Excerpts

Excerpts

More judges speak to the press (the NYT) about what a disaster the Supreme Court (specifically the shadow docket) has been - “incredibly demoralizing & troubling”; a “judicial crisis”; a “slap in the face to district courts.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

The Cass Review Continues To Be Severely Flawed A new paper from an Australian team shines a light on the problems with the review

The Cass review into children's gender services in the UK continues to be terrible.

A new report from Australia led by the fantastic Dr. Julia Moore - and featuring me - looks into the issues in detail.

My new piece.

gidmk.substack.com/p/the-cass-r...

How are they so wrong. I work in (academic) publishing and no one says it that way

Trump’s Immigration Push Diverts U.S. Agents From Drug, Money and Sex-Crime Cases Federal investigators are resigning, and morale is low, as they juggle complex cases and detain migrants.

“A federal team in El Paso that once pursued child traffickers has been disbanded.

“A task force in Kansas focused on stemming fentanyl has been redirected.

“Highway checkpoints near the border—on roads identified as major drug-trafficking routes—have gone unstaffed”

🎁
www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

The retconning of George Floyd: a coda A response to Coleman Hughes and Avak Howsepian

Hughes eventually responded in what Weiss called the longest article they've ever published. And his response, they had to know I was going to parse, was also riddled with easily checkable errors.

radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retcon...

Changes at NIH Give Political Appointees Greater Power To Fund or Block Research - KFF Health News The National Institutes of Health’s long-held standard of peer review for grantmaking has been subverted by President Donald Trump and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who gave unprecedented power to po...

IMO this hasn't gotten enough attention: a recent memo at NIH announces that peer review will be devalued in determining which grants get funded, granting more power to political appointees to make decisions based on the admin's whims over scientific merit

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

The Billionaire Behind Trump’s Deal for Universities

the usual story. rich guy wants to punish universities for not clamping down on pro-palestinian protests and for doing too much to recruit minorities. at base these guys want the top tier of american universities to become, once more, safe-spaces for their dunderheaded failsons

Trump officials discussed sending elite Army division to Portland, text messages show A high-ranking White House official was indiscreetly texting about the Portland, Ore., planning last weekend, according to messages shared with the Minnesota Star Tribune.

The messages show high-level officials in the Trump administration discussing the possible deployment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, an infantry force that has dropped into combat zones in both World Wars, Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Lucrative hate: YouTubers target migrant hotels for clicks YouTubers are cashing in by harassing asylum seekers at hotels, turning human misery into profitable, divisive entertainment

Hotels housing migrants are now YouTube content farms. Outrage = clicks. Clicks = cash: £10k–£20k a month, just for filming cruelty. Division is the business model.

Details here ⤵️

@eastangliabylines.co.uk @owensennitt.bsky.social

Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...

A new paper in The Lancet, one of the world’s foremost peer reviewed medical journals, estimates that USAID prevented 91 million deaths across 133 countries over 20 years.

The paper estimates that Elon Musk’s DOGE funding cuts to USAID will lead to 14 million deaths by 2030 (4.5 million children).

Fear and Hope in Venezuela as U.S. Warships Lurk

Article:

Data manipulation within the US Federal Government A US Department of Veterans Affairs dataset compiling veteran health-care use in 2021 was quietly amended on March 5, 2025. A column titled gender was renamed sex, and the words were also switched in ...

"Data manipulation by the US Gov...makes crucial datasets untrustworthy and unusable. If the US Government secretly changes datasets for political reasons, researchers relying on the data might erroneously recommend ineffective or counterproductive interventions."
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

The Free Speech Crisis for Black Americans Is Worse Than You Think Don’t let Jimmy Kimmel’s return fool you: Black academics are more frightened of talking to the press than I’ve ever seen.

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, HBCUs received terroristic threats. Black students have been expelled or forced to withdraw. Black professors and teachers have been fired and placed on leave. A Black firefighter was placed on leave. A Black journalist was fired

thebarbedwire.com/2025/09/26/f...

1 week after deadly shooting at CDC, some employees feel Trump and RFK Jr. have moved on In the days after a deadly shooting, CDC employees said they feel frustrated with federal leaders due to a lack of statements and for the peddling of vaccine skepticism.

A police officer was killed in the attack on the CDC by an antivaxxer. Trump did not mention it. Use this as a benchmark to compare how the Trump administration responds to an attack on an ICE facility to judge which federal employees are deemed worth protecting.
abcnews.go.com/US/1-week-af...

Who Really Runs DHS? Kristi Noem is the face of Trump’s police state. Corey Lewandowski is the muscle.

So many crazy details in Ben Terris's story about Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski, who we can confirm are not only dating but running DHS together: nymag.com/intelligence...

Judith Butler is being targeted by the US government. We must stand up | Joel Swanson What is happening to Judith Butler – a Jewish intellectual – in the name of fighting ‘antisemitism’ is outrageous

"In the name of 'fighting antisemitism', the Trump administration is publicly making an example out of arguably the most famous Jewish public intellectual in the country today."

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Opinion | Eric Adams, Donald Trump and the Case That Broke American Justice

Maybe all of this gets resolved in a Kamala Harris DOJ. But that's not what happened. When Trump made Eric Adams' case go away, he functionally killed a whole bunch of other corruption probes, too.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/o...

Charlie Kirk Sept 27 2024: "Just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night - it's only gonna get worse - unless Donald Trump wins
There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama and they will become your masters"

The kids are alright?

Young US citizens are struggling to find work. This seems to be due to a hiring freeze, not because AI is replacing graduates

secure.ubs.com/global/en/we...

#EconSky

Early dropoff in girls' school sports linked to new gender confirmation forms Province's new requirements are already having impacts on girls' sports in junior high

Fewer girls are playing sports after govt erected barriers for girls to play sports.
edmontonjournal.com/news/local-n...

Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Assault Destroys U.S. Families and Communities YouTube video by Representative Pramila Jayapal

Starting at 8:30 EST, @immcouncil.org’s own @naynagupta.bsky.social will be testifying at a shadow hearing held by Congressional Democrats on the impact of Trump’s mass deportation policies. Check it out! www.youtube.com/live/m47GZMk...

The UK’s problems aren’t caused by immigration [FREE TO READ] It’s not hard to see how so many came to worry about the issue. But the data isn’t there

faintly ridiculous that @timharford.ft.com has to spend his time pointing out the obvious, but here we are

on.ft.com/3VWYtgs

D and G are correct

An $85 Billion Railroad Merger is in the works. No one’s happy about it. In late July, Union Pacific announced their plans to merge with Norfolk Southern in a megadeal that would create nation’s first transcontinental railroad. No one’s happy about it.

In late July, Union Pacific announced their plans to merge with Norfolk Southern in a megadeal that would create nation’s first transcontinental railroad. No one's happy about it.

'So Vile': MAGA Maniacs Go After Black Professor After She Says Charlie Kirk and His Followers Terrorized Her for Months "Black professor targeted by MAGA extremists for speaking out against Charlie Kirk's online harassment campaign. Her courageous stance is...

"“For weeks, my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: ‘bitch,’ ‘c*nt,’ ‘n****r.’ They threatened all manner of violence,” Patton described. “They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office 1/2

What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic...

This is an archived government report that found that “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.”

It existed yesterday and is gone today.

US rightwing group targets academics with Professor Watchlist Turning Point USA’s list gains fresh attention after it expands and some notice it disproportionately names academics of color

Not an isolated incident either
www.theguardian.com/education/20...

"Now an extraordinarily successful scientific research system — one that took decades to build, has saved millions of lives and generated billions of dollars in profits for American companies and investors — is being dismantled before our eyes."