Gates Palissery

Hi everyone, I wanted to share some sad news about the future of the Verena program. As you know, in September, NSF delayed our annual payment indefinitely, and asked us to keep spending closer and closer to zero until they could “justify” another payment. We began to run out of funds at some universities this month, and will be fully spent out by late spring, so the goal was to get paid in December. We’ve been working with our program officer to make this happen, but sadly, we’ve learned we’re not getting an increment again, and there’s no clarity on when or how much we will be paid in the remainder of the grant (through September 1, 2027). Because of this, the Executive Committee has made the difficult decision to essentially shut the BII down until / unless something changes. What that means is an indefinite end to all programs (e.g., seminar), training activities (integration workshops, trainee corner), and evaluation. On research, what’s able to continue will have to be navigated by each investigator; our goal is to work together to push out all the impactful science we’ve spent three years collecting and analyzing data for, but we also know that priorities may shift around to keep people employed. If we’re lucky, Congress will pass a budget that lets us continue doing something like what we planned, and we’ll pick that back up when Zoe and Collin are back in April. Until then, Verena will continue to exist as a community where we can collaborate (and give and receive support!), and we’re working to find funding sources that can pick up from where the BII left off. On a personal note: it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work with all of you, and an unbelievably lucky thing to get to run an NSF center in my 20s. I’ve loved this project, and I hope it’s made as much of a difference in your lives as it has in mine. In case I don’t see you later: happy holidays, be well, and so long and thanks for all the viruses. Best, Colin

Yesterday, we sent this message to the @viralemergence.org team, bringing a (hopefully temporary) end to our project three years into what started as a decade of planned work. /1

Today's meeting of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is going great

it's wild how the positive use cases are like "save 5 minutes reading a long doc" and "write a generic email faster" and the negative use cases are "get encouraged to dive deeper in psychosis, misogyny, or suicidal thoughts" and we're still on the fence about overall value

Mychal Threets, wearing a Library Joy t-shirt, smiles and holds up two picture books: The Abominable Snow Dancer (by Steph Lau) and Jim! (by Jerrold Connors). Behind him are shelves of books, in a bookstore.

A screencap of Publishers Weekly Picture of the Day. Caption reads: On November 8, Steph Lau (r.) launched her new picture book, The Abominable Snow Dancer (Penguin Workshop), at Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, Calif. Joining Lau at the event were authors Mike Jung (c.) and Jo Wu (l.). Courtesy Jo Wu/Jerrold Connors. Jo is holding The Abominable Snow Dancer, Mike is wearing a unicorn hood with shiny gold horn, and Steph is wearing an Otto the Abominable Snow Dancer costume.

It's been 1 MONTH since my debut picture book ❄️🩰The Abominable Snow Dancer🩰❄️ launched. Highlights:

- 4 launch events + 1 school visit (and one more event still incoming!)
- Mychal Threets held my book (🤯!!!)
- Our smiling faces in PW Daily 😎
- Reading my book aloud makes me feel weirdly powerful 🪄👶

Santa sitting at a computer in his home looking at the kinds of gifts people are thinking about buying for kids. He comes across a listing for a mystical sword of fire. Santa's advanced computer monitor creates a projection of the sword above the screen. Santa is surprised and says, "The Flaming Sword of Handsomeus Ronicus? To be handled only by the Champions of Light after completing the Trials of Virtue?! Who is gifting this to kids?!" A reindeer nearby says, "Oh, yeah. Ages 300+ for that one. Says it on the box." The text reads: Someday your kids may complete the Trials and attain the Sword. Until then, you should buy age appropriate gifts for kids from retailers you know and trust.

Check your kid's list for the Flaming Sword of Handsomeus Ronicus.

A 3D printed model of The Flash, the DC superhero. Flash is in a running position. The plastic is currently grey but I will be painting it. The detail is incredible, like the lightning bolts on the boots and cowl.

He tells me that I look happy when we're together, and every time, I marvel at the fact that I am.

How could I not be, when I'm seeing someone who does things like 3D print the Flash for me because he knows I'll love it?

Happy and genuinely free to be myself. Never taking this for granted.

