Christine Howard

I know many people are exhorting you to read many things right now—but please, if you’ve ever cared even the tiniest bit about the English language, read this.

A straight line can be drawn from the ignorant redefinition of "nonplussed" and "bemused" through the entire Real Housewives franchise and on to where we are now, and it is a straight line of shame and ignominy.

Once again, as with all of the other things, the executive branch cannot unilaterally do this. It’s illegal.

And again, they’ll get away with it, because Article I of the constitution has completely failed & Congress is full of oath-violating cowards

Here’s what we did today

I have to wonder how reporting on all this would differ if our newsrooms hadn’t been gutted over the past couple of decades.

APLU Statement on Cuts to Reimbursement of NIH Facilities & Administrative Costs - APLU Washington, DC – APLU President Mark Becker released the following statement on the National Institutes of Health’s announcement it will cut reimbursement of research facilities and administrative cos...

From Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities: “NIH slashing the reimbursement of research costs will slow and limit medical breakthroughs that cure cancer and address chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.”
www.aplu.org/news-and-med...

Deep Cuts to Medical Research Funds Could Hobble University Budgets Grants from the National Institutes of Health come with additional money for overhead. Proposed funding cuts would leave colleges with large budget gaps.

If you’re not familiar with the importance of grant indirect costs to research universities, this is an excellent short introduction. The even shorter version: indirects are essential to keep the lights on and the doors open. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/u...

The NIH capping the indirect cost rate (IDC) for grants at 15% can best be described as a direct assault on Universities. It’s such a bureaucratic, innocuous sounding thing that actually means that research universities will be kneecapped. Thousands of employees across the US will lose their jobs.

The Words of the Week - Feb. 7 Dictionary lookups from the trade wars, the Grammy Awards, and the high seas

These are your words of the week
genre
ethnic cleansing
doge
potash
tariff
coup
Ahabian
www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the...

What a perfectly glorious photograph.

How I’d like to go back and have a word with my snotty college self who met outrage about NEA decisions with “why would you expect government-funded art to be anything but boring propaganda?”

I’m off to bake some billionaire’s stollen!

A federal court just blocked Elon Musk from interfering with the federal government’s payments system.

There is power in fighting back. We won’t let up until this block is permanent.

point out, it is also unworkable. (See Dkt. No. 69-1 at 17.) The recordkeeping and administrative burden from such an arrangement, (see id.), ' also mandates nationwide relief. Nor is it clear what, if any, prejudice the Government would suffer from nationwide relief. In its brief in opposition, it points to none. (See Dkt. No. 84 at 57-59). For all these reasons, the Court finds that relief must be nationwide. Anything less is ineffectual. III. CONCLUSION Citizenship by birth is an unequivocal Constitutional right. It is one of the precious principles that makes the United States the great nation that it is. The President cannot change, limit, or qualify this Constitutional right via an executive order. The Court GRANTS the i Plaintiffs' motions for a nationwide preliminary injunction (Dkt Nos, 63, 74) and ENJOINS enforcement or implementation of the Order on a nationwide basis.

Birthright citizenship remains the law of the land. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

“Punitive cuddles” is my new favorite phrase.

Every. Single. Post.

My internal editor is fierce.

Adorable calico kitten sprawled on a hardwood floor at the top of a carpeted staircase. A toy shaped like a UFO is on the top stair.

The kitten has been super extra adorable the last few days, as if she’s actively trying to distract us from the implosion of everything.

(She’s waiting for her next game of fetch here—she loves to chase her UFO toy down the stairs.)

If you're considering Trump's federal employee buyout, know that you deserve better than to have a billionaire with no real understanding of what you do, come in, belittle your work, & try to push you out the door—whether you're a food safety inspector or an air traffic controller.

Me too.

Also realizing I had completely forgotten how I used to have a custom ringtone for each of my people.

Beautiful but intense calico staring up from a grey stone floor.

Thank you! Would you care for a cat in return?

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States WASHINGTON—Putting the nation on alert against what it has described as a “highly credible terrorist threat,” the FBI announced today that it has uncovered a plot by members of al-Qaeda to sit back an...

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States

Staff too.

Maintain your sanity, friends. Maintain your joy and peace while you continue to put your back into the work that needs doing.

Highly recommended reading—this, more than anything else I’ve read, sets out the distressing, almost-impossible-to-take-in truth of where we are now.

Oh, yes—tons and tons of cousins and descendants, but still I love these links to history.

Yes. And it’s not just the devastating effects on research projects and faculty—losing the facilities and administrative cost reimbursement that’s built into federal grant proposals would have a huge impact on research universities’ operations funding.

Yes, although I’m mostly studying Swedish so I suppose it’s reasonable to expect a certain percentage of the sentences to be along the lines of “Ingrid’s death came very suddenly.”

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

Two versions, ten minutes, and one lively marital discussion about commas later, I have posted a ten-word skeet reply employing quotation marks.

Comment Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

You say “Marie of Roumania,” my brain answers “Dorothy Parker.”

poets.org/poem/comment