The agonizing long tail of disaster recovery is underexplored. I think a lot about this 2024 study finding that when a hurricane hits somewhere in the U.S., the people there are more likely to die *for the next 15 years*. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article) A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

Gift article about the across-the-board *slowdown* in federal funding for science - on ALL the topics. But especially for up-and-coming scientists.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/... 🎁

Large Language Models As The Tales That Are Sung Gene Wolfe, Albert Lord, machine culture.

www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-lang... The complicated relationship between LLMs and the oral tradition.

Trump Pauses All Asylum Applications and Halts Visas for Afghans

NEW: The New York Times got a State Dept. cable telling diplomats to destroy visas that had been approved and printed to give to Afghans. And diplomats are told to do scheduled interviews but not grant visas. US shuts all legal entry routes for Afghans. Our story: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/u...

USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, accord...

Elon Musk and the Trump administration gleefully shutting down USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”

People throw around terms like genocide quite freely online but it’s hard to find other words to describe this level of man-made death.

Puberty blockers: why politicians overriding doctors sets a dangerous precedent The government’s ban on puberty blockers undermines clinical expertise and targets trans youth with a policy that lacks evidence, consistency and fairness.

This is very good. Clear, calm, factual, and devastating for proponents of bans on puberty blockers for trans youth.

theconversation.com/puberty-bloc...

Brexit Hit to UK Economy Double Official Estimate, Study Finds Brexit has caused almost twice as much damage to the UK economy than estimated by official forecasts, according to new paper from a group of experts including a senior Bank of England economist.

Brexit has caused almost twice as much damage to the UK economy than estimated by official forecasts, according to new paper from a group of experts including a senior Bank of England economist

This is the first story I ever did that got more than a million views

“Ticking Time Bomb”: A Pregnant Mother Kept Getting Sicker. She Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion in Texas. Walker is one of several women ProPublica found with underlying health conditions who died when they couldn’t access abortions.

NEW: ProPublica has found multiple cases of women with underlying health conditions who died when they couldn’t access abortions.

Tierra Walker, a 37-year-old mother, was told by doctors there was no emergency before preeclampsia killed her.

Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act 1990-2020, the Second Prospective Study | US EPA In March 2011, EPA issued the Second Prospective Report which looked at the results of the Clean Air Act from 1990 to 2020 to assess the benefits and the costs of the entire Clean Air Act.

Clean Air Act study: “Our central benefits estimate exceeds costs by a factor of more than 30 to one, and the high benefits estimate exceeds costs by 90 times” www.epa.gov/clean-air-ac...

US funding cuts imperil global efforts to eliminate cervical cancer | CNN Maina Modu, an immunization officer in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, lost his wife, Hauwa, to cervical cancer in 2011. She was one of the 349,000 women globally who die from the preventable canc...

86 million girls were vaccinated as part of a campaign led by Gavi. Its HPV vaccination program is a key piece of WHO's global strategy to put cervical cancer on a path to elimination. But the pace of its progress is now under threat after unexpected funding cuts by the US government.

“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops After reviewing coverage from the network and hours of social media videos that preceded Trump’s decision, ProPublica found that Fox’s portrayal of “Portland rioters” routinely instigating violence wa...

NEW: 2020 footage said to be in 2025. A neighbor who keeps reappearing in the same clip, said to be on different days & months. A broadcast from elsewhere suggested as Portland.

How Fox News misled its viewership -- which may have included the president.

www.propublica.org/article/port...

Have that bardo pond on vinyl and it is a beautiful listen. Wanting that windy and carl for christmas

What do you think an ICE agent does after a full workday of snatching parents away from their children? Maybe they unwind by plucking the wings off of bats, or leaving out bowls of antifreeze for pets, before gooning to a simultaneous play of Hotel Rwanda and Come and See, muttering "I'm a good guy"

Your Cheat Sheet to the 2025 General Elections - Bolts Four contests have come to largely define the 2025 elections this fall: the elections to lead New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City, plus California’s redistricting measure. But there’s so... Read M...

My cheat sheet to election night now has roughly 100 results from elections up and down the ballot, to the governor races you know about to the startling Democratic sweeps in Pennsylvania school boards.

Don't miss stuff! boltsmag.org/whats-on-the...

U.S. citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents about children gathering at bus stop, lawyers say Lawyers for Carlos Jimenez said he was in fear after an agent threatened him with chemical spray, then pointed a gun at him.

US citizen shot from behind as he warned ICE agents children would be coming to get bus, lawyers say

Bc of our kids, we decorate for halloween which my fam didnt do at all and our kids love it. Halloween thru christmas pipeline is a fantastical time of year for the kids and yeah it's a lot of work

A United States that is disintegrating and no longer a leader in Asia As Trump 2.0 hollows out US state capacity, the Asia Pacific must prepare for a world without US leadership

Want to read what I really think about the Trump administration and the Asia Pacific? Here you go. It’s a goddamn catastrophe for U.S. national interests and for the regional economic and diplomatic order.

Ah, sorry, missed it.

The people running zbmed in germany are going tbrough funding approval to essentially set up a pubmed mirror/replacement in the case pubmed falls apart

Yeah im not thrilled with it and we have a business account

It then wants to reclassify everything according to the new criteria it developed bc it now thinks this initial classification is wrong!

Ive run into the problem w copilot that if i ask it to classify certain kinds of studies (clinical, observational, experimental, etc) and then innocently ask it to explain one of the classifications, it assumes im being critical, says it made an error (even when it didnt!)

JD Vance claims that diversity weakens unions, as people end up distrusting each other and not organizing.

Let me tell you two menswear stories related to this claim. 🧵

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Why AI Breaks Bad Once in a while, LLMs turn evil—and no one quite knows why.

Once in a while, LLMs turn evil—and no one quite knows why.

but are there emps

Fuck this in particular

New @nberpubs: "The Ripple Effects of China’s College Expansion on American Universities" www.nber.org/papers/w34391
"Chinese master’s students generated positive spillovers, driving the birth of new master’s programs, and increasing the number of other international and American master’s students"

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.