Bill Levine

The Language Processing Lab at the University of Arkansas is recruiting a PhD student to start in the fall of 2026. Our lab examines the basic cognitive processes involved in understanding written text, mostly fiction while being read by skilled adult readers, with an emphasis on reference comprehension, inferences, and negation, among other topics. We use multiple behavioral methods, including priming tasks, reaction time, self-paced reading, and eye-tracking. The University of Arkansas PhD program has a growing group of cognitive psychologists, with several labs in the department investigating memory, creativity, and other aspects of cognition. Funding is through teaching and research assistantships. The university also has generous fellowships available for competitive applicants.

My lab is recruiting PhD students for fall 2026. Please reach out if interested!

this is a far more explicit death threat from people with the actual means to carry it out

Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid, express regret • Kansas Reflector A handful of county-level officials who were involved in a small-town Kansas newspaper raid in 2023 will pay a cumulative $3 million to three journalists and a city councilor.

Breaking: Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid, express regret kansasreflector.com/2025/11/11/m...

Auburn University requires faculty to review courses to comply with anti-DEI law Auburn's provost office posted a web site on how to comply with state and federal DEI mandates on Oct. 31.

Disturbing news out of Auburn University, where the admin is pressuring professors to sign a statement saying they're complying with an "anti-DEI" law and TPUSA is holding a rally and trying to record classes.

I hear faculty are terrified to sign, worried this is a pretense for mass firings.

Awful: Pentagon officials told lawmakers Trump now claims authority to bomb people merely “affiliated” with “narco-terrorist" groups, Rep Adam Smith tells me. But under questioning, they wouldn't say what “affiliated” even means!

Lots of fresh info in my new piece:

newrepublic.com/article/2025...

NEW: There’s a disaster unfolding in Alaska right now. And no major network is covering it.

The remnants of Typhoon Halong battered western Alaska overnight. Homes, with people in them, have literally been swept into the Bering Strait.

At least 20 are missing. No comment from any federal agency.

The only violence I’ve been seeing in Portland is from the so-called Feds!!!

Keep sharing these videos; it’s evidence.

President Donald Trump's threatened crackdown on the finances and activities of liberal non-profits and groups opposed to his agenda is a multi-agency effort with top White House aide Stephen Miller playing a central role, according to officials.

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

It’s important to flood social media and news channels with news about how ICE lies, so that potential jurors see it.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

The #NSFGRFP solicitation is out. Deadlines are pushed to Nov. 10, 12, 13, 14. However, 2ND-YEAR GRADUATE STUDENTS ARE NO LONGER ELIGIBLE. This is unfair to those who delayed applying or who withdrew last year due to missing letters (please contact me if this is you).
www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Page 1: Flyer from The Heritage Foundation Oversight Project titled “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism (TIVE): Background and FAQs on Need for an FBI Domestic Terrorism Designation.” The page defines “Transgender Ideology” and “TIVE,” outlining beliefs allegedly associated with them. It claims such ideology justifies violence against opponents or frames opposition as violence. The text references the alleged assassination of Charlie Kirk, urging the FBI to classify TIVE as domestic terrorism.

Page 2: Continuation of flyer with a section titled “Recent Instances of TIVE-Motivated Acts of Domestic Terrorism.” Lists multiple violent events from 2018 to 2025, attributing them to transgender ideology. Includes mugshots of two alleged attackers. Followed by a “Frequently Asked Questions and Key Terms” section, addressing whether transgender people are terrorists, comparing TIVE with “Nihilistic Violent Extremism,” and discussing FBI designations.

Page 3: Flyer continues with questions about Antifa and FBI terrorism classifications. States that Antifa and TIVE are separate categories. Lists ways the FBI classifies domestic terrorism and identifies typical characteristics of “TIVEs,” such as targeting Christians, mental illness, and online radicalization. Includes images: a “Trans Antifa” logo, a pink-blue-white-striped slogan image reading “Protect Their Right to Exist,” a photo of Audrey Hale with a firearm, and a close-up of a magazine with the words “Where is your God?”

