Heidi Baumgartner

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings:
"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Polite Greeting
Name
Relevant Personal Link
Manage Expectations

Keep it BRIEF.

Her community rallied so fast and so diligently. This is a victory to uphold and celebrate. Reminds everyone that it's worth fighting back.

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

If you rank civility over justice at this point you are a collaborator

I said this last time but their real position is “if you disagree with us we can kill you.”

Yeah, this is basically where I stand.

Paper title and authors

Now up as a reviewed @elife.bsky.social preprint: "Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood" elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Using data from ~2000 kids ages 1-6, we quantify links between word recognition and early vocabulary growth!

People are going to try and lure you into debates about whether Maduro was a good guy or not and the thing is, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of discussing whether violent kidnappings and extrajudicial murders by the US government are ok. No, they aren’t! End of convo.

you can tell so much about people by whom they give the benefit of the doubt to

Numerical Cognition

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

Abstract of paper

Figure 1!

What do kids choose to do when they think that someone will help them? What about when no one will help?

New paper: "Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners" - led by Kat Shannon, with @hyogweon.bsky.social and Willem Frankenhuis.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Tim Robinson in a hot dog costume, captioned "WE'RE ALL TRYING TO FIND THE GUY WHO DID THIS" (from "I Think You Should Leave")

"Condoleeza Rice discusses restoring confidence in American democracy"

stanforddaily.com/2025/11/12/r...

registration >>> Register for the 2025 BTSCON now! *** ### BTSCON Registration Info To balance inclusivity with our funding needs, *registration fees for the Big Team Science Conference are optional*. You can pay ...

There's still time to register for the 2025 Big Team Science Conference (October 6-8, live on Zoom)! All fees are OPTIONAL, so you can pay what you'd like (or nothing at all!) to gain access to a ton of amazing BTS content.

bigteamscienceconference.github.io/registration/

program Note: The live conference schedule with links to sessions will be provided to conference registrants via email. To access the live schedule, REGISTER NOW *** >>> View the 2025 BTSCON Program *** > Not...

Our full 2025 program and schedule are now up on our website! We've got so many great presentations lined up, you won't want to miss it!

bigteamscienceconference.github.io/program/

a post from Louisa saying "Just remembered there's no more Gilded Age this season and got emotionally devastated", directly underneath a Darth repost of a photo of Trump and Zelenskyy sitting in the oval office (where everything has been gilded to shit) saying "You could write a book about this photo. Everything about it is so fucking vulgar." Ugh.

timeline coincidence of the most depressing order
cc @darthbluesky.bsky.social @louisathelast.bsky.social

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Capybaras lounging in yuzu-filled hot springs is my happy place

It's been a ton of fun to work with @mcxfrank.bsky.social and @asifamajid.bsky.social on this. I'm so lucky to get to support projects like this (and @manybabies.org and @btscon.bsky.social and ...)!

Small joys like this (☝️) are the only thing keeping me sane right now

Just got an “out of office” reply with the most amazing example of “there’s a German word for that.”

Abwesenheitsbenachrichtigung!

omg

Possible to start to tell a unified story: "Trump is personally too old, crazy, and confused to run things, so at any given time the question is which co-president is in charge. At first it was Musk, & we got the crazy chaotic DOGE era. Then Navarro: a trade war that crashed markets. Now Miller..."

It’s completely insane that US troops are illegally deployed to suppress domestic opposition and it’s not uniformly condemned by the press and political elite.

Rondeline giving her acknowledgements at her defense.

Anjie showing cat photos at her defense.

Huge congratulations to Drs Anjie Cao and Rondeline Williams on their successful defenses this week!! @anjiecao.bsky.social

There are a couple in progress! :)

Please assign these articles for your teaching as well as your own browsing, and let us know 1) how you're using them and 2) what articles you need to help you in your teaching!

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

“We want scientists who hold identities that may be under attack to know that we are proud to be your colleagues, and that our science is stronger as a result of your being in this field.” 👏

my endorsement for any democratic presidential candidate who promises to send the entire DOGE team to prison

What DEI threatens isn’t merit. It’s monopoly. Political science professor Hakeem Jefferson argues for DEI's importance to de-monopolizing universities.

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond.

I hope you’ll read and share the piece.

stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...