Dan Vergano

On the Media The Peabody Award-winning On the Media podcast is your guide to examining how the media sausage is made. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger examine threats to free speech and government transparency, cast a skeptical eye on media coverage of the week’s big stories and unravel hidden political narratives in everything we read, watch and hear.

“Media capture,” is a phrase scholars have been using to describe the phenomena of public interests losing possession of the press to political and corporate players. @victorpickard.bsky.social on why the American system was set up to be snatched away from the start lnk.to/onthemedia/b...

I've made a new starter pack of people to follow for news and commentary on Iran.

Got the idea from a request by @kakape.bsky.social

People are going to yell and be assholes today because they're upset. Not telling you how to respond! Just reminding you (and by you, I mean me) in advance that it's going to happen. 99% of cases won't really be about the thing you said or wrote. They're just furious, and you happened to be there.

Politics & Policy | PSO Policy Research Journal | Wiley Online Library This review article analyzes two pertinent and related works by Marcel Dirsus, How Tyrants Fall, and Hal Brands, The Eurasian Century, to investigate how contemporary authoritarian governments utiliz...

"the ways regimes crumble from within, even when they appear outwardly sturdy and technologically equipped"
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
"digital armor of authoritarian regimes conceals profound structural vulnerabilities. Surveillance may suppress dissent, but it cannot forge legitimacy"

Anthropic responds to Hegseth. www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

The U.S. just surpassed a grim measles milestone As the U.S. officially breaks 1,000 measles cases in 2026, experts say that the rate of infections is accelerating much faster this year than it did in years past

The U.S. has reported more than 1,000 measles cases in 2026—and we're just two months into the year. That's nearly half of all the cases reported in 2025. And public health experts say it's a sign that the U.S. has likely lost its measles elimination status. My reporting for @sciam.bsky.social:

Opinion | Casey Means' Cringey Senate Hearing Should Sink Her Surgeon General Bid The nominee revealed her fundamental confusion between individual healthcare and public health

Casey Means' Cringey Senate Hearing Should Sink Her Surgeon General Bid — The nominee revealed her fundamental confusion between individual healthcare and public healthhttps://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/120089

Here’s the full clip @whyshoulditrustyou.bsky.social

The announcement of the new upper stage for SLS seems to have blindsided the people actually building the rocket.

No work whatsoever has been done on actually designing and integrating this stage with the SLS rocket, not even a basic feasibility study.

TESS confirms what we saw with Kepler and K2 - on average, ***every single small red star has a planet around it***! And a short-period one at that (<30 days).

And you know what the galaxy is mostly made of?

Small red stars.

PLANETS. PLANETS EVERYWHERE!!!

Happy weekend pondering that, everyone.

Private money cannot replace public funding of science Who should pay for American science? In the current political climate, many are looking to the private sector to compensate for cuts in public funding. At the Harvard School of Public Health—particula...

"Private money cannot replace public funding of science"
Thank you @naomioreskes.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🧪 🌊 ⚒️ #scipol

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

The New CBS Is A Clown Show The denigration of CBS is best viewed as just part of a broader effort by oligarchs to create a propaganda-coddled permanent autocracy, propped up by a broad array of highly-paid, useful idiots.

Bari Weiss was hired to create authentic-seeming ratings-grabbing agitprop for the extraction class, but she's genuinely not competent enough to pull it off

the same fate awaits CNN, which is already broadly terrible after years of mismanagement

"All of [the boys] were Black, and researchers believe many actually died because they were overworked, underfed and denied proper care."

These changes to Artemis are in the right direction, but it really feels to me like they're redesigning a bridge over a gorge on the fly as they're standing on it. This whole program has been a mess since Day 1, with fuzzy goals and way more politics than engineering.

The Wandering Physicist | Alec Wilkinson Luis Alvarez brought a scientific pragmatism to many of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries, including the secrets of pyramids, the Kennedy assassination, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs...

Alec Wilkinson on why the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez never met a problem he didn’t try to solve

NASA lost a lunar spacecraft one day after launch. A new report details what went wrong Why did a $72 million mission to study water on the moon fail so soon after launch? A new NASA report has the answer.

NASA lost a lunar spacecraft one day after launch. A new report details what went wrong

www.npr.org/2026/02/26/n...