Page 4: Section titled “Terminology Used by TIVE.” Defines terms including cisgender, deadnaming, Gillick competence, misgendering, “Right to Exist,” “Trans genocide,” and a phrase “You either have a live boy or dead girl, you choose.” Each is presented as terminology used in or associated with TIVE. Page layout is text-heavy, no additional graphics.

Heritage Foundation has released an absolutely insane policy proposal to label all trans people as domestic terrorists. It uses completely made up instances of terrorism and made up statistics but facts don't matter to them.

They want us all eradicated.

A screenshot of a repost by Elon Musk of a tweet from Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog). The tweet reads: “Transgenderism is a death cult. The largest, most well funded, and deranged death cult that this country has ever seen.”

They're going to keep going until they get trans people killed. They want trans people murdered en mass.

The Wall Street Journal needs to issue a full retraction and apology to the trans community for this. Nothing less will suffice. They put us all in danger and recklessly put out incorrect information.

Putin is an authoritarian who won his last election with 87% of the vote and murdered his main political rival.

Ensuring evidence-based health care for children and teenagers identifying as transgender: The state of the scientific literature regarding optimal care and support approaches for children and teenagers identifying as transgender and those diagnosed with gender dysphoria is described in the recent HHS review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria . In accordance with these data, there are clearly more promising avenues of research that can be taken to improve the health of these populations than to conduct studies that involve the use of puberty suppression, hormone therapy, or surgical intervention to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence in minors. By contrast, research that aims to identify and treat the harms these therapies and procedures have potentially caused to minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence, and how to best address the needs of these individuals so that they may live long, healthy lives is more promising.

Well, it's Fustilarian Friday again and the NIH director does not disappoint with his new Statement of NIH Priorities. Despite a cover letter promising that his has made it his lifelong mission to resists any form of political influence on science, the document includes this abomination.

DC police are using excessive force against Black people

I spent about 1/3 of my waking hours as a kid across the street at the Irving Park Y and had no idea that this building had an interesting history. My excuse is that I was a kid. Thanks for posting this!

Same. It's so weirdly calming.

I wish as many people wanted to actually click on Teen Vogue stories as like a post about our work being good and important, because this post is almost at 20k likes and that would be pretty good traffic!

I don't say this lightly: The New York Times should fire the reporter and editor who chose to present a leak from the white house as if it was a leak from Harvard.

Don't print lies in the newspaper

He's promising to protect the integrity of the data by firing statisticians who follow established methods of data collection and processing whenever those methods yield numbers that don't please the boss.

Needed to last night. The lavatories didn't work. Way to go, American. Enjoy the social media chuckles.

The NIH’s 2024 budget of just under $37B generated $95B in economic activity in 2024 alone. 99.4% of new pharmaceuticals approved from 2010-2019 came from NIH-funded research. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that generates as much direct economic benefit as our NIH did before they destroyed it

* REUTERS POLL -- NEARLY 90% ECONOMISTS, 89 OF 100, SAY THEY ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE QUALITY OF OFFICIAL U.S. ECONOMIC DATA, INCLUDING 41 SAYING VERY CONCERNED

@reuters.com

Nashville Banner: Pregnant Mother in Tennessee Denied Care for Being Unmarried

Forget about what year it is. What century is it?

nashvillebanner.com/2025/07/20/d...

“It Just Feels Like Death”: Barrage of New Rules Target Arkansas Ballot Initiatives Faced with popular initiatives to protect abortion rights and other measures they dislike, state Republicans are passing new bills that local advocates say will hollow out direct democracy.

In Arkansas, organizers working on ballot initiatives already face a mountain of technical rules to satisfy — down to the color of ink that notaries must use on petitions. The state this spring made the obstacle course even tougher. boltsmag.org/new-rul...

The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”

NEW: Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”

Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues A journal has retracted 16 papers after a whistleblower flagged it for “irregularities” in peer review, among other concerns.  The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, a Springer Nature title…

retractionwatch.com/2025/06/17/s...