David Wallace-Wells

The Harvard Endowment’s Biggest Public Investment is Now Bitcoin The endowment dramatically increased its holdings of a spot bitcoin ETF since its previous such report.

“At current prices, the value of those IBIT holdings sits at around $364 million.” gizmodo.com/the-harvard-...

You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?

Warning! This “Colorful Chart” is Censored by IPCC James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha and Dylan Morgan

“One implication of the increased growth rate of GHG forcing in the last 15 years is that the goal to keep global warming under 2°C is now implausible.” open.substack.com/pub/jimehans...

“If we drive the carbon cycle far enough from equilibrium, it will respond in kind, no matter how hard we try to subordinate it to the market, or tame it with panicked legislation.” - @peterbrannen.bsky.social (quote from Peter’s excellent new book)

RFK Jr is boosting America’s peptide obsession When 30 million Americans learnt to inject themselves with Ozempic, they lost weight while creating the infrastructure for an entirely unregulated peptide market. Health and Human Services Secretary R...

“The peptide free-for-all is the logical endpoint of a healthcare system where feeling optimised matters more than being safe, and where the new HHS Secretary actively dismantles the guardrails which might protect consumers from contaminated vials and 12,000% markups.”
unherd.com/newsroom/rfk...

Climate crisis or a warning from God? Iranians desperate for answers as water dries up As rainy season fails to bring relief, authorities try cloud seeding – while others across the country pray for a miracle

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

“More than 50 days have passed since the start of Iran’s rainy season and more than 20 provinces have not yet had a drop. The number of dams that have less than 5% of their reservoir capacity had increased from eight to 32, and the crisis has spread from the central plains right across the country.”

“Even for an intermediate emissions scenario [which is our current emissions pathway] the probability of AMOC shutdown is way above 50%”

(AMOC shut-down means Europe and parts of South-East Asia become uninhabitable, by the way.)

1/4

Melting Glaciers in the Himalayas Feed Lakes That Threaten Towns Below Melting ice from the Himalayas is creating thousands of unstable lakes, a growing menace to towns and cities below.

“As the planet warms, so much ice has been erased from around Mount Everest that the elevation at base camp in Nepal, which sits on a melting glacier, has dropped more than 220 feet since the 1980s.” www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

World still on track for catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise, report finds Fossil fuel emissions have hit a record high while many nations have done too little to avert deadly global heating

With current pledges, the world's on track for 2.6°C of warming in 2100 compared to preindustrial levels.

10 years ago, before the Paris agreement, it was 3.6°C

20+ years ago, we thought it would be 4-5°C

So 2.6°C is better, but the problem is that climate impacts are way worse than we predicted.

Stanford Medicine scientists tie lupus to a virus nearly all of us carry The Epstein-Barr virus can convert B cells it’s infected into diabolical overlords that reprogram myriad other immune cells to attack our tissues, Stanford Medicine scientists have found.

One of humanity’s most ubiquitous infectious pathogens, the Epstein-Barr virus, which 19 of 20 people carry, bears the blame for the chronic autoimmune condition called systemic lupus erythematosus or, colloquially, lupus.
med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...

Opinion | The Haves and Have-Nots Are, Once Again, at War

“Between 1989 and 2022, households in the top 1 percent added about 100 times as much wealth as households at the national median. The share of all U.S. wealth held by the top 0.00001 percent has nearly doubled over the last decade.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/o...

Climate disasters displaced 250 million people in past 10 years, UN report finds Floods, storms and droughts have uprooted people across the globe as rising temperatures intensify conflict and hunger

“Climate-related disasters forcibly displaced 250 million people globally over the past decade, the equivalent of 70,000 displacements every day, according to a report by the UN refugee agency.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

We Used to Read Things in This Country | Noah McCormack Technology changes us—and it is currently changing us for the worse.

“The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought.”

Must read piece by Noah McCormack with too many quotaboe lines to select one! thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

bigthink.com/wp-content/u...

A fantastic piece. Fascinating that Watson was another victim of The Bell Curve and became entrenched by his undeserved arrogance and hubris

I read The Double Helix as an undergraduate. I was a science major at a women’s college taking molecular biology. Our professor taught us that Watson & Crick screwed Rosalind Franklin over.

So I read the book to learn more. I’ll never forget how reading this passage made me feel.

If I'm doing the math correctly, Musk's big pay packet yesterday could have made each of these now-dead people millionaires instead.
He is among the sickest men the world has ever produced.

“People perceive climate change as more impactful when shown binary data rather than continuous data, because binary data creates an illusion of sudden change.”

Sudan's Death Toll Could Exceed Gaza’s. Here’s Everything You Need to Know Two experts on Sudan explain how the killing in El Fasher is worse than anyone knows.

“‘More people could have died in the past week in El Fasher, and this is without hyperbole, than died in the past two years in Gaza,’ says Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab.” open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/...

According to this (extremely informed) projection, Zohran Mamdani will win more votes than any mayoral candidate in New York since 1969.

This quote continues to rattle me to my core:

"So what you’re telling us is you need less evidence to kill somebody than you do to hold them."

That's Rep Adam Smith to Pentagon officials in a briefing on Trump's illegal boat bombings. As he told me in this piece, they didn't answer his objection:

A reminder that less than two months ago, the Trump administration abruptly ended the federal government's 27-year practice of collecting data on hunger and food insecurity.

O'DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao?

TRUMP: Are you ready? I don't know who he is

O'DONNELL: His crypto exchange Binance helped facilitate a $2b purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin. And they you pardoned him.

TRUMP: Here's the thing -- I know nothing about it

“Among the 861 children whose mothers were SARS-CoV-2–positive during pregnancy, 140 (16.3%) received a neurodevelopmental diagnosis by 3 years of age, compared with 1,680 (9.7%) of the 17,263 remaining children from SARS-CoV-2–negative pregnancies.” www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/new...

Los Angeles will nearly double recycled water for 500,000 residents Los Angeles is set to double the size of a planned facility that will transform wastewater into purified drinking water, recycling enough water to meet the needs of 500,000 people.

A major shift in where L.A. gets water: The city will double the size of a project to transform wastewater into purified drinking water, producing enough for 500,000 people. The recycled water will allow L.A. to stop taking water from creeks that feed Mono Lake. www.latimes.com/environment/...

Melissa was one of the strongest storms on record. NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters flew into it without pay | CNN The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Hunters have spent the past week diving into the eye of Melissa — a storm of historic ferocity — to gather life-saving data. But the gov...

Melissa was one of the strongest storms on record. NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters flew into it without pay.

Crews are asked “To be fully mentally present, especially in this environment, and it’s hard to do that when you know you can’t potentially make ends meet.” www.cnn.com/2025/10/31/w...

Gen Z no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life, survey shows - A growing sense of inequality is undermining trust in both society’s institutions and capitalism, according to a long-running global survey. The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer – now in its 20th year – h...

“Since we began measuring trust 20 years ago, economic growth has fostered rising trust. This continues in Asia and the Middle East but not in developed markets, where national income inequality is now the more important factor.” reuternews.online/gen-z-no-lon...

Wednesday's paid subway ridership was 4,585,493, a new post-pandemic high.