the vicious idiocy with which medical research is being treated right now by the US administration.

In a first, a gene therapy seems to slow Huntington disease Small study suggests uniQure drug could be first successful treatment for devastating brain disorder

“This is an immensely exciting development for the Huntington’s field.” https://scim.ag/4nnW62z

Huntington’s treatment slows disease by 75% giving hope to families The condition, which currently has no cure, has been slowed in a groundbreaking trial

BREAKING | Huntington’s treatment slows disease by 75% giving hope to families

Phenomenal. In my 10 year update of A Brief History, I make the point that in the first edition, not one disease had been successfully treated using gene therapy. Today that number is at least 7.

The Hospice Hustle Half of all Americans now die in hospice care. Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.

Half of all Americans die in hospice care.

Easy money and a lack of regulation transformed a crusade to provide death with dignity into an industry rife with fraud and exploitation.

(Published 2022)

MIT Professor Cancels Israeli Military Grant After Student Pressure As students push for MIT to drop projects tied to the Israeli military, the school has obscured information about the funding.

SCOOP: An MIT professor canceled an Israeli military funded research grant after pressure from students. “This concession shows that student campaigns do have an influence,” one student said. "These ties cannot survive transparency." theintercept.com/2025/09/22/m...

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Cary Supalo: STEM students with disabilities deserve an authentic experience Graduate student <b>Soren Lipman</b> talks with this chemist and education researcher about accessibility gaps in teaching labs and assessments

Cary Supalo, one of C&EN's Trailblazers, specializes in making exams fair and inclusive to people with disabilities. Read more: cen.acs.org/education/Tr... #chemsky 🧪

Income Gaps Persist in College Outcomes Despite Stable Enrollment Rates, New Study Finds Low-poverty schools see 50% completion rates while high-poverty schools achieve just 25%.

Stark income-based disparities in college success persist among high school graduates, with students from low-poverty schools twice as likely to complete postsecondary credentials compared to their peers from high-poverty schools.

RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Panel Votes Down Its Own Proposal to Require Prescriptions for Covid-19 Shots In a chaotic meeting, ACIP voted not to recommend a prescription requirement for Covid-19 vaccines. Some panelists seemed unaware of the point of the meeting, while others went on strange tangents.

In a chaotic meeting, ACIP voted not to recommend a prescription requirement for Covid-19 vaccines. Some panelists seemed unaware of the point of the meeting, while others went on strange tangents. 🫠

We Can’t Let White Nationalism Dictate What Is Taught and Learned in Classrooms Curricula that challenge oppression are being shut down. How do we resist?

In the past, Trump has decried discussions in schools about systemic racism as a “twisted web of lies” and even “child abuse.” Now, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the far right is weaponizing the killing to push for alarming new infringements on free speech — including in education.