leslie berntsen, ph.d. 😷 👩🏽‍🏫 🇳🇮

I tell people that if the government is covering up the existence of aliens, NASA is absolutely not involved, because astrobiologists can't keep a secret to save their lives

“If [wealthy, powerful people] can get us to accept that the future’s already settled, AI is already here, the end is already here, then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.” — @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

I’ve seen enough. Not about the election. Just generally.

this is not an amount of money any individual or household should be able to have and we have to abolish both billionaires as a group and the economic system that makes them possible

Long COVID — Here’s What To Know And The Challenges Ahead Six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus still exists. A public health expert explains what Long COVID is, and the challenges associated with it.

Explicitly capitalist media again shares a new piece that Long COVID is concerning, has no cure and again, embarrassingly, is doing better public health comms about this than most public health orgs. www.forbes.com/sites/omeraw...

These increases are notable but they're not synonymous with accommodations, nor are they synonymous with *unfair* accommodations. Elite media is doing another social-contagion panic, this time on disability writ large.

Colleges See Spike in Students With Disabilities, Including Elite Schools

They are clearly trying to whip up a moral panic about disability accommodations but this article doesn't include any data on accommodations.

This makes me think of that time in grad school when local news interviewed our electronic music professor about using IBM’s Watson to make music and how incredible and new it was, and his response was “Actually, we’ve been doing computer music for decades” and then they cut him from the segment.

I am not looking for a politician to explain why blowing up 100 little girls is good

If you couldn't be bothered to write it, why in the name of all things holy, unholy, and mundane should I take the time to read it?

If this were me I’d be haunting their asses so hard. Every cabinet flying open, candles snuffed out, hot breath on the back of their necks, chains rattling in the night, the whole shebang

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

The Department of Education has hung a massive banner honoring a racist college dropout who built a lucrative career out of targeting professors for harassment

sure the pedophile felon president just illegally bombed a country that may have nukes while federal forces under his command murder and harass people in america and immigrants are tortured and he moves forward with plans to build concentration camps and sorry idk where i was going fuck all of this

I am so fucking normie coded, but anytime I suggest on here that people do things that are not illegal, not violent, simply IMPOLITE, the PUSH BACK is unhinged.

IDK what to tell you.

My ancestors didn't earn their freedom by being polite.

There's this quote from the graffiti from the 1968 protests in France that goes, "you will die of comfort" and in my 20s I thought that quote was so true, but lately I've been thinking what's more accurate is, "you will die from politeness"

Science of sex and gender being misrepresented by Trump officials, experts warn Scientists say crackdown on gender-affirming care could have impact on healthcare of all Americans

Major thanks to @melodyschreiber.com for interviewing me about what biology actually says about sex & gender

Unscientific attacks on trans rights are fueled by fascism, not science, and harm all of us - cis or trans

Excellent reporting 🧬🏳️‍⚧️

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“Silence is not neutrality; it is permission. The record that university chancellors, presidents and trustees create in this moment — who spoke, who acted and who stayed silent — will be studied long after today’s political actors are gone.”

My whole life, advocating war has been fed to me as “the adult position,” akin to drinking your coffee black or reading the business section of the newspaper. Let’s be very clear — war is the childish nonsense of impulsive destructive idiots playing baby-brained video games with real human lives.

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

No one should be using ChatGPT or partnering with OpenAI for anything.

The military obsession with AI is in large part about being able to command something to kill, with instant compliance, no rebuttal nor compunction

I should always add: my most comprehensive piece incorporates ableism alongside racism, (hetero)sexism, Islamophobia, etc.

"Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care"
muse.jhu.edu/article/715439
(Journals have to survive in this anti-intellectual world)

Mamdani getting a kidnapped kid released from ICE in less than a day kinda lays bare the full depravity of the Democrats' "we can't just DO things" mentality for the last year.

Randomly looked back at this 2021 piece. I be telling the truth!

"I’ve spent my career watching white people use job-performance standards to judge everyone but themselves and each other."

time.com/5958844/blac...

It is completely reasonable to email your dean and/or Provost to ask what is being done at your university to stop this from happening to your students

Dolly Parton Is 'So Excited' That East Tennessee Children's Hospital Is Being Renamed in Her Honor Dolly Parton's philanthropic efforts are taking another huge step as the singer announced on Thursday, Feb. 26, that the East Tennessee Children's Hospital has officially been renamed the Dolly Parton...

Musical genius and humanitarian Dolly Parton announces that the East Tennessee Children's Hospital has officially been renamed the Dolly Parton Children's Hospital 🦋 people.com/dolly-parton...

One of the misinformation talking points from centrists on Covid is that Covid activists and anti-vaxxers are the same.

I want you to think of any other rights movement where the centrist position has been “ugh, these people on the far ends are both so noisy, they’re the same.”

Is it all of them?

I think Harvard's plan to respond to the every-decade moral panic about grade inflation by capping A's is pedagogically obscene.

Grades should be a measure of learning, not competition.

Grade caps engender competition and anxiety where we should be teaching collaboration and a love of learning.

How Covid Quietly Rewires the Brain Researchers keep discovering more about the long-term neurological effects of SARS-CoV-2.

Explicitly capitalist media is telling you that getting/continuing to get COVID is really bad for you and is, mortifyingly, still doing more to warn you than most public health leaders are.

www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

🎁 Link below