Trump’s surgeon general pick, Casey Means, still lacks votes for confirmation Two Republican senators told POLITICO they were undecided after Means faced tough questions on her vaccine views at a nomination hearing.

Trump’s surgeon general pick, Casey Means, still lacks votes for confirmation

Two Republican senators told POLITICO they were undecided after Means faced tough questions on her vaccine views at a nomination hearing
www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Sex between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans tended to follow a specific pattern Interbreeding between Neandertals and ancient anatomically modern humans primarily occurred between male Neandertals and female humans, a new study suggests

Interbreeding between Neandertals and ancient anatomically modern humans primarily occurred between male Neandertals and female humans, a new study suggests

Why Biden-era clean energy investment policies had limited political returns | PNAS The Biden Administration enacted the largest federal policy framework to incentivize clean energy and decarbonization in U.S. history. We examine w...

Fascinating new research paper asks: why did Biden receive so little political credit for his enormous investments in manufacturing? Turns out people give all the credit to governors (ironically, in this case, mostly red-state governors who were hostile to the policy!).

Secretly rewritten nuclear safety rules are made public The Energy Department made the rules public a month after NPR reported about their existence. The rules slash requirements for security and environmental protections.

SCOOP: The Department of Energy has made public a set of newly revised nuclear safety rules that slash security and environmental protections.

@npr.org first reported on the existence of the rules last month.

www.npr.org/2026/02/26/n...

We now know the full scale of Trump’s federal workforce cuts - The Boston Globe Amid President Trump’s bureaucracy-slashing directives, the federal workforce shrunk by about nearly 10 percent in 2025.

We now know the full scale of Trump’s federal workforce cuts

Amid the Trump administration’s bureaucracy-slashing directives, the federal workforce shrunk by about 220,000 people in 2025.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/26/n...

Hey space people, I'm looking for an expert with good technical knowledge of Rocket Lab's Neutron rocket – particularly on the reusability/constellation aspect – to comment in a story I'm working on.

If that's you, or you know someone, do get in touch.

jdaoca[at]gmail[dot]com

Thanks!

Unmasking Academe’s Gilded Boys’ Club The Epstein files reveal an elite, chummy, and venal scholarly network.

"Within a trove of millions of pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, a notorious sex offender whose wealth and connections proved alluring to academics in search of money, women in higher ed are seeing evidence that supports a story they know all too well." www.chronicle.com/article/unma...

"… turning a blind eye to malfeasance in our ranks gives the public legitimate reason to distrust our work." Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University

As the U.S. doubles down on glyphosate, a widely cited study asserting its safety has been retracted after it was discovered the paper was ghostwritten by Monsanto employees.

This incident, and ghostwriting in general, harms scientific integrity, writes Naomi Oreskes. https://scim.ag/4rIIu4a

Introductions to women. Free flights. Business deals. Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Harvard run deeper than previously known. - The Boston Globe Some of Epstein’s ties to the school were hiding in plain sight, yet Harvard officials missed or looked past them during their 2019 probe.

The Epstein files mention Harvard University more than 12,000 times.

A new Boston Globe Spotlight Team report found that Jeffrey Epstein's ties to the country’s most revered academic institution ran deeper than previously known.

WSJ editorial board: A Vaccine Skeptic as Surgeon General /Casey Means won’t restore confidence in public-health advice.

on.wsj.com/4czbB5h gift link @wsj.com

How to avoid inappropriate dental antibiotics

Going to the dentist is unavoidable. But getting an antibiotic prescription from the dentist isn't. Part 3 of a 3-part series on potential harms from taking antibiotics for dental procedures.

www.cidrap.umn.edu/a...

Read-out of Majorana qubits reveals their hidden nature – Physics World Mechanism could pave the way for more robust quantum computation, but questions remain over scalability

Scientists @qutech.bsky.social and @icmm-csic.bsky.social have succeeded in reading out the parity of a system of Majorana zero modes – an important step towards making these protected qubits a viable #quantum computing platform. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/read-out-o...

U.S. science agency moves to restrict foreign scientists from its labs Proposed rule at National Institute of Standards and Technology would limit access to a few years for international researchers and students

U.S. science agency moves to restrict foreign scientists from its labs | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