Aatish Bhatia

Giving the gift of independent journalism: a guide The Handbasket has subscription suggestions for almost everyone on your list.

NEW — I put together a list of independent journalism subscriptions that would make great holiday gifts. From music to politics, astronomy to alcohol, tech to social justice, there’s something for [almost] everyone. Support indie media *and* surprise and delight your loved ones!

My guide:

"A squircle is a shape intermediate between a square and a circle." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle

It's today! Come to the Science Comics Carousel from 1-2PM for my visual exploration of thinking and perceiving. I do a lot of thinking about how we think about science! My comic BRAINS is a love letter to the brain and how thinking for yourself is beautiful. See you soon @massmice.bsky.social!

An indecipherable collection of diagrams of overlapping circles and curves in 3 colors.

Why do math diagrams on wikipedia look like this? I can't imagine what the author hoped to communicate here.

A page from the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg that reads: Introduction Let the Problem of the Mind Dissolve in Your Mind This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them. I have been dealing for many years with certain structures within animal brains that seemed to be interpretable as pieces of computing machinery because of their simplicity and/or regularity. Much

They really don't write textbook introductions like they used to...

THE COURT: Okay. Case settled? MS. CONROY: Unfortunately no, your Honor. THE COURT: Rats.

Reading old court transcripts and, I mean, whomst

Top quality poetic opening

Thanks Noam! Your data journalism has genuinely been essential this year.

be the bitch doing something yourself that you want to see in the world

I am so thankful for this reporting, it has been so hard to explain to non-scientists how these changes have impacted us and this does a great job.

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.

While the administration has said it is cutting “woke programs” that “poison the minds of Americans", it actually funded fewer grants in every area of science and medicine.

“They brought everything to a stop,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the N.I.H.’s National Cancer Institute

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.

In my last story on staff at the Times, my colleagues and I analyzed over a decade of federal science funding and interviewed many federal employees to identify all of the science that went unfunded this year. Here's a paywall-free link:

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.

While the administration has said it is cutting “woke programs” that “poison the minds of Americans", it actually funded fewer grants in every area of science and medicine.

“They brought everything to a stop,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the N.I.H.’s National Cancer Institute

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.

@aatishb.bsky.social got me on the record. “My colleagues did an outstanding job to work their butts off to approve things.” I swear it's true. It's still true at #NIH.

India’s Desert State Reignites Coal-Fired Power Debate The competitive cost of batteries is making clean energy a viable alternative to coal in parts of the country.

The Indian state of Rajasthan produces more solar than any other. It has rejected a 3.2 GW coal power plant, because the bids to build it were more expensive than bundling renewables with batteries.

🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Sharon Lee De La Cruz | Substack Storyteller, mainly known for my comics.

Wanting a space that is more visually inclined but not instagram….so I’m trying Substack out! substack.com/@sharonleede...

“Displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property,” said Art Carter, California Regional Multiple Listing Service’s chief executive officer. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

I learned this folding technique yesterday, so I had to make something with it.

Not-Ship A newsletter charting the age of uncertainty

I have a newsletter that uses data to try to make sense of our messy, uncertain world. Let’s chart the chaos together!

www.not-ship.com

Glad that I have you on my road Arka!

"An impossible message is infinitely surprising, and therefore conveys infinite information; an inevitable message is completely unsurprising, and conveys no information at all." www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2025/11...

Some personal news: I've left my job at @upshot.nytimes.com. Grateful to have spent four and a half years learning from such brilliant and kind colleagues. I'm taking some time to read, learn, and work on my own creative projects.

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

YouTube video by Amundsen Sports My Pace – Life of Goro | Escaping City Rules for Outdoor Life in Hokkaido

"Life is fast. Death comes so easily. If I just drift, in no time I’ll be an old man. I want to build a fun lifestyle. That’s what I thought. I want to build it." m.youtube.com/watch?v=4ylH...

Newsroom Fellowship | The New York Times Company The New York Times Fellowship is a one-year work program aimed at cultivating the next generation of journalists. The fellowship represents a unique opportunity to do great journalism for The Times.

Here's more about the fellowship program, which was also my door into journalism: www.nytco.com/careers/earl...

Fellow, Upshot New York, NY

Tomorrow is the deadline to apply for the 2026 NYT fellowship, the Times program for early-career journalists. The Upshot is hiring a fellow, come work with some of the smartest & friendliest people in journalism. (May include ice cream walks to Bryant Park.) job-boards.greenhouse.io/thenewyorkti...

Three curves (carbon dioxide, temperature and sea level) showing historical climate changes covering the last 2000 years.

Climate variations over the last 2000 years provide valuable context and help answer questions about how unusual the recent changes are.

Now with added global sea level rise: climatelabbook.substack.com/p/climate-ch...

Graphics: ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visu...

YouTube video by Machine Learning Street Talk The Elegant Math Behind Machine Learning

Enjoyed listening to this interview, highly recommend. Anil is such a clear thinker and so good at explaining ideas.

An owl sits on a branch in a tree surrounded by autumn leaves.

'Eagle Owl' - Yoshida Toshi, 1968.
#OwlishMonday #JapaneseArt

Here’s Who Will Be Affected by Disruptions to Federal Food Aid

Unlike other projects the Trump administration has canceled during the shutdown to punish Democratic-leaning places, disruption to SNAP will touch every corner of the country, including many communities that support the president.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/u...