I just made a dinner reservation for 2 for my birthday in a couple of weeks and still can't believe that this is my life now? (positive)

We've been dating for a couple of months and life is just so much better than it was? I can't fully wrap my mind around it? I'm happy?? It's confusing.

This Giving Tuesday, every $1 you give to The Examination becomes $3. Triple your impact & power fearless journalism that names those profiting from sickness. Give today: theexamination.org/donate

ACTUALLY EYEL JUST PROVIDE THE LINKS DIRECTLY HERE:

TRANSGENDER EMERGENCY FUND OF MASSACHUSETTS
secure.everyaction.com/0zSUdT7YtEig...

MASSACHUSETTS TRANSGENDER POLITICAL COALITION
www.masstpc.org/donate/

TRANS YOUTH EMERGENCY PROJECT
southernequality.app.neoncrm.com/forms/37

TRANSGENDER LAW CENTER
transgenderlawcenter.org/donate/

My only consolation is that the time will fly by and a signed copy will be in my hands before I know it...

a man in a suit and tie is talking to another man who is saying give me it Alt: a man in a suit and tie is talking to another man who is saying give me it

Me, after reading these:

I closed my eyes and hit my keyboard, this is what it came up with: 8566237

So... 85, 66, 237?

It's Giving Tuesday, and all I can offer is a reminder.

If you're one of the millions of Americans who get coverage in an ACA marketplace, your rates could double soon.

Please don't let your plan auto-renew. And check out Charles' work to see if you can get a cheaper, comparable, or better plan.

remember that your ring doorbell starts using face recognition on every face it sees today :)

Repeating this one more time:

If you absolutely need home cameras and doorbell cams and such, Reolink devices can function 100% without any access to the internet.

Combine that with a Home Assistant server and the only one who can see what's on your cameras is you.

…Oh. Oh no. Oh no nonono. …And yet: of course.

"Gen AI" tells you the thing you are statistically most likely to accept so you keep using it— & research shows that most people who like "AI" like it *Because* it sycophantically tells them their ideas are great & should defs be implemented. So… Yeah.

Hey there Onion members, This is Ben Collins, CEO of America’s Finest News Source™. I am writing today, as we have arrived at a precipice in American life, to thank you. Our government is employing masked oafs to kidnap our neighbors, ziptie our children, and play Call of Duty: Burger King Edition in several American cities. The White House, otherwise occupied with taping an episode of HGTV’s “Help I Wrecked My House,” is hellbent on politically mandated starvation of the indigent. Worst of all, America’s airwaves have been taken over by dull throbbing moans only recently identified by scientists as something known as “Morgan Wallen.” In short, it is not a good time out there, and our captured media has been too scared to call that out. But, because of you, none of that is true at The Onion. For reasons we don’t like or understand, our work has become increasingly important. You and your contribution over the last year have allowed The Onion to thrive in this precarious moment — to take risks and to say sentences mere moments before those thoughts become criminalized. We need your help in the next year to bolster that fight as things get precipitously worse.

Because of your support, The Onion is now the 11th-most distributed newspaper in the United States, sandwiched between The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune. In the next year, our goal is to crack the top 10, and to surpass the circulation of the propaganda project of a notorious space pervert, Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post. We’re confident we can reach this goal with your help. Unlike other publications, which all appear to have a fetish for caving to an increasingly maniacal and unpopular authoritarian government, The Onion remains unafraid to print the truth, straightforwardly and without favor. Due to your patronage in the last year, we have: Published 13 newspapers since the relaunch of our print edition in September of 2024. Over the summer, by popular demand, we increased the size of the paper by half. Took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times “calling upon lawmakers in Congress to sit back and do absolutely nothing,” then sent this op-ed to every member of the House and Senate and all 54,000 of our subscribers. Thankfully, they took our advice, and now people are starving. Drove the Onion Newsvan in front of protests and ICE detention centers, blaring headlines about ICE’s one true love: teargassing elementary schools. Released Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile in over 40 cities across North America and later on YouTube, and let independent theatres keep the ticket sales. It’s still unclear if we can write this off.

