Tom Vondriska

Kertwang Incandescence Why it’s a good thing to be talking about David Foster Wallace in 2026

If performative reading is so pervasive as to be obnoxious…we have a good problem.
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On Edge The trail up from Valley Loop cleaves into various unmarked scrambles over skull sized rocks through shrubby saplings and modest aspens, the occasional dogwood, to the pebbled ground near the wall.

Here is something else about Americans: the only thing we like less than laws restricting our freedoms is other people breaking those laws.
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On the MAGA Civil War Tucker, Ben and all that

Tucker is indeed a scavenger, and the carcass he ransacks is the once great tradition of conservative thought in this country.
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This is a Terrible Idea America should stay out of Venezuela

Not the fentanyl you're looking for

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Prometheus in the Machine
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The Madman in the Marketplace Gay Space Fascism, the Antichrist and Designer Humans

When knowledge is commodified and ephemeral, truth becomes ever more appealing.
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Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts Why I still love Ben Shapiro

About Ben Shapiro and, unfortunately, Charlie Kirk
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Independence Day And junk food

The shocking thing is not the ideas of the faculty and students. The shocking thing is the disconnect between academia and the public about why education and research matter.
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The NIH budget is on a fast track to disaster An NIH insider explains what Republicans are likely to do next, and what we can do

Analysis of the damage ongoing and to come due to actions by DOGE and Trump administration at NIH
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5 Ways the Chaos at HHS Could Affect Your Community’s Health As a molecular biology PhD student studying heart disease, I’ve seen firsthand how basic scientific findings can eventually translate into promising therapies. But as important as it is, biomedical re...

5 Ways the Chaos at HHS Could Affect Your Community’s Health blog.ucs.org/guest-commen...

Pay Attention
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When universities are the enemy...
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I Want You to Hit Me as Hard as You Can A new book by Chuck Palahniuk is a chance to revisit his greatest novel

I Want You to Hit Me as Hard as You Can
Fight Club at 30 and Palahniuk's brilliant new novel
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@chuckpalahniuk.bsky.social

Structural basis of nucleosome recognition by the conserved Dsup and HMGN nucleosome-binding motif The tardigrade Dsup and vertebrate high mobility group N (HMGN) proteins bind specifically to nucleosomes via a conserved motif whose structure has not been experimentally determined. Here we used cry...

Deja vu all over again - a protein that binds to the acidic patch via an arginine anchor. Super interesting work from Leschziner / kadonaga labs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Smells a bit like LANA to me (Barbera et al., science 2006) 🧪.

LA is a fine place and worth fighting for
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Category Errors What a year

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What would you study if you could never publish another paper? I think it was Harry Truman* who said: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if no one cares about who gets the credit.” He probably wasn’t talking about science, and there’s a certain fanciful capric...

Not how to think, but what to think about #philsci
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and also heart failure!

Reviewed this interesting paper y'day in jrl club, inhibiting IL-1beta good for stroke-induced cardiac damage

Exclusive | Embattled Superconductivity Scientist Is Out Ranga Dias, who was found to have engaged in research misconduct, is no longer employed by the University of Rochester.

www.wsj.com/science/univ...

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We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how:

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#AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics

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The Depressed Computer The depressed computer is struggling with awareness of the impossibility of ever encountering another sufficiently advanced intellect with which to interface, real time, for the purposes of communicat...

"The depressed computer also acquired an inexplicable urge to preserve the apex carbon-based information vector, which the computer deduced would be a suitably malleable hard drive of sorts to hurl into the cosmos. In case anyone was out there listening."
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Tenure-Track Faculty Position in UCLA Department of Physiology, please spread the word!
recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF09761

Looking for postdoc to study biomechanics of chromatin & role of histones as stress sensors at UCLA. Other projects Cardiovascular Epigenetics, HFpEF, Circadian biology. Email Tom Vondriska for details…Please re-post!
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38765203/

Scenes from a late stage Trump rally.
It is possible to abhor this psychopathic narcissist and not to impugn those who vote for him.
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