And, a year ago this week, we successfully bid on InfoWars at a bankruptcy auction, before the judgment was overturned by a judge for — and I’m paraphrasing here — being too cool. Yes, despite a legal bill that rivals the GDP of West Virginia, we are continuing work to acquire InfoWars and evolve it into an galactically sized depot of lies, scams, and miracle cures for all of the world’s awesome new and untracked illnesses. The Supreme Court — yes, this Supreme Court — denied Alex Jones’ appeal just last month, a last gasp at evading justice, and we’re hoping this clears a path to reinventing the dumbest site on the internet very soon. So ahead of this holiday season, please consider subscribing to The Onion for yourself, your friends, your parents, or your infant. People love getting something great in the mail every month amidst their requisite bills and death threats. Look, we’re an independent company, we don’t use AI to write headlines and make art, and we’re one of roughly three publications who are up for the fight. Unlike other places, The Onion is quadrupling down on being a pain in the ass, politically. Are you? If so, I hope you’ll continue to be an Onion member, get the paper, and help us deliver ulcers to those who deserve it. Thank you, and Tu Stultus Es, Ben Collins CEO | The Onion

Here's a note I sent to our members about what we did with their money, and why we expect the Onion to outgrow the Washington Post.

We keep doing weird, hard shit — taunting ICE, yelling at Congress for not taunting ICE, buying bad websites — when nobody else does.

Our members keep getting papers.

Perry: The pro-Hitler problem with the American right "We need to get back to the basics: Hitler was bad. The people who suggest otherwise are also bad," David M. Perry writes.

Hitler was bad.

An essay that, you know, I didn’t think I’d need to write.

NYT headline saying "F.D.A. Attributes 10 Children’s Deaths to Covid Vaccines: The agency’s top vaccine regulator said that a review had found that the children were likely to have died “because of” the shots. But public health experts want to examine the data." With a photo of a light-skinned baby receiving a shot from a healthcare provider with darker skin.

Headlines like this are extremely dangerous. Because moms of young kids are the people who make the bulk of the vaccine decisions for famillies. And for a lot of them, "reading the news" looks like scrolling past headlines on social media in the spare moments of the chaos of caring for kids.

Lopez Belloza made it through security but was stopped as she was about to board the plane, Pomerleau said. "They wouldn't tell her why she was being detained. She didn't understand it at all," Pomerleau said. She was then taken to the Burlington ICE field office, then flown to Texas, Pomerleau said. The Department of Homeland Security and Babson College did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After a frantic 48-hour search, her family received a call from her on Saturday from Honduras, a country she had not lived in since she was a child. The federal government had quickly deported her, the lawyers said, and Lopez Belloza had found her way to her grandparents' house and called her father.

Imagine getting ready for your daughter to come home from her freshman year of college for Thanksgiving, and the day of departure she goes MIA, and then 48 nightmarish hours later she calls you to tell her that ICE goons kidnapped her and shipped her to Honduras www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/25/m...

Lot’s of small acts add up to making a BIG difference. Here’s a terrific thread on how you can help your local shops.

We know that, for a ton of reasons, a lot of folks don't have as much to spend as they'd like this holiday season. Sooooooo, here's a thread of things you can do that will support your local indie bookstore or other business WITHOUT spending any more than you intended...

busta rhymes on a float at the macy's thanksgiving parade with the ninja turtles

thanksgiving is a time for people to come together, to celebrate the spirit of unity despite our differences, and to demonstrate that, here is busta rhymes performing "break ya neck" with raphael the ninja turtle

I wish it didn’t feel so unusual and inspiring to see a leader treating everyone like they matter and saying that we have a responsibility to help each other

Message board with a poem; Gobble gobble Yummy yummy Get that turkey In my tummy

I wrote a lil poem, happy Thanksgiving 🦃

Lil Jon singing Turn Down for What while Geoffrey the Giraffe dances behind him on the Toys R Us float.

You can't make this up. Macy's parade, best parade.

Combatting poverty and hunger in this city will take every single one of us. Myself included.

Al Roker and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jamming out to Busta Rhymes was the hilarity I didn't know I needed today. I love this parade 😂

Nothing says Thanksgiving like Shaggy on a golden turkey singing “It Wasn’t Me